Alison Buck Cook

[From 50th Reunion Yearbook...]


A remembrance from Alison’s husband, Scott:

A few simple life vignettes

What I actually personally know of Alison only starts in 1969. Fifteen years earlier she was assigned to Gould with Luise Eadie. Alison didn’t talk much to me about those years but Luise can relate some hysterical episodes of life at Northfield with Alison. Certainly her sense of humor and the requisite persistence to complete secondary education were nurtured at Northfield. Along with her wit grew a vociferous appetite for reading and composing lyrical rhymes, as her writing in the class notes might well indicate.

Post Northfield, there was Holyoke, summer stock theater at Booth Bay, Maine, and a time as secretary to the graduate School History Department at Yale, where my Yale college roommate met her. I was working on the roof of a Vermont farmhouse I had recently purchased when Alison was introduced to me by my roommate. She asked if she could help…. As I nearly fell off the end gable, I declined the offer. (But thought to myself how super this lady was.) She offered again. I climbed down and we went on from there. (“Persistent,” I thought.) We were married in Russell Sage Chapel, and promptly hopped into Dwight L. Moody’s carriage for a reception at the Inn.

Her tenacity became quite clear to me on our honeymoon when we flew to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. Alison disliked the notion of flying… well yes, she really hated to fly. “If God had meant us to fly, he would have given us wings.” As we left the ground on take off, she grabbed my arm and squeezed hard. (I thought “how sweet a gesture” – well only for a moment – it hurt like ___!) When we got off the plane 3 ½ hours later my arm was black and blue from shoulder to wrist. Yup, able to latch on and never let go.

Another time, in 1972, she came across an advertisement for Kent cigarettes. It involved a contest where there were to be fifty winners of a trip to London for a week. (Oh no! Another possible flight.) The contest seemed easy. Write down (computers were not allowed) all the words you could make out of the phrase “Kent Micronite Filter Cigarettes” which could be found in a certain dictionary. Alison immediately started with the American College Dictionary which sat on our bookshelves. After a day of writing, I suggested she actually go get the required edition cited in the rules. And so she did. For the next three months, every spare moment not at work she devoted to the task. (I learned a lot about cooking during that time.) Proper names were not permitted, but no mention of proper adjectives. Alison included proper adjectives. Well guess how many words she found??? We flew to London the next summer, stayed two weeks on Kent cigarettes and spent a couple more in the country. Thereafter we sailed rather than fly.

The next trip we took she won by going on an NBC game show called “Sale Of The Century.” The prescreening was not too tough. Alison had a mind just full of trivia. We went to Greece (yes by ship) and through the usual Mediterranean sites and back to London via the Orient Express (“Direct Orient” to be honest.) We actually sailed on more than 30 different voyages during our 33 years of marriage.

Alison and I have one child… a son, who is, of course, the delight of our lives. Being able to carry to term, however, was not a delight. Six months into her pregnancy, her physicians thought she was about to miscarry and put her to bed for the next 3 months on a protocol that included alcohol all day long. The only thing she could manage to swallow were whiskey sours which I delivered throughout each day – about four each day to relax the uterus – (Did I just hear a gasp? Yes, we know better now but in 1975 it was thought to be appropriate.) – needless to say I learned even more about cooking during those months – Always active at some endeavor, Alison was a bit antsy the first week, bored and really hopeful the first month and then just off the wall for the last two months. We had managed to get through the Lamaze course early on but when term came and delivery was imminent, she required a C-Section – those in the know will remember how painful that was. (I, however, was relieved… at least until I discovered I was doing all the night feedings.)

For the next four years we tried to have another child but alas, not to be. During those years she would get up every other morning at 6:00, travel an hour and a half to Yale where she received every known protocol, including estrogen therapy injections delivered by both a syringe and a new pump technology. During those years she had four miscarriages. Finally, she just ran out of viable eggs.

