Auction features goods from Dr. Denton Cooley

When items from the Cool Acres Ranch of famed heart surgeon Dr. Denton Cooley are auctioned Oct. 26, bidders will have a chance to buy more than chairs, sofas and other household items.

Cooley and his wife, Louise, both died in 2016, but while living, they maintained the more than 400-acre vacation property in Orchard. The couple had five daughters; each had her own house at Cool Acres. The ranch was recently sold.

Gallery Auctions, 13310 Luthe, will host an auction featuring items kept on the property, with a preview at 8 a.m. and the auction starting at 10 a.m. Furniture and furnishings are certainly among the inventory, but there’s also 150 pieces of art — an art cow, an authentic gypsy wagon once owned by Judge Roy Hofheinz and a train car. Vintage and antique items include an old red telephone booth, old shaving stands, church pews, wooden student desks, wicker furniture believed to have come from Hotel Galvez, rushseat dining chairs and a Coca-Cola cooler.

Cooley was born in 1920 and grew up in Houston, attending the University of Texas on a basketball scholarship. He started medical school at UT Medical Branch in Galveston, later transferring to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He met his wife at Johns Hopkins, where she was a nurse.

Cooley was there at the dawn of heart surgery, when he assisted Dr. Alfred Blalock with the first “blue baby” operation — a feat depicted in the movie “Something the Lord Made.” In Houston, he founded the Texas Heart Institute in 1962, performed the first human heart transplant in which the patient lived more than a few weeks and performed the first implantation of an artificial heart.