Madge Isaacs Cook
Madge Isaacs Cook, 91, came to Danville from her
home in Jeffersonville, Ind., to attend Kentucky College for Women
in 1918. Her acquaintance with the town actually
began several years earlier when she started coming here to spend summers with her
aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Owen McIntyre. The daughter of Clay D. and Corrina
Minor Isaacs,
she was married to William Robinson Cook Jr., and lived
on a Bluegrass Road farm for many years before moving to Lexington Avenue.
She credits her uncle, who was once mayor and editor of The Advocate, with
encouraging her to become a teacher. She taught grade school in Garrard,
Lincoln and Boyle counties.During her summers in Danville, Mrs. Cook worked at The
Advocate office. She remembers Col. Vernon Richardson's popular column,
"Just a Minute Please" and some of the other goings-on at the
newspaper.
I would come up on the train, And there would be a horse and
carriage meeting me at the station to bring me up to the
hotel.
I did odd jobs (at the Advocate). Sometimes I filled in
for Miss Julia Durham, who wrote the personal column. I helped in any way that I could around the office. It was
on Main Street, where the bookstore is now.
Uncle Owen built five houses in Danville; three of them
are still standing. The drugstore across from the hospital is the last one he built. He died in the upstairs of that
building.
Every afternoon when the Advocate came off the press,
Uncle Owen didn't have regular deliveries to Perryville, Mitchellsburg,
Junction City and he would take me in the front seat of the Ford with him and he'd fill up
the back with copies of the Advocate and we'd go leave them at Perryville,
Mitchellsburg, Junction City and then come back home.
Those summers that I worked for the Advocate, he was
considered responsible for putting down the first permanent streets in
Danville and it didn't make him very popular because the residents had to
pay for the streets in front of their houses.
Mrs. Cook lived in East Hall on the KCW campus (where
Danville High School is now) while she was in school. She remembers how the
students passed the time when they weren't in class.
We went to town, had to have permission to go. You had to
have a teacher with you until our senior year, then we could go without one. You
had to write and ask for permission and file it in Miss Andru's office. And then you'd
have to have a chaperone to go with you. Same way when you went out in town to
visit, you had to have somebody else with you.
After her marriage, Mrs. Cook lived on the farm she and her husband owned
on Bluegrass Pike, where their daughter, Corinna Baiden and her husband,
Bill, live. Cook raised hemp on the farm.
One thing that helped with our hemp crop, Robinson's brother, Valentine
Cook, who went to Massachusettes Institute of Technology, invented a hemp
break in time for the big crop we had during the war when it was so in demand. There's a model of it still down in Constitution Square.
I helped with the chickens. And the baby lambs that lost their mothers, I
fed on the bottle, that was all the connection I had. And then my husband
did sell tobacco seed and I did help package the tobacco seed, that was
about the extent of my helping on the farm.
(A15)
