George M. Cook
Graduating class: 1927
Inducted into Hall of Fame: 2016
Hall of Fame Category: Athlete
He was a coach and teacher but George Cook’s main claim to fame at Fairhaven High School was his prowess as an athlete. Unique probably was the best word to describe this all-around athlete during the mid-to-late 1920s, because that’s exactly what he was. That uniqueness came to life in December of 1926 when, after being awarded a varsity “F” in recognition of his winning the Greater New Bedford Junior Tennis Championship the previous summer, he became the only five-letter athletic winner in the high school that year.
Cook had won and would also win letters in football, basketball, baseball and track. By winning the tennis title Cook became just the sixth student/athlete at Fairhaven to earn five varsity letters in the same year. John Hawkins, Raymond “Peanut” Waterman, Hilton Holland, Carlcy Holland and William Q. “Biff” MacLean ’54 were the others.
Cook was a man for all seasons. He was a consistent ground-gainer as a running back in a powerful Fairhaven backfield in 1926, captain of a track team where he was a key member of the Blues’ talented relay team, a captain and guard on the basketball team and an infielder with the baseball squad. At the end of his senior year, Cook was awarded the coveted Sparrow Cup which was awarded annually to the athlete “who performs with the most meritorious service.”
But as good as he was in those four sports, Cook’s most memorable headlines came in the summer of his junior year when he defeated fellow Fairhaven athlete Al Andrews, to win the Greater New Bedford Junior Tennis title in a five-set marathon match held at the Country Club of New Bedford. The match took three hours and 30 minutes before it went to Cook, 6-2, 7-5, 3-6, 3-6, 10-8. Away from the athletic arenas, Cook served his senior class as President.
George was also president of the school’s athletic association and was the assistant to the school newspaper The Huttlestonian. Cook was an A/B student throughout his high school years and at the University of New Hampshire where he won a varsity letter in football and was the school’s inter-fraternity tennis champion in 1930 and 1931. Cook later returned to Fairhaven where he taught English and served as the school’s tennis coach for six years before moving to Brockton where he taught English at the high school. Except for tennis, Cook’s competitive days as an athlete ended after college.
He later moved to Tennessee where he became a tennis professional at the John Rogers Tennis in Memphis. He returned to Brockton in 1960 where he resumed his classroom teaching. In 1966, he said “he got tired of wasting time measuring and drawing lines for true-false, multiple choice and completion tests for high school English studies” and decided to do something about it. That something was acquiring a patent of a plastic clear template that enabled a teacher to lay out an objective test that normally took seven-to-eight minutes to prepare in less than a minute.
Cook was married to the former Bertha Rohr of Essex, N.H. and the couple had two sons, William and George Jr. A 1966 newspaper article said the Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UNH and English teacher was enjoying his role as an inventor. “Primarily because it saves time for me,” Cook was quoted as saying. It’s also presumed he was spending time remembering those unique days at Fairhaven when he was one of only six student/athletes to earn five varsity letters in one single year.