This was some years ago, but the four or six of us sitting at our table during the lunch hour instantly recognized the man who walked in the door of the same local barbeque joint in south Fort Worth we had chosen for midday dining.
The green hat he wore, inscribed with “Mike’s Garden Center,” had become as much a part of him as his given name.
Recognized is the wrong word. In reality, we all knew him very well. And so we dropped whatever conversation we had going and waited and watched.
It didn’t take long.
As Mr. Cook waited in line, he turned to the gathered lunch crowd and in a voice that a ship at sea could have mistaken for a foghorn made an announcement that would have made Gene Autry proud.
“The stars at night are big and bright … .”
The suddenly quieted dining room and startled diners looked on in dead silence, not saying a word, wondering if they had encountered a psychiatric patient who had shaken loose.
“Oh, c’mon,” implored Mr. Cook, who always spoke slowly and deliberately. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Deep in the heart of Texas!’”
That was Mike Cook, who died Oct. 11 in his office at Mike’s Garden Center, the retail greenery store he made famous in this part of the world with his master strokes as a salesman and promoter. Generally, no one read past a Mike’s Garden Center ad in the Star-Telegram, most, or all, he fashioned himself.
One such ad was for his “Cow Poo Poo” fertilizer.
He was selling 40-pound bags of cow dung to “work into flower beds, gardens and lawns.”
There would always be something of the order of, “As organic as it gets,” or he would pick out a business neighbor to poke. “As Phil Norwood of Alta Mesa Banks says,” the ad continued, “if we can’t dazzle them with brilliance, we baffle them with Cow Poo Poo from Mike’s Garden Center.”
Mr. Cook was 72.
The use of “Mr. Cook” isn’t New York Times formality, but rather how we all knew him as we grew up in Fort Worth. I was classmates with two of the five children of the brood of Mike and Donna Cook. I went to school with Mike Jr. and Jennifer, while growing up in Catholic schools at St. Andrew and Nolan. I got to know son Matt, a high school football coach, well through work at the Star-Telegram.
I don’t know of any peer who ever evolved to calling him “Mike,” though there probably was.
His reach and impact were evident by the standing-room-only congregation that came to bid farewell at a funeral Mass at St. Andrew.
There were no odes sung of a Greek tragedy or lamentations about being tethered to this life.
Mr. Cook was one of those who did his shot at this life very well, with a passion for living and doing so with a unique – very unique – joy. All of it was grounded in his faith.
He was an exemplar of faith, which he lived through his Catholic Church, his family and his various avocations. Among those were his devotion to Catholic education.
It wasn’t just faith. It was faith in action.
If he wasn’t at work, chances are he was giving his time for something at St. Andrew or Nolan or the Knights of Columbus.
Particularly in that first generation or so at Nolan, many parents took on much more of the burden of school finance and filled in needs of time than a school that had more fully developed the generations of alumni that help underwrite the school’s operation. It wasn’t only about his children, either. I remember not so many years ago a conversation I had with him.
I believe it was probably at lunch at another time and another place. That was the other thing about Mr. and Mrs. Cook, married for more than 50 years. They never forgot you. You might be an extra 25 pounds and wearing a new beard or a new head of gray hair, but they somehow recognized you.
But anyway, during that conversation, he was plotting to undertake an initiative to raise money to help more underprivileged children attend Catholic schools.
He was ever present at Nolan while we were there. If memory serves – it fades by the minute – he was the booster club president for a spell, a job he took very seriously. There wouldn’t have been a football stadium at Nolan when there was, in 1987, without him. The complex at Doskocil Stadium today was for the school’s first 25 years nothing more than a natural amphitheater with nothing in it except an empty field. There wasn’t money to build one or the determination to find it until Mr. Cook came around. He was able to beat it out of donors, not to mention his own wallet, and see to its construction.
It was hard to forget as a basketball player in a huddle during a timeout, suddenly feeling a cool breeze coming from somewhere behind us. It was Mr. Cook. He had moved down directly right behind the bench, fanning our best player with, I think, a type of game program. Really a sheet of paper with the teams’ rosters.
I can’t remember the team or the result of that game, but I vividly recall as a 16- or 17-year-old breaking into laughter at this pivotal moment of the game.
It was Mr. Cook in his element.
Just as he was with his faith, Mr. Cook was one of the finest examples of how to have outrageous fun.
“He was the only guy I knew who ran a crooked cakewalk,” said one longtime friend, who noted that Mr. Cook, long known as the best cakewalk caller St. Andrew has ever known, favored the underdogs in the annual Fall Festival activity. Mr. Cook often made sure the young children and elderly got their share of winners.
“Well, they always had too many cakes anyway,” my mother said, immediately concerned that Mr. Cook might have to answer to his Robin Hood cakewalk tactics on the other side.
He had in the last 20 years or so, perhaps much longer, a constant companion by his side seemingly at all times. Louie, a little mutt, he took everywhere with him. Louie Cook was his name. After Louie’s demise, there were descendants. There was a Louise Cook, I seem to remember, and others. He was devoted to his dogs.
It always was a matter of when, not if, he would unleash one of his famous bits. He was faithful to those, too.
At one time, at the front of Mike’s Garden Center were two birds that greeted customers. In the early 2000s, both were stolen. Mr. Cook put out an all-points bulletin, even going to the local newspaper and television stations to report the bird-napping. Beau and Darryl were eventually found and returned, “a few feathers missing,” he said.
In that day long ago, when western belts with first names adorning the back had a foothold in fashion, Mr. Cook was famous for stopping complete strangers, addressing them by the first name he had seen on the belt and asking about the kids, family and work maybe.
At Carshon’s Delicatessen, the best kosher deli in town (maybe the only), Mr. Cook would order a ham sandwich. When informed they didn’t serve ham, he’d inquire about other pork options.
All in good fun, of course.
A season-ticket holder at the old Arlington Stadium with seats along the first-base line, Mr. Cook enjoyed delivering good-natured heckling, calling every umpire “Al,” a natural “assumption” considering the “A.L.” umpires had inscribed on their hats.
“By about the end of the first year of owning those seats he had befriended quite a number of umpires,” Dale Carron remembered, “to the extent that many of them made it a point to come over between innings to say ‘hi.’”
That was Mr. Cook, who for years supported the Texas Golden Gloves at Will Rogers as a season-ticket buyer.
His jokes were renown and generally — OK, always — appropriately inappropriate. He once stopped down a lunch reception after a funeral with a joke punchline that required the vocal range of a baritone, which he nailed as he sat at his table.
Son Mike remembered his dad in Austin stopping his car and asking a pedestrian how to get to so-and-so street. The guy scratched his head and tried to remember. Mr. Cook knew how to get there — he had just passed the street — and when the guy came up with the wrong directions, Mr. Cook told him how to get there.
The guy said “thanks” and turned to walk off, taking a couple of steps before turning around confused.
“Wait … did you ask me how to find the street or did I?”
At a golf tournament two years ago benefiting Holy Family Catholic School, Mike’s Garden Center sponsored the music during lunch. As legend has it, the performer, “Beerman,” is paid in beer. No doubt at the behest of Mr. Cook, Beerman was dressed from head to toe in Mike’s Garden Center apparel. And between every song, he reminded the golfers to make sure to “remember Mike’s Garden Center for all your gardening and landscaping needs.”
Mr. Cook, who held a penny and $100 in equal esteem, was making sure he got his money’s worth.
There were few like him, one of those guys who embody the adage that the dead can’t truly be dead when they leave so much behind.