During other moments, she engaged in various activities including but not limited to professional theater director, professional actress, estate appraiser, church rummage sale chairperson, Fuller Brush salesperson, writer for local magazines, and of course, attendee at two Northfield Reunions that I remember where she was always so pleased to see classmates, the campus, and souls like Bill Morrow. It was also during those years that she wrote a column in the alumni news which essentially asked “What have we done lately which might be construed to be important?” It was directed to all the readers, but also towards herself.

Alison had been active at St. Mark’s Church in Mount Kisco, New York and one day as we traveling to Philadelphia to attend an historic preservation conference for sacred spaces, she informed me she was going back to school – Divinity School at Yale. She felt “called” to be a priest in The Episcopal Church. I called out something else. Going back to graduate school at age fifty was not going to be so simple. For the next three years her focus was with divinity school and she graduated in 1992 being one of only three in her class to pass the General Ordination Exam the first time around. Having gone through earlier screening by the Diocese of New York and gotten to the final interview with a new bishop, she was informed that essentially she was too old a female… but if she were of color and younger that would have been acceptable. (Yes, I heard that person left office a few years later along with three discrimination lawsuits.) Undeterred, Alison interviewed the Anglican Church of Canada – specifically the Diocese of Western Newfoundland, where she had actually been when much younger. She had been an aide at the Grenfall Mission which cared for abandoned and abused children. She and the bishop there got on quite well and she went to work the minute graduation ceremonies at Yale concluded. She was three years in Newfoundland, at one point serving seven different parishes at the same time (3 or 4 every other Sunday) along a three hour drive of coastline. From that work she went to Church of Our Saviour, New Lebanon, New York, in the Diocese of Albany for three years and finally to Immanuel St. James Parish in Derby, Connecticut.

Her entire time in the priesthood was laced with challenge upon challenge, day in and day out. She managed them all with some considerable pain and humor. The life of a priest, as Alison saw it, is always 24/7. Much of those years we led a “commuter marriage” (Absence does, indeed “make the heart grow fonder”.) Then, during her time in New Lebanon, she was found to have breast cancer, underwent a modified radical, radiation, chemo and tamoxifen. Four years later she was a “survivor.”

In 2002, despite feeling very tired and rather weak, we managed a trip (yes, by sea) to England again to witness our son get a masters from Oxford. Upon returning, Alison was finally, belatedly diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. Memorial Sloan Kettering refused to treat her aggressively, (statistically a poor candidate) so rather than just letting the disease take its course (two to three months) she decided to go to Yale where they would try to treat her. The leukemia was in remission when she died of pneumonia (not wholly unexpected but certainly worth the attempt.)

Alison loved Northfield dearly. She always loved to return, always loved to talk to old friends. I believe Northfield had not some small influence on her persistence to carry on in the face of adversity. Not always successful and not always without error, but always to persist with enormous energy.

Whether emerging at Northfield or not, Alison’s abiding effort to help others in need has been obvious throughout her life, perhaps culminating in the priesthood but evident in the time spent in volunteer service at Northfield (with her sister Judy) the summer of ’55 for Religious Conferences, at the Glenfell Mission, Newfoundland, Seattle Children’s Hospital and Women’s Volunteer Service, London, all at times before I met her. More than once she stopped at a vehicular accident to see if aid to victims or last rites were needed to be given. In Derby, an old mill town, she took neighborhood “street kids” off the street simply by having a basketball backboard erected in the church parking lot. I remember her taking a vagabond into the rectory, overnight, on a cold fall evening, in New Lebanon, a very rural place. She told me the next morning, knowing that had I been there I would have sent him packing.

I enclose a couple of notes received after her death.

Surely our time together and with others was not always perfect but just as certainly it was never dull, often thrilling, exhilarating, usually rewarding, and way too short.

She had a profound impact on everyone who knew her.

Oh, by the way, there were more than 22,300 words she found in the Kent cigarette contest.

Lovingly submitted,

Scottie Cook