Buddy Joe (B.J.) Cook, 91, passed away from natural causes November 28, 2022, in his home in Lutz, Florida. B.J. was born May 10, 1931, in Paducah, Kentucky, to Henry D. and Camille Cook, and later moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. He has a surviving younger sister Janice who resides in Paducah with her family.
B.J. played safety for his high school football team and was the youngest Boy Scout in the Knoxville district to attain the level of Eagle Scout at that time. He went on to attend and graduate from the University of Tennessee with an accounting degree. While on campus, B.J. was a member and president of Sigma Chi fraternity. Upon graduation, he was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Navy, rising to the rank of Lieutenant before honorable discharge. He served in peacetime in the mid-1950s on the minesweeper USS Triumph, mainly in the Mediterranean Sea.
In March 1954, just prior to his entrance into the service, he married Carole Kennedy, from Plant City, Florida, who also attended the University of Tennessee. As newlyweds, Carole rendezvoused with him at the ship’s ports of call during his Mediterranean deployments. As a result, B.J. was fond of saying he had a “girl in every port.”
B.J. and Carole settled in Tampa, Florida, with B.J. taking a sales position with Sperry Univac, which ultimately led him and his family, which by then included son, Daniel Joe Cook and daughter, Carole Allyson Cook Reynolds, to Dallas, Texas, to serve in a similar role there for four years.
He returned to Tampa to realize his lifelong dream of opening a store specializing in arts and crafts. The Craft Cottage was located on Kennedy Boulevard for seven years. B.J. was an accomplished tole painter and author of the book “Sand and Surf.” Thereafter, B.J. began an insurance career, first working for Connecticut General, then for more than twenty years as a respected representative of Guardian Life.
B.J. was a devout Christian, spending significant time as an active member of Christ Community Church and Idlewild Baptist Church, both in Tampa. He had a heart for evangelism and missions, enjoyed mentoring young men, and served as chairman of the Board of Elders at CCC for two terms. At Idlewild alongside Carole, he was active in Idlewild’s Missions ministries, volunteering at Just Elementary in Tampa, and joining short-term mission trips to the Appalachians, Amazon River, Costa Rica, and other foreign mission fields.
For twenty years, the Cooks spent half of their time in their beloved mountain home in Waynesville, North Carolina, where they were faithful members of Rehoboth Baptist Church. B.J. and Carole received a steady stream of visitors and family from Florida while there.
B.J. was grandfather to eight grandchildren, Phillip and wife Susannah, Stephen and wife Katie, Matthew and wife Breann, and Rachel Huertas and husband David, from daughter Allyson and her husband Richard Reynolds, and Parker, Collin and wife Bree, Madeleine, and Kennedy (two sets of identical twins) from son Dan. From these grandchildren, he was constantly surrounded in his later years by 13 great grandchildren, and the expanded family of Dan’s wife of 23 years, Donna, who is mother to Julie, Amanda, Philip, Jacy, Austin, and Amy, from whom came nine children. Amanda, in fact, faithfully attended to B.J. in his final months.
B.J.’s final resting place will be in Memorial Park Cemetery, Plant City, where Kennedy family members are buried.
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