For 45 years, he used this chair to hold his mail. It was just sold at auction for $348,500.

For 45 years, Bruce “Scoop” Cooper placed his mail on the seat of an inauspicious wood chair by his front door. Occasionally, he deposited a jacket there, too. The space between its legs? That became a makeshift cubby where the 73-year-old stored a favorite pair of secondhand loafers.

This all changed early this year when the chair — as it turns out, a storied survivor of 18th-century Philadelphia craftsmanship — sold at a Manhattan auction for $348,500.

Cooper, who’s a hockey historian, a longtime freelance writer for the Flyers and various minor-league teams, and a statistician for televised games, took his cut of $280,000 back to his suburban Philly home. (In the grand tradition of lottery winners and others who’ve come into money, he prefers to keep the name of this suburb under wraps.)

“It wasn’t a particularly comfortable chair, so I never sat in it,” said Cooper, who inherited the piece from his father. “I always figured it was worth something, maybe a couple thousand dollars, but really I had no idea.

"At my age, you don’t get excited about much, but discovering what this piece of furniture actually is … that’s been an absolutely unique, unexpected experience.”

Until this serendipitous turn of events, no one would have called Cooper lucky. In 1974, just six years after he’d graduated from Temple University, his parents were killed in a plane crash. The private aircraft, which had been flying from Philadelphia to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., disappeared during a thunderstorm and was never found.

Distraught, Cooper quit his job as an administrator for Haverford College to get his parents’ affairs in order. After two years, he felt compelled to change the direction of his life.

Previously, Cooper had been working in the professional hockey industry only as a side hustle (albeit one that landed him in the Flyers’ locker room in 1974, drinking from the Stanley Cup). Now, he began doing regular work for NHL, AHL, and minor-league teams in the areas of public relations, writing, and talent stats.

In many of the 3,000-plus games he’s worked in his 50-year career, he’s been the guy in a sportscaster’s ear, adding statistics and historical bits of info to a telecast. He’s written or contributed to five books about hockey and was featured in the 2010 HBO documentary Broad Street Bullies.

Cooper also spent 20 years as a supernumerary, or non-singing actor, in local operas. He appeared alongside Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti (or, as he calls him, “The Pav”) on several occasions.

All the while, Cooper, descended from more than a dozen pioneer Quaker families in Philadelphia, indulged his passion for history. He’s written four books about the evolution of the North American railroad, a fascination that stems from his maternal great-great-grandfather’s work on the Transcontinental Railroad.

Every year, he travels to the small coastal community of Searsport, Maine, to connect with his ancestry there. And this, he says, is where the chair saga begins.

Last summer, Cooper took a picture of a house in Searsport that was built in 1840 by the sea-captain spouse of his distant cousin, a house he’d stayed in as a little boy. He posted the picture online along with a brief history of the home, now empty and up for sale.

Soon after, he received a Facebook friend request from a man named Paul Rulli, who was about to make the winning offer. The two connected over their shared appreciation of its history and became friends. One day, because Rulli happens to be a master of reproduction colonial American furniture making, Cooper figured he’d pick his brain about that old chair holding his mail back home in Philly.

“He told me, ‘Oh by the way, I have this antique chair that’s reportedly been in my family for generations,’” Rulli recalled. “As a furniture maker, I hear that story a lot.

"I groaned, and I can remember thinking, ‘Let me guess … It came over on the Mayflower? George Washington sat in it?’

"Well, Bruce did send me a picture a couple days later. When I saw it, my jaw dropped.”

Rulli recognized the chair as a circa 1750, Philadelphia-made, extremely high-end, Queen Anne-style, carved-walnut, compass-seat side (or dining-room) chair. In other words: the holy grail of colonial American furniture. In mint condition.

Rulli suggested Cooper take it to the curatorial team at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There, thrilled experts confirmed its authenticity and provided background.

The gracefully curved piece, 42 inches high, is part of a set that includes at least 17 chairs. Of these, only six other side chairs and two armchairs (one on display at the museum) are publicly known — the last discovery happened more than a century ago.

