Toby Cooling, 1944-2022: Shimabuku Sent Him Home to Teach
He trained in Okinawa under the founder of Isshin-Ryu for four months in 1969 and 1970. Tatsuo Shimabuku promoted him and told him: go back to the States and teach good Isshin-Ryu for me, make happy family. He did, for fifty-one years.
- Born
- 19 July 1944, Elkton, Maryland
- Died
- 12 February 2022, Gardnerville, Nevada, age 77
- Cause
- Complications from COVID-19
- Trained under
- Tatsuo Shimabuku, Okinawa, December 1969 – March 1970
- Founded
- The Order of Isshin-Ryu, 15 January 1971
- Also
- U.S. Air Force staff sergeant 1964–1970; Cecil County sheriff’s deputy for 20+ years
Shimabuku promoted Cooling to roku-dan, sixth degree, in Okinawa, and gave him an instruction that Cooling built the rest of his life around. Ten months after coming home he founded the Order of Isshin-Ryu, on 15 January 1971, and later served as its chairman emeritus. He was inducted into the International Isshin-Ryu Karate Hall of Fame in 1988 and received the Spirit of Isshin-Ryu award in 1991.
He did all of it alongside a full career — six years in the Air Force, then more than twenty years as a Cecil County sheriff’s deputy in Maryland.
What a school owner should take from Toby Cooling
He was never a full-time martial arts professional. He was a deputy sheriff who founded and ran an international organisation on the side, for half a century.
That is worth saying out loud in a trade journal that mostly addresses people trying to make this their whole income. The part-time operator is not a lesser category. A man with a pension and a day job can make decisions a man dependent on next month’s tuition cannot — hold a standard, refuse a student, decline to open a second location, wait out a bad year. Cooling’s organisation is still going.
Sources, and what we could not confirm
- The widely circulated death date of July 2025 is wrong by three years. He died 12 February 2022. The 2025 date is the publication date of his organisation’s memorial article, mistaken for a date of death. We flag it here because it is circulating.
- His rank is disputed. His organisation’s memorial page calls him judan, tenth degree; that same organisation’s own black-belt records give his highest rank as ku-dan, ninth degree, attained in 1992; his newspaper obituary mentions only the sixth dan from Shimabuku. We have printed the Shimabuku promotion, which is not in doubt, and noted the rest here.
- Survived by his wife Diane Ortenzio-Cooling and his son Joel.
- Principal sources: the R.T. Foard funeral home obituary, the Cecil Daily, and the Order of Isshin-Ryu’s own records.
Corrections and first-hand recollections are welcome and will be added with attribution.