Cook was active with many local nonprofits, service boards last 15 years
If Gilmer County isn’t losing one of its “volunteeringest” senior citizens in MyKey Cook, it’s certainly losing one of the most willing to volunteer her time.
Cook, 81, has been involved with a multitude of different nonprofits and service boards since moving here with her husband, Larry, 15 years ago.
The past few months have been filled with goodbyes as Cook prepares to move back to her home state of Pennsylvania.
“Larry passed away in 2010, so it’s really taken me 11 years to leave,” she said. “I’ve been saying goodbye for about a year, now.”
You can just say no, but ...
For Cook, a retired school teacher and former college admissions recruiter, the decision to volunteer was usually an easy one.
“The people would call and say ‘MyKey, would you ...,” and I’d say, ‘sure.’ You can just say no, but then you’ll just be sitting at home,” she said.
The Cooks first visited Gilmer County while motor-homing across the country. They camped off and on in Coosawattee River Resort before permanently moving to East Ellijay in 2006. Larry, who loved riding motorcycles, was involved early on with local cycling group The High Country Cruisers.
“We were six years on the road in our motorhome, and we kept finding ourselves coming back here,” Cook said.
After leaving Pennsylvania in 1970, they lived in Naples, Fla., where Cook taught first and second grade for 30 years.
“My school was at the end of Alligator Alley,” she remembered.
Her first volunteering experience here was at the Gilmer County Library, which had just moved into its current location on Calvin Jackson Drive. Cook and another Friend of the Gilmer Library, Linda Kotula, helped get the library’s popular book resale shop, The Bookshelf, off the ground.
Cook later represented East Ellijay on the local library board and then on the regional Sequoyah Library System board.
“Gilmer, Cherokee and Pickens County all have different needs, so it was interesting to get those different views,” she said.
Mack Wood, East Ellijay City Planner, said Cook was someone you could depend on when the city needed a committee representative.
“She’s absolutely one of the nicest people I’ve ever met,” Wood said. “She came to every city council meeting with her husband, and we got to know them. When we needed to get a committee person who cares about something, we (called her).”
A “born-and-raised Catholic,” Cook has been heavily involved with activities at Good Samaritan Catholic Church since moving here. Two of the big ones each year were a summer flea market at the Lions Club Fairgrounds and the Christmas Cookie Walk, for which church members baked thousands of fresh cookies that were sold by the box.
Laura Nizinski, who co-chaired the Cookie Walk with Cook for several years, is also originally from Pennsylvania, where the two’s hometowns are about 100 miles apart. They became close friends and often worked together on projects while attending the local Good Samaritan church.
“She’s very dependable and just a super person,” Nizinski said. “She’s a list person and very thorough and meticulous in whatever she does. She kept me in line doing the Cookie Walk.”
Nizinski brought the idea for the Cookie Walk with her from Pittsburgh as a way to help busy moms and the “baking challenged” have a nice variety of Christmas cookies for friends and family each year, Cook recalled.
“We started off asking each parishioner to bake 20 dozen cookies, but that wasn’t enough. When the people came, you didn’t want to be sold out,” she said about the popular event. ‘We started doing the baking (at the church), which was fun. I would make some of my Italian cookies, and someone would do their Polish cookies and so on. You had a lot of variety with all these special Christmas cookies. You met more people and got to know the good cooks and good bakers. You just made a lot of friends.”
For the church flea market, which brought hundreds of shoppers to the Lions Club Fairgrounds each summer, Cook kept track of incoming donations from church members, which were housed in storage lockers.
“We would open the storage unit in May, and if somebody had something to donate, I would meet them there. I’d have them stacked and everything, and when I got real heavy stuff, I would call for one of the Knights (of Columbus) to come help. It was fun because I was close, not even a mile (away),” she said.
The large flea market was always a team effort that required the input and energy of many church parishioners, she noted.
“That was a good, hard-working, sweaty August or September when we set up to do it, but we looked forward to the fellowship and hard work,” Cook said. “One time, we heard people talking on a CB radio (about the flea market) — ‘Hey, fella, you better get down to the fairgrounds! There’s something going on down there. Let’s go see what it is.’”
Cook was also active in Ellijay’s Civil Air Patrol (CAP) squadron and later volunteered in the Blairsville CAP squadron.
Most recently, she volunteered with Keep Gilmer Beautiful (KGB), which offered opportunities to get more people interested in recycling and picking up litter with the group’s Adopt-a-Road program.
“That was the best part of Earth Day, when all those people came out (to clean up),” she said.
Cook said she’s been slowing down lately and volunteering less, but she’s happy to have been involved with so many different groups and projects while living here.
“It’s just getting harder to just do a lot of things, now, but it’s been an honor to serve,” she said.
Going back home
Cook has been proud to call East Ellijay home these last many years, but the move back to Pennsylvania will put her closer to family. Her husband is buried there and her siblings, nieces and nephews live nearby.
A retirement community run by the Eerie Catholic Diocese is her destination.
“I’m going to another small town,” she said about DuBois, Penn., about 100 miles from the Pittsburgh area.
Cook said she’ll miss the people of Gilmer County most of all.
“It’s unique and beautiful here. I’ve been thinking about all the different people who I’ve met here,” she added. “Some of them lived here their (whole lives) and others, like me, moved here later. The people, that’s what made the difference.”
Cook will probably be involved with some kind of volunteer work, although perhaps on a more limited basis, when she returns to DuBois.
“I do intend to stay involved somehow. They have a Friends of the Library and things like that there, so I think I’ll be busy doing stuff,” she said. “I think I’d be like this anywhere.”