Cooper’s chair is the only one to retain its original leather seat (stuffed with original horse hair), and it’s never been shellacked or varnished, meaning there’s a rare crispness to the carver’s work. The piece was likely made by Samuel Harding, who carved interior woodwork for Independence Hall, and his apprentice Nicholas Bernard.

Because the chair was made for Philadelphia merchant Samuel Powel II, there’s some speculation that, upon his death in 1759, it would have been inherited by his son, Samuel Powel III, who was mayor during the Second Continental Congress.

At his house on South Third Street, Powel regularly hosted the founding fathers for elaborate dinners and constitutional debates. If the chair was here, who’s to argue that it didn’t support the posteriors of Franklin, Adams, or Washington?

Alexandra Kirtley, a curator of American decorative arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, says evidence suggests the chair was handed down, rather, to the merchant’s daughter, Abigail, who lived on Walnut Street.

But it’s fair to say that she and her husband, prominent businessman William Griffitts, were a power couple who ran in the same elite circles. Their parties would also have been a who’s-who of Philadelphia gentry. “It’s very possible that Washington sat in it,” Kirtley said. “If this chair could talk, it would have quite the story to tell.”

Cooper, whose family ended up with the chair through marriage, lives on Social Security and a small annuity, and he recently needed to pay for a $12,000 roof repair with a credit card. So, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, he sent pictures of the chair to Christie’s auction house, via its online submission tool.

The photos landed on the desk of Martha Willoughby in London, a specialist in the American furniture department. “It’s in the stratosphere in terms of rarity,” she said. “I’ve been with Christie’s since 1996 and can think of only two other items that have had the same cachet.

“It did quite well for the market it’s in, but the price it sold for does not reflect its rarity,” she said. "In 2008, at the height of the market, I have no doubt it would have sold for hundreds of thousands more.”

The following Monday at 10 a.m., Christie’s deputy chairman John Hays, who calls the chair a “miracle,” came to Philadelphia to collect the piece in a limo, which “created quite a stir in my neighborhood,” Cooper said.

While Hays was there, Cooper asked if he could hold on to the chair’s Victorian needlepoint seat cover, not worth much but sentimental value. Christie’s obliged. The company had the cover removed — and FedExed back to Cooper the next day — revealing original leather underneath. The chair’s most fragile part was still, astonishingly, intact.

On Jan. 18, Cooper, sporting the same black loafers he’d regularly stored under the chair, traveled to Christie’s U.S. headquarters in Rockefeller Plaza for a two-day auction of more than 1,300 American items, his piece among the standouts.

Outside, an 11-foot banner depicting the chair hung in the show window for two months. Inside, while munching on complementary pastries and cheese, Cooper overlooked the bidding from a private skybox, the same one that might host the owner of, say, a $50 million painting.

In the end, the piece went to a private collector. It may have been a more genteel type of action than Cooper is used to, but on the adrenaline charts, it surpassed the most intense hockey shootout. That’s because Cooper has great plans in mind for the money.

Throughout his career, Cooper has mentored young men from all over North America who’ve reached out for guidance on breaking into the professional hockey industry. One of them has relied so heavily on Cooper’s career and life advice, he recently had “WWSD” — What Would Scoop Do — tattooed over his heart.

Cooper plans to use some of his cash to attend the Toronto wedding of one of these mentees and to visit with others. “I’ve never been married and I don’t have kids,” he said. “I consider working with these guys my legacy. I tell them all I want in return is that they pay it forward, because the satisfaction is worth more than gold.

"To see their successes, to hear about it in their letters, and to see how important I am to their lives, that’s the greatest compensation,” he said.

As for the million-dollar question — where will Cooper keep his mail now? — he’s got a plan for that, too.

Christie’s is paying Rulli $2,000 to make Cooper a replica of the chair, minor nicks and all, using only the hand tools available to its original carvers. In the meantime, Cooper has designated a chair from his dining-room table to serve as temporary mail-collection device.

“It’s another one I got from my parents. It’s kind of a funny, high-backed chair. I think it’s modern, not particularly old or valuable.”

Then again, he adds, “You just never know.”