Some Personal Memories of Roger Cook
Remembering This Old House's Roger Cook, who died on August 21
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Roger Cook, the landscape contractor on PBS’s This Old House and Ask This Old House died last week after many years of health struggles.
At one time in my life, I spoke to Roger several times a week; so often that his number was one of the “favorites” in my phone. He and I traveled around the country together and worked in every possible weather: snow, rain, heat, humidity.
For those that don’t know, I spent 15 years working for This Old House Productions, starting as a production assistant at the age of 21 and eventually becoming the Senior Producer and Director of Ask This Old House.
Today, I wanted to share some of my memories of the Roger that I knew off-camera, with the hope that it might bring some comfort and solace to the people mourning his loss from afar.
I don’t remember the first time that I met Roger, though I do remember the first time I traveled with him. It was also my first trip with the show, less than a month into my new job, when we flew to Dallas.
We arrived in Texas the evening before our scheduled shoot and would have to wake up early the next morning to begin filming. Before bed, the producer mentioned that breakfast was available in the hotel restaurant starting at 6:30am and we should be ready to leave the hotel promptly at 7:00am.
When I came down for breakfast at the appointed time, Roger was seated alone in the restaurant. I had expected some of the rest of our team to join us for breakfast, but nobody else was around. They must have either ordered room service or skipped breakfast, so it was just Roger and me.
I wasn’t even sure if I should join him at his table or give him his space. I awkwardly went to sit across from him and he welcomed me and invited me to sit. I proceeded to make small talk at that early hour, even though we didn’t really know each other yet. I don’t remember exactly what we talked about, but I remember feeling like it was a fan interaction that should’ve been limited to a minute or two that was uncomfortably being dragged out to thirty minutes, as I mostly asked about his time on the show and things I remembered watching him do over the years.
Roger was gracious in answering my questions, but at some point, I could sense that he was getting nervous that our food hadn’t arrived yet and he might we late to the shoot. I jokingly told him that he should pull a “do you know who I am?” on the waitress to see if that would speed things up. He immediately shot that down with a very serious tone that showed me he didn’t find that funny: “I would never do that. Absolutely not.”
I could tell that he really meant it. He didn’t see himself as any better than anybody else.
Roger was somebody who cared deeply about the people in his life. He had a warm and gentle spirit that seemed to put everybody he met at ease.
About three months into my job, I asked for a photo with the cast that I had framed for my parents and grandparents that Christmas. Roger has his arm around me like we’re old friends.
I’ve been looking back at old pictures after learning about his death a few days ago and was struck to find a picture of the first time we all met Nick Offerman when Nick was performing in A Confederacy of Dunces in Boston. Roger has a gentle hand placed on Nick’s bicep in that photo too, and they had only met ten minutes prior. That’s the spirit of Roger. A warm embrace. Friendship. Love. To everybody he met.
Roger was also a devoted family man. His kids were about my age, so they were out of his house by the time I knew him, although his wife Kathy would often travel with us for shoots. Most of the other talent wives rarely, if ever, traveled, but Kathy accompanied him on several trips.
On one shoot in Charleston, South Carolina, I remember going out to lunch with Roger and Kathy and filming a few quick lines of dialogue around the streets of Charleston with Roger.
After lunch, he had to head to an event, but Kathy and I stayed behind and she tagged along with me as I filmed shots around the city for the show with a small camcorder. We even went for a horse-drawn carriage ride together and Kathy was a bit bemused by me hanging off the side of the coach to get the “perfect” shot of the horse’s hooves on the cobblestones or the wheel turning.
A few days after we returned from South Carolina, Roger came to my office with an envelope of photos that had just been developed. Kathy had taken my picture during that carriage ride, had prints made, and wanted to share them with me.
Roger’s world was turned upside down when Kathy got sick with cancer and ultimately passed away at age 56. When I came to pay my respects to her at the funeral home, Roger gave me a big hug. He then pointed at the photo above her closed casket and asked me if I recognized it.
I didn’t at first, but as I looked closer, I noticed some tassels behind Kathy’s head. I realized it was a photo from our carriage ride in South Carolina. When Kathy was taking my picture with her camera, I must have taken one of her too. I was so touched that in all of his grief, Roger not only remembered who had taken that photo, but was able to share that memory with me.
I got married the summer before Kathy died and invited much of the cast and crew of This Old House to my wedding. Roger was caring for Kathy at that point and wasn’t able to attend. I know he felt bad about missing my special day, and I’ll never forget the email he sent me on the morning of my wedding. His message was about how special a wedding day was and about how that day will produce so many memories that my wife and I would look back on for years to come and play the “remember when” game. He was right, we did.
It was touching to know that he was thinking of me on the morning of my wedding even if he couldn’t be there in person, but it was also poignant to imagine starting my married life as the end of his marriage was clearly in sight.
