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Jeannie Taylor chosen as Timber Days Grand Marshal

David Colburn
Posted 6/5/25

COOK- The Cook Annual Timber Days committee in recent years has chosen grand marshals for Sunday’s parade who have been involved in many different volunteer and philanthropic groups. This …

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Jeannie Taylor chosen as Timber Days Grand Marshal

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COOK- The Cook Annual Timber Days committee in recent years has chosen grand marshals for Sunday’s parade who have been involved in many different volunteer and philanthropic groups.
This year’s choice, Jeannie Taylor, breaks that mold. While expressing her enthusiastic support for all of the good being done in the city and surrounding area by volunteers, Taylor focuses primarily on one, an organization with big goals and big impact – Cook Friends of the Parks.
Taylor didn’t expect to be the center of attention for Timber Days, but when the committee came calling she didn’t say no – she just asked a simple question: “Are you sure you want me?”
That question alone says a lot about Taylor, who’s spent most of her life doing work that matters without ever trying to stand out for it.
“It’s an honor,” Taylor said. “I’m just not a big fuss kind of person.”
Taylor is a Cook native, the daughter of Gordon and Lillian Anderson. She was the fourth of six Anderson children.
Taylor said she first got engaged with volunteer service in high school with an organization known at the time as the American Sunday School Union. The group has gone through many name changes since its founding in 1817, and is known today as InFaith.
“It was kind of like a missionary-type thing,” Taylor said. “They would go to different towns and put on Bible schools in the summer, so I volunteered for that. They had a camp on Lake Esquagama. We got $20 for maybe four weeks of work. It was fun.”
Taylor graduated from Cook High School in 1971. “There were 71 kids in our class,” she noted.
She moved on to Mesabi State Junior College, where she broke a different mold at the time – by majoring in criminal justice.
“I thought I was going to save the world, maybe,” Taylor said.
But then, while attending the funeral of an old family friend, she reconnected with the man who’s been her husband for the past 52 years, Jim Taylor. He had recently returned from a tour of duty as a Marine in Vietnam. Originally from International Falls and also part of a big family, Taylor said she didn’t really remember him.
“It was kind of a bizarre thing, because I drove my mom (to the funeral),” Taylor said. “My mom didn’t drive a lot of distance and she wanted to go. So that’s where I actually met him, and he said he was thinking about going to Mesabi. So, when I saw him at Mesabi, I went to talk to him and we started dating, and we got married about six months later.”
That marriage, and the children that came with it, eventually changed the course of Taylor’s life. Their first son, Travis, was born in her final year at Mesabi.
“He was born, and I went back to school ten days later,” Taylor laughed.
Then they moved to Bemidji, where she studied at Bemidji State College. The Taylors moved to Cook in 1976. Along came son Jesse, and later daughter Kristina, but no job in criminal justice – too many other applicants for the few positions available, Taylor said. So, she worked stints at the local co-op and at Ketola’s Department Store in Virginia before getting a job at the school as a playground aide when Kristina was about four.
“Somewhere along the way, I got really involved with PTO – all the playground equipment that’s left at the old school, we did all the fundraising for that.”
Then somewhere around 1992, Taylor said, she became the leader of the community education program, a position she held until her retirement in 2011. And in her retirement, she’s broken the mold yet again, this time as a cancer survivor.
“I retired because I was going through my cancer thing, and the prognosis was less than five years,” Taylor said. “I did three years of treatment and then it came back, and I took a few months off for surgery and stuff, and Jim said, ‘Why are you going to go back? Let’s just enjoy our life.’ So then we started traveling, and that’s what we’ve done, and miraculously I’m still here.”
But between cruises that have taken them all over the world, there’s been Cook Friends of the Parks. Taylor, the group’s current president, said it’s been a good fit with what she did with community education, as well as with the parks and recreation board that she served on for 25 years.
“It’s kind of like a puzzle you put together, you figure this out, you figure that out,” she said.
The most visible and vital of the projects she’s worked on is the Cook Community Center, which at its inception was intended to be a youth center, but as more people got engaged, the focus shifted.
The next big project was creating Veterans Riverfront Park, on the north end of River St. on the banks of the Little Fork River. And for the past year, Friends of the Parks has been working hard to bring pickleball to Cook through the transformation of the old ice skating rink at the community center. Originally intended to be a dual-use surface, plans have changed over time so that now there will be a smaller ice rink and separate pickleball courts. The projects they’ve tackled are large ones, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars they’ve had to raise, but Taylor is rightfully proud of the contributions Friends of the Parks has made to the community.
“We’re just a small group – I think there’s seven of us now, but we just say this is our goal, let’s do it,” Taylor said. “Sometimes it takes longer than we anticipated, and raising more money, but we do it. I think my goal is to make this community appealing to new families.”
And Taylor has some ready consultants for what might be appealing to families. Sons Travis and Jesse live here, and daughter Tina lives in Silver Bay, and Taylor said that she has six grandchildren, each kid with two.
“And three great-grandchildren,” Taylor said, smiling big.
Taylor expressed sincere gratitude for all of the relationships she’s made through her work with Friends of the Parks and the overwhelming community support they’ve received. She hopes people will help boost them over the final hurdles of fundraising for the pickleball courts by participating in raffles and upcoming events. And when it comes to volunteering, Taylor noted that one doesn’t have to do large projects to make a difference.
“You don’t have to do something big, you just have to show up,” she said.