Jeff Whitten, Correspondent.

Pembroke Fire Chief Peter Waters called Jimmy Talmadge Cook “one in a million, for sure.”

Plenty of other people clearly felt the same way about the former Pembroke fire chief, who died at the age of 88 on May 20 after a short illness.

So much so that hundreds paid respect at Cook’s visitation Friday night and funeral service Saturday at Flanders Morrison Funeral Home. Others have taken to social media to share how he impacted their lives. But more on that later.

Bryan County District 1 County Commissioner Alex Floyd, tasked by the family to write Cook’s obituary, which is duly added to the bottom of this story, said Cook was “a leader in the highway, the firehouse, the church, the community and his home and in every case his legacy is the young men he brought up in leadership.”

Bryan County Sheriff Mark Crowe said Cook inspired him to go into public safety.

“Sometimes a single invitation can change the entire course of a life,” Crowe said. “I owe much of my journey in public safety to the belief of one man, who saw potential in me when I couldn’t see it in myself.”

Crowe served as one of the pallbearers at Cook’s funeral at Flanders Morrison Funeral home. Waters and his department were among the honorary pallbearers at the service. Representatives from six fire departments accounted for the 30 firefighters who attended the service – a sure sign of respect for a man who probably hadn’t put out a fire in at least a decade.

But then, Cook was once feted for his 50 years of service to Pembroke and the city’s Fire Station No. 1 bears his name. He touched a lot of people in a lot of ways.

“He was a great man,” Waters said. “He played a big role in my life as a chief but also as a very good friend. He was almost like a second dad.”

Cook, Waters added, taught him “a lot on and off the job. Even after he retired we still went to lunch pretty regularly and if we didn’t go to lunch we would just sit and talk on the porch for a while. I will miss him very much. It’s going to be hard going forward without him to talk to, for sure.”

Cook’s wife, longtime Pembroke Mayor Judy Cook, now 80, is still seeking a way forward after losing the head of the household.

She said life will be “a different territory altogether” without the man she’s lived with for 63 years and dated for three years before that, after they first met when she was 16 and he showed up at a dance at a local soda shop.

“He was sitting on a car, wearing a bandana around his neck and boots and his jeans were rolled up at the cuffs like they used to do, and he complimented me on my legs,” Cook said Tuesday. “I was not impressed one bit, but after that one of my girlfriends was in cahoots with him and he eventually wore me down.”

She paused for a moment. “I’m very glad he did wear me down.

I’m very fortunate he did,” she said.

Cook described her husband, who worked 34 years for what is now the Georgia Department of Transportation before retiring at 57, as a clean-living family man, a trait that apparently got hold of him early on. As a boy, Jimmy Cook refused to start first grade until his younger brother Freddy was old enough to go with him. He didn’t want to leave him behind. That was a recurring lesson in the Cook household.

Almost from the outset of their lives together, the Cooks were tied to public service in one form or the other, but family members said that didn’t change their routine, or their insistence on putting family first when possible and making sure their three children, Richard, Jay and Teresa, had a normal routine with normal mealtimes and time for homework and family trips. That was important. 

“There’s never been a moment in my life, no matter what we were doing, when he brought his work home. When he walked in that door he was daddy,” Teresa Anderson said, recalling that there was never a time when she saw her parents argue.

Admittedly a daddy’s girl, she also recalled a time she went to a weeklong camp at Shellman’s Bluff in McIntosh County.

“I was maybe 8 or 9, and my grandmother, daddy’s mom, was down there cooking for the kids,” Anderson said. “And I still got so homesick, even though my grandmother was there with me, that I called my daddy to come pick me up, and he drove down there about midnight to get me.”

As a disciplinarian, she said her father held his kids accountable and taught them right from wrong, but didn’t dwell on their mistakes. She can only recall one time he gave her a spanking. That one was enough.

“As far as teaching us how to behave or do better, when we messed up he didn’t hold that over our head. We owned up to our mistakes and he held us accountable, but he genuinely cared for us and wanted us to do better.”

He also had a wicked sense of humor and was a people person who treated everyone the same and enjoyed his many friends, Anderson said, but also had an honest streak a mile wide. That included his dealings with his children.

“With Daddy, it was do not ask him if you did not want to know what he thought, because he would tell you,” she said. “But after that he’d also say ‘don’t cry over spilt milk, tomorrow’s a new day.’” He was also “true to his word,” Anderson recalled. “If he said something you could take it to the bank. He was a good man and a good daddy. And he taught us to never leave anyone behind. If we were traveling with other people in other cars, we’d always make sure we were together.”

And they traveled often, taking the family with them, or as much of the family that wanted to go. Judy Cook estimates she and her husband visited 47 states together, and Anderson said her father at times was like a gypsy on trips, going where his spirit took them.

And there’s more, because Jimmy Cook’s career as a volunteer first responder, his love of people and insistence on treating people fairly endeared him to many.

“I think the thing that has amazed me the most since he’s gone is all the lives that he has touched over the years,” Judy Cook said. “I never realized just how many until people started posting different things on Facebook about him. It made me so proud that he has touched so many lives in different ways. I knew he was a good man, a good Christian man, but that’s what kind of surprised me.”

She thought about it for a second. “I don’t know why I’m surprised. He loved his community, he loved the people in it,” Judy Cook said. “It was quite a ride to live with Jimmy Cook. There was never a dull moment, and there was always something going on with him. Whether it was the fire department, whether it was the church or the kids playing ball.”

And no matter what, he was a family man.

“He was a family man first,” Judy Cook said.