John Cook: a mayor with a mission
By Cheri Pearson |
 There are some things that perhaps a lot of El Pasoans don’t know about their guitar-strumming, folk-singing mayor.
When he walks the streets of El Paso’s Segundo Barrio, with its corner stores and the kids laughing and playing in the streets, John Cook says he’s reminded of his youth.
He was born in 1946 and grew up in a poor Bronx, N.Y., neighborhood.
During a recent interview in his 10th floor office at City Hall, the mayor that everyone in his old Bronx neighborhood knew one another. Cook and his siblings often were called upon to run errands for neighbors. The mayor said he did a lot of running to the store for a blind woman who lived across the street.
Cook said that helping others was the norm in his home. He recalled his father always saying, “John, life is like a bucket, you don’t get any more out of it than you put in it.”
Even as a teenager, John Cook loved to play the guitar. Naturally he formed a band with some friends. Not long after that, a relative asked him to play for The Guild of Exceptional Children, which helped disabled kids. Eager for exposure, Cook and the other band members accepted.
They played 17 songs. The children were beyond delighted, clapping and cheering, the mayor recalled, and so the band played the same 17 songs all over again.
He said they returned to the guild many times to play the only songs they knew over and over for the children, who didn’t seem to mind the repetition.
Word spread of Cook’s work with the guild.
One day his mother told him to put on a suit and go visit a state senator. The senator was the father of a mentally challenged boy, Tommy.
Cook said the senator had heard he was in the Boy Scouts, and he asked if Tommy could somehow become a member, too. Cook went to every troop he knew to ask if Tommy could join.
In every case the answer was no, due to liability issues.
Cook went back to the senator to suggest that they find some fathers willing to help create a new troop just for disabled kids. A prominent banker with a mentally challenged son agreed to help. Together they founded BSA Troop 23, the first in the U.S. open to disabled boys.
Before Cook knew it, their new troop had 15 disabled members, who were turning out to be more difficult to oversee than two teens assistants and a troop leader could handle. But another opportunity soon presented itself.
Cook recalls he was approached by someone who wanted to form a troop for poor kids. After thinking about it for a night, Cook said he went back to the senator’s house and asked him if the wealthy parents of the disabled boys could help a group of impoverished would-be scouts.
It was a shining moment, the mayor recalls, when at the next scout meeting the poor scouts and the disabled scouts began working together, and a bunch of fathers with no prior scouting experience joined in to help.
Cook said that’s when he suddenly realized the potential for just one person to make a real difference in people’s lives.
Years later in El Paso, as vice president of community service for the Telephone Pioneers of America, Cook became part of a Texas-wide project to benefit the Children’s Miracle Network. He came up with the idea to raffle a truck and give the profits to the medical charity.
Cook recalled walking into Casa Ford and sitting down across the table from owner Clay Lowenfield and asking for the dealership to donate a truck.
As Cook tells the story, Lowenfield let out a disbelieving chortle, replying that wasn’t how it worked. Lowenfield said he could give the truck to the charity at cost, but that wouldn’t raise much for the charity if, as Cook said, he was planning on charging on $1 for a ticket.
Cook said he wanted to try it that way anyway. So Lowenfield walked him out to a Ford Ranger pickup truck.
“Now, John,” Lowenfield said, “if you don’t sell enough tickets to pay for that truck, who will?”
Cook recalled looking him in the eye, saying, “I will.” With that the two men shook hands and Cook drove off with the truck.
The mayor said that with the sparkling new albatross sitting in his driveway day after day, it soon became apparent that Texans weren’t taking his fund-raiser as seriously as he’d hoped.
So that summer he went into overdrive. He recalled dragging his two daughters to all the festivals, churches and Wal-Marts in the area to sell $1 raffle tickets.
At the end of the summer, he said he walked into Lowenfield’s office and neatly deposited two piles of cash on his desk – one large stack that covered the price of the truck, and one smaller stack of $3,000.
Eyeing him, Lowenfield asked, “Which one is mine?”
“Either one,” Cook replied.
Lowenfield reached for the small pile of $3,000, and Cook walked out with the rest to donate to the charity. When he tells the story, a deep respect for Lowenfield is obvious in the mayor’s voice.
‘No pain, no gain’
Cook and his wife, Tram, have six children. One Christmas the entire Cook family sang carols for the children at Kidsville in Providence Hospital.
Cook said some of the children were so sick they couldn’t even smile. His daughter, Suzie, was eight or nine at the time. Cook recalled she walked out of the hospital with tears in her eyes, reached for him and hugged him saying it was the best Christmas of her life.
“If you want to give your children the gift of giving, pick something and spend time doing it,” the mayor said.
Cook has received many humanitarian and social service awards, including the Habitat for Humanity Golden Hammer Award.
As a city representative, he learned of a program in which U.S. Congress employees build houses for the poor. He came up with a similar program and called for everyone who elected him to the city council to help out.
They built six houses wit their donated time, skills and money. During the construction Cook’s two young grandsons picked up nails with magnets tied to sticks, and now when they pass the houses, he said, they proudly proclaim, “I helped build that house.”
“It is like working out – no pain no gain,” Cook said of his charitable endeavors.
Most El Pasoans know that during his 2005 run for mayor, Cook, with Tram by his side, knocked on 17,132 doors.
“The campaign was like a revival,” he said, adding that his door-to-door odyssey helped him realize that El Paso is a city with extremely diverse needs.
One day during the campaign, he recalled, he and Tram found themselves having tea in a mansion; the next day they were sitting in a kitchen at a homemade table built out of crates. At that stop, Cook said, the homeowner had no electricity, no air-conditioning and no sewer, but he sent half his pay home to his mother in Mexico.
When he became mayor, Cook asked Tram to come up with a mission as El Paso’s first lady. She announced she would feed the homeless, much like her mother used to do when she invited homeless people off the streets and into her restaurant.
Since taking office, Cook and his wife have provided meals each month to various organizations, missing only this past August when the city was hit by floods.
“One of my most rewarding days was serving spaghetti at a Veterans Home and realizing how much they appreciated having someone to sit down and talk to them,” Cook said.
Send comments on this article to tomfenton@elpasoinc.com.
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