69 Pleasant Street

69 Pleasant Street, before renovation. [2022, Dunlap]

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Marguerite “Beata” Cook — “Provincetown’s Master Storyteller,” in the words of The Provincetown Independent — occupied this house at the end of Pleasant Street, as did her parents, Nellie Irean (Patrick) Cook and John Francis “Peacy” Cook. Beata led many lives over her 96 years, but her greatest public exposure began in 2015 with the column “This, That & The Other” in the Provincetown Banner, the last installment of which was published just three days before her death in this house in May 2021. (The property had been purchased for $2,500 in 1950 by Beata’s uncle Manuel Francis “Pat” Patrick, founder and proprietor of the Flagship restaurant, 463 Commercial Street. He transferred title immediately to Nellie. The Cook family owned the property until 2025, when they sold it to an Atlanta couple for $2.525 million.)

Beata was the Cooks’ first child, born in 1924. In her early years, the family lived at 40 Franklin Street and 19 Winthrop Street. But she gravitated to “Nanny,” her beloved maternal grandmother, Sadie Mae (Newcomb) Patrick, at 8 Mechanic Street. Beata attended classes at the Western School, where the School Street Parking Lot is now. “Nanny’s house was a stone’s throw away,” Cook wrote in her first column. “I spent most of my early childhood at Nanny’s house and have warm and happy memories of this lady. In later years, if my sister or mother asked Nanny while on the phone what she did that day, her answer was invariably, ‘Oh, this, that, and the other.'”¹ Beata was graduated from Provincetown High School in 1941.

At Bridgewater State Teachers College in Massachusetts, Beata met her first girlfriend, Peggy, who stayed with the Cooks in Provincetown the following summer. They both worked as fish cutters. “I hadn’t openly come out to my parents,” Cook told Kaimi Rose Lum in 2019, “but they eventually knew, I think, without too much surprise.”² The couple moved to Northampton in the early 1940s, where Beata made machine-gun bullets at an ordnance plant. After she and Peggy parted ways, Beata joined her parents working at a Pratt & Whitney aircraft plant in Plainville, Conn. Then it was on to Detroit, again in ordnance manufacture, followed by a wild spell on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “At night I’d go down to the Village and drink up a storm,” Cook recalled. “I was a hard partier. That’s why I’ve lasted to 95. I’m pickled.”³

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Beata Cook in the Grace Hall parking booth. [2016, Dunlap]

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After returning to Provincetown, Cook worked as a waitress at the Old Colony, a bookkeeper at the Town House, and a bartender at the Post Office Café. She also tended a booth at the Grace Hall Parking Lot. Even more important, she found her voice as a raconteur and memoirist, encouraged by warm receptions in a writing group at the Council on Aging, the Writers Voice Café at Napi’s, and the Generations Project at the Crown & Anchor. Her essay, “School Days,” in the 2013 Provincetown Portuguese Festival yearbook brought Cook’s writing to the attention of Sally Rose, then the editor of the Banner. “This, That & The Other” began 23 April 2015.

“She’s cheerful and gregarious, with a memory that’s sharp and teeming as a fish trap on a dropping tide,” Lum wrote. “She can sift through the years and pull up a description of the hot-chocolate-sauce-drizzled yellow cake her grandmother used to make … as readily as she can tell you about the cocktail she had the other night. It’s a skill that puts her in a line of distinguished Provincetown storytellers.”⁴

She even narrated her own impending death, after she was discharged in February 2020 from Cape Cod Hospital to hospice care at 69 Pleasant Street. “So far, any pain I’ve experienced has been negligible,” Cook wrote the next month. “It’s mostly only minor discomfort and fatigue. I’m not really sure if I’m dying or not, since I’ve never died before.”⁵

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In memoriam

• John Francis “Peacy” Cook (1894-1972)

Find a Grave Memorial No. 91318972.

• Marguerite “Beata” Cook (1924-2021)

Find a Grave Memorial No. 228183433.

• Nellie Irean (Patrick) Cook (1905-1983)

Find a Grave Memorial No. 193105895.

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¹ “The Origins of Beata Cook’s Column,” Provincetown Banner/Wicked Local, 12 June 2021.
² “Provincetown’s Master Storyteller,” by Kaimi Rose Lum, The Provincetown Independent, 9 August 2019.
³ “Provincetown’s Master Storyteller.”
⁴ “Provincetown’s Master Storyteller.”
⁵ “This, That & The Other: Returning Home to Face My Eternity,” by Beata Cook, Provincetown Banner, 18 March 2020.

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