Roger and Kathy sent us a beautiful lobster pot as a wedding gift. I’ve used it to cook lobsters, but also for making my maple syrup or canning tomato sauce. We refer to it as the “Roger pot” and I always think of him when I use it.
When I got promoted to a producer on Ask This Old House in 2011, my first story happened to be with Roger. I was still learning the ropes and in retrospect, I feel a bit bad for the ambiguous story I pitched him. There was a homeowner whose front foundation plantings were a bit out of control and needed some guidance.
Roger met me at the house and walked through the concerns with the homeowner. He then came up with a plan that would make a good story. He would teach the homeowner which plants could be saved, which could be pruned back to look better, and which needed to be removed while walking her through each step. He also suggested some new plantings that would work well with what was there but add new dimension to the front yard too.
Roger took my ambiguous pitch and turned it into a memorable makeover story. This upgrade was well within his comfort zone, as it was the type of work he did for paying customers when he wasn’t on TV. He knew exactly which plants thrived in the Boston suburbs, which looked best at different times of the year, and how to really wow people with plantings.
Roger was great to work with locally, but he was even more fun to produce for on the road. For most of the trades we covered on Ask This Old House, there was very little regional variation. A shower valve in San Francisco isn’t any different from a shower valve in Pittsburgh. But yards, plants, and trees varied so widely state to state, so they were the best way to showcase our travel efforts.
Roger had a bit of an environmentalist streak in him, perhaps from studying wildlife management and conservation law at the University of Maine. It was a side of him that I instantly connected to, and together, we would find interesting stories around the country which had an ecological, environmental, or social justice bend to them.
Some highlights:
Learning how Native Americans grew food in the deserts outside Santa Fe
Organically treating citrus trees to survive citrus greening in Florida
Replacing a lawn with a drought tolerant garden in Las Vegas
Learning beekeeping in both urban and suburban spaces in Boston
In 2018, Roger announced that he was struggling with health issues and would be stepping down from his role with the shows. Even though he was no longer a regular part of our group, he would occasionally stop by the office to chat or check in on things.
In 2019, my wife was diagnosed with cancer and I had to take some time off while she sought treatment and I focused on caring for our children. While many of my coworkers expressed support, Roger seemed to know how to take action to make me feel cared for.
Despite dealing with his own health struggles at the time, Roger sent me a gift card for Freshly, one of those online ready made meal companies. It was enough to buy us about a week’s worth of meals. At a time of high stress, it was helpful to know that staying fed wasn’t something I needed to worry about.
In March, 2020, I was laid off from This Old House Productions after 15 years. It was as the pandemic was just beginning and the world was shutting down, so most of us were focused pretty inward.
In the summer of 2020, my phone rang. Roger’s name was on the caller ID. He and I hadn’t spoken in months and I wasn’t sure if he may have been calling me by mistake or not.
I answered and he was on the other end of the line. He told me he had been thinking of me and that he felt like I wasn’t treated fairly with how my departure from the group had been handled. We chatted a bit about our summers and the pandemic. He had spent some time fishing on Cape Cod, which was one of his favorite pastimes. I told him about the podcast I had launched a few weeks earlier. We didn’t talk for long, but it meant the world to me that he thought to call.
That phone call was the last time I spoke to Roger. I would occasionally hear small updates about his health or wellbeing through the grapevine, but I didn’t know much. It was that same grapevine that delivered the news of his passing, a few hours before it was released to the public.
To the people that have reached out to offer condolences over the last few days, I have shared the same message: Roger was even better in real life than he appeared on TV.
Back when I was still a young production assistant on the show, I remember our director commenting that if the TV shows ever went away, Roger wouldn’t bat an eye. He’d be right in the mud with his crew the next day, running an excavator or teasing out the roots of a tree.
I always remembered that observation and thought about it a lot. While other people on the show seemed to grow into their “celebrity status” in some ways, Roger never quite did.
In all the years I knew him, whether he was on the stage of The Tonight Show or the Emmy Awards, celebrating Mardi Gras in New Orleans (which we got to do when we filmed a series there), or was helping a homeowner prune an apple tree using the three-cut method, he was always that same person that I had breakfast with that first morning in Dallas so many years prior. Humble, kind, himself.
I think he understood that life was a gift, and in losing his wife at such a young age, he learned to appreciate every moment. More than his landscaping projects or his TV appearances, it’s that spirit that I hope lives on as his greatest legacy. Roger was kind, empathetic, and a dear, dear friend and teacher. He will be greatly missed.
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Thank you for such a touching story, when I read the obituary I saw that he lived in Woburn, I remember a Roger Cook from when I was in 4th grade at the Plympton Elementary school and wonder if it’s the same Roger ? The reason I remember so well is he asked if he could sing a song from Sunday school and my teacher Miss Cahill said sure AND he proceeded to sing ‘I’m HAPPY” a cute little song that I remember to this day; I even sang it to my own kids !! I’d love to know if it was him ….? (Thanks again for a great story , I hope your wife is doing well)
Thank you for the heartfelt story.