Nancy Cooney is an East Bay Native and daughter of photographer Martin J. Cooney, who took photos for the East Bay Regional Park District, among other clients. In the interview, she discusses her family and early life, her father’s work in photography, learning the craft from him, his freelance career for which he took photos for the EBRPD and the San Francisco Chronicle, eventually going into business with him, and the impact that he had on the Bay Area. In 2016, she gifted to the EBRPD Archives a sizeable collection of Martin J. Cooney’s photographic negatives all related to her father’s work with the EBRPD that document significant parkland acquisition, recreation activities, portraits of staff and other historic people, and also many other subjects and events, from the early 1970s through the 1980s – at a time when the EBRPD was expanding in agency size and acreage. The size of the collection is well over 15,000 images.