Passing of William R. Cook
Current mood: melancholy
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Word arrived today that Uncle Bill passed on to the next world over the past weekend.
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If you went to school in Baltimore between the sixties and the eighties, you might have known him as a music teacher or director of music for the Baltimore school district.
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If you attended a concert of the Baltimore symphony between the sixties and the eighties that featured lute, you might have seen him performing. He was one of the few classically trained lute-players in the United States, and built his own lute while studying with the world master.
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If you purchased a concert-quality mute for your brass instrument between the seventies and the nineties, there is a good chance it was manufactured by his company, which was started in his basement and eventually produced mutes for symphonies worldwide.+
If you had an orchestral instrument repaired in the eighties or nineties in Baltimore, there is a chance that he made the repairs. His work was in such demand that he had to get an unlisted number for his workshop, and the only way to find him was by referral.
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He was the my dad’s younger brother and the second of three sons of my grandmother. When she turned 65 she made a deal with him that if he took care of her for the rest of her life, she would give him her house in return. He upheld his part of the bargain, caring for her even into her mid-nineties, when she could not even remember who he was.
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Other than my dad, he is the first man I have memories of. He taught me to play chess when I was four, gave me a recorder when I was six and a silver trumpet when I was in third grade, introduced me to shortwave radio, showed me how to snap peas and boil crabs. He had the style of a southern gentleman, speaking with a baritone Baltimore drawl, slowly and distinctly as if he were considering very carefully everything he wanted to say, and was concerned that you understand and appreciate every word. I cannot recall him ever saying anything that was unkind, nor anything that lacked insight.
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He was intensely interested in our family heritage, and traced the Koch (Cook) family back into the seventeen-hundreds, traveling several times to Europe to dig through church bibles for records of baptisms and marriages. He prepared a family tree of several hundred pages listing the descendants of Heinrich Baltazar Koch, my great-great-great-great-grandfather, who was the first of his family to immigrate to the United States in the 1840′s. Uncle Bill sponsored several family reunions where all of these hundreds of family members could gather in Edinburg, VA, where Heinrich had settled.+
Sadly, Uncle Bill’s first marriage failed, and in the failure, he lost all contact with his only daughter. It was ironic then that he should finally pass away on Father’s Day weekend. For my part, I loved him as much as I did my father, and when my dad passed away, treasured his company on the few family gatherings that brought us together from distant corners of the U.S. He was like a second father to my brothers and sisters as well.
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One of the last times we were together, on the occasion of the passing of my brother-in-law, I showed him a new classical guitar that I had purchased, and asked if he would like to try it out. He struggled for a minute with his arthritic hands to call forth a few notes from a medieval piece, then shook his head saying that his performing days were over and lamented that the guitar was his “first” instrument. Still his craftsman’s eye examined every inch of the instrument and he remarked on the subtle excellence of the guitar’s construction.+
If you should ever possess a copy of the Maui Ruhi Songs CD (google is your friend), you can look in the CD booklet under “Credits”, the first name you will encounter is William R. Cook, my Uncle Bill.
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If you ever travel to the Baha’i World Center in Haifa, Israel and look in the library there, you will find a couple of copies of that CD with his name in them.
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Rest in peace, dear Uncle Bill. I will miss you.+
Top to bottom, photos from flickr:
Picture of Richard
