John E. Cook

1919 - 2020

(News story) LAMBERTVILLE - John E. Cook, an adventurer and artist who was chief development engineer for Libbey Glass, created a camp in the Ontario wilderness, and taught would-be watercolorists, died Sunday in Aspen Grove Assisted Living. He was 101.

He had coronavirus, son John, Jr., said. Formerly of Kingston Residence of Sylvania, the elder Mr. Cook lived for 60 years on Densmore Drive in Toledo's Old Orchard neighborhood.

"He could do so many things and do them well. I learned a lot from him, and it was the basis for me ending up where I did," said his son, a retired industrial arts teacher at Ida High School.

Mr. Cook was a longtime member of the Toledo Artists Club. He taught watercolor classes there and at the Toledo Museum of Art, and he was a mainstay of the Monday Morning Painters, a plein air painting group.

"His work was very easy to love and very popular," Trudy Kahn, a painter and friend, said. "It was free and easy, and he was facile with watercolor."

He designed and, for a time, marketed the Cookie Box, a handled case with slots and spaces inside for a watercolorist's palette and brushes.

Mr. Cook retired in 1981 as chief development engineer of Libbey, then part of Owens-Illinois Inc. He oversaw the machinery that produced Libbey Glass products and was sent by the company to glass plants in Japan and England, but also to the North and South poles. "He was well liked, and they kept moving him up," his son said.

Born March 3, 1919, in Oshkosh, Wis., to Frankie and Everett Cook, he grew up in Toledo and was a graduate of DeVilbiss High School. While taking night classes at the University of Toledo, Mr. Cook worked for the DeVilbiss Co.

The firm was known for its spray-painting equipment and atomizers, and Mr. Cook and a team of engineers were successful at a government project to design a fog generator to provide cover for troops.

He was a Navy veteran of World War II and was stationed in Washington. He returned to the DeVilbiss Co. afterward but decided he didn't want to spend his life behind a drawing board.

He'd been an outdoor enthusiast for years. As a Boy Scout, he and a friend hitchhiked from their Scout camp in Michigan to north of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. In the late 1940s, he and his wife established a camp in northern Ontario at a former Hudson's Bay Co. site near the Agawa River outlet to Lake Superior. They built a lodge and cabins, the lumber cut by a sawmill Mr. Cook built from scratch.

A December, 1951, article in the Toledo Blade Pictorial titled "Hewing A Home From The Wilderness" chronicled the family's quest. The Cook family returned to Toledo for the winter months, when Mr. Cook was an O-I engineer.

The camp was sold in the late 1950s, with the site later becoming part of Lake Superior Provincial Park.

Mr. Cook and the former Catherine Jane "Susie" Clark married April 13, 1940. She died Sept. 18, 1999. He married Rose Force in November, 1999. She died Feb. 4, 2017. He married Phyllis Eichenlaub in June, 2019. She died April 4, 2020.

Daughter Lynn Patterson died in 2004, and son Larry died in 2011.

Surviving are his sons John, Jr., and James R.; eight grandchildren, and innumerable great-grandchildren.

There will be no visitation or services. Arrangements are by Newcomer Funeral Home–West Sylvania Chapel. The family suggests tributes to a charity of the donor's choice.

This is a news story by Mark Zaborney. Contact him at mzaborney@theblade.com or 419-724-6182.