Roger Cook’s columns span 45 years
Columnist Roger Cook says he’s not a writer, but a scrapbook filled with his work begs to differ.
Cook, 67, has dealt with physically debilitating cerebral palsy since birth. The condition affects his speech and fine motor skills, but Cook found a way to use his mind and provoke others’ thoughts instead.
He has been writing for the Southern Standard as a gratuitous opinions columnist under the “What’s Cooking?” title for more than 45 years, something that began as a coincidence, he said.
“My daddy was talking to Rayford Davis, who was the editor of the Standard, and he told him how I was writing,” Cook said of his beginnings. “He wanted me to write something to put in the paper and I did. It went from there.”
“What’s Cooking?” has addressed everything from the Middle East crisis as it has changed throughout the years, jokes, Bible passages and even road signs.
Cook’s brother, Larry Cook, said many know him by name, but not by face.
“There’s a lot people who don’t know him. We go to all kinds of places and they talk about his articles,” Larry Cook said, noting his brother’s other achievements despite his physical limitations. Cook works at Opportunities, Inc. and mows a couple of acres in the summer.
In the early days, Cook’s columns, written at his home where he was born, were tedious and difficult to write, but he nevertheless pecked away at a typewriter one key at a time, using the postal service to mail his copy.
But the old machines didn’t leave much room for error. And as technology advanced, Cook’s writing became less difficult. Word processors allowed room for deleting mistakes and a disk was available to save copy.
Today, the word processor sits, unused. Cook has found a better way – a computer where the program allows for him to punch in a single number that can automatically translate into a word. And although he’s still pounding out columns one key at a time, most take him two or three hours to type instead of two or three days.
The old system of mailing everything to the newspaper is also gone. He e-mails everything, and that’s where some of his ideas come from. He has a listing of about 40 e-mail addresses, scans the Internet and keeps himself abreast of current events.
“People can just say something that makes me think about things,” said Cook, who said his most controversial articles concerned the liquor referendum, defeated more than a year ago.
He has his favorites, and there’s a long list to choose from. But one of the most unique was about birds.
“We had a bunch of those starlings. They were trying to eradicate them. Someone from New York wrote the paper. They couldn’t understand why they wanted to kill all those pretty birds. There wasn’t anything pretty about them,” he said.
Like many other writers, the ideas are always in the works and just when he thinks he is about to “drain dry” of ideas, something else comes along. Although he used to stash a few columns for use when the ideas weren’t flowing, he said he doesn’t do that as much anymore.
In his editorial debut in 1957, he took a non-committal and humble stance, and holds that today.
“I don’t know much, but I’d like to tell what I know,” Cook wrote at that time. “Vacation time is here again. That means hot weather. People are not satisfied with the weather. I guess that is why God made four seasons of the year …”
He said he doesn’t know how long he will keep going, and his brother thinks he will continue, noting writing was something he could do, albeit slowly.
“I didn’t think I would be writing columns this long, but everyone says, ‘Keep it up,'” Cook added.