Kingsport Spirit

Several years ago, I was watching Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan’s PBS documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, when I saw a reference to John Cook.

I immediately texted my friend Lafe Cook, longtime director of the Dobyns-Bennett High School Band.

“Is that your dad?”

When Lafe answered yes, I was smitten, but I had no idea how much National Park Service history was contained in that simple answer.

Lafe later casually mentioned that he was the only member of his family who had not worked for the national parks.

And boy, what a family story.

The Cook family’s formal Park Service tradition began in 1924, when Lafe’s great-grandfather, John E. Cook, went to work at Grand Canyon. The National Park Service was less than a decade old. The family initially lived in a small cabin, while the children slept in a nearby tent cabin.

John E.’s son, John O. Cook, grew up at Grand Canyon and began his own Park Service career there in 1936. He and his wife, Bee, started married life in a tent. His career later took the family to Montezuma Castle, Wupatki, Saguaro, and Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, where he served as superintendent.

The third generation was Lafe’s father, John Cook, who began his career at Saguaro in 1953—also living in a tent. By 1958, John and his new wife, Marjorie “Dani” Guillet Cook, were living in a small Park Service trailer at Chaco Canyon.

Dani brought an equally strong park heritage to their marriage. Her parents, Meredith and Emma Dean Guillet, grew up near Mesa Verde. Meredith began his federal career at the Civilian Conservation Corps camp there and eventually became superintendent of Mesa Verde National Park.

Dani spent her childhood in park communities that included Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Casa Grande Ruins, Carlsbad Caverns, Canyon de Chelly, Chaco Canyon, and Walnut Canyon. National parks were not places John and Dani visited on vacation. They were home.

John’s assignments included Navajo National Monument, Chaco Canyon, Canyon de Chelly National Monument and Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site. As his responsibilities increased, the family also lived in Scottsdale, San Francisco, Washington, Santa Fe, Anchorage, and Gatlinburg.

Dani did not hold an official National Park Service position, but she was central to the family’s life. She raised Kayci and Lafe, managed repeated transfers, and created a home wherever John’s assignments took them. She encouraged a love of books, music, museums, current events, and public affairs.

John’s importance to the Park Service extended beyond the individual parks where he served. He became a senior leader trusted with difficult assignments and consequential personnel decisions.

During the Carter administration, John was sent to Alaska to help resolve serious conflicts involving the Alaska Lands Act, an especially contentious period of debate over federal land protection, access and the future of Alaska’s public lands.

The assignment required more than technical knowledge. It called for someone who could listen to people who strongly disagreed, understand local concerns and seek common ground without abandoning the Park Service’s responsibility to future generations.

According to Lafe, his father handled the assignment so successfully that he was rewarded with the opportunity to choose his next post.

John chose the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

That decision brought the Cook family to Gatlinburg—and brought Lafe to Tennessee.

John also used his leadership position to open doors for others. At a time when women still faced significant barriers within the National Park Service, he appointed Lorraine Mintzmyer and Mary Bradford as deputy regional directors of the Southwest Region.

These were not honorary positions. Deputy regional directors helped oversee numerous parks, senior employees, budgets, and some of the most difficult issues facing the agency. John recognized leadership ability and gave talented women an opportunity to use it. Mintzmyer later became a regional director herself.

That part of John’s legacy is especially meaningful when considering the career of his daughter.

Kayci Cook Collins became the fourth consecutive generation of the Cook family to work for the National Park Service. She did far more than continue a family tradition. She became an accomplished leader in her own right.

Her career has included assignments at Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Death Valley National Park, and National Park Service headquarters in Washington. She later served as superintendent of El Malpais and El Morro national monuments in New Mexico, and Fort McHenry, where Francis Scott Key penned our national anthem. She also led the Flagstaff Area National Monuments—Walnut Canyon, Wupatki, and Sunset Crater Volcano.

In September 2021, Kayci was named superintendent of Mesa Verde National Park and Yucca House National Monument.

Her appointment brought both sides of the family story together. Kayci carried the fourth generation of the Cook family’s Park Service tradition to the park where her maternal grandfather, Meredith Guillet, had begun his federal career and later served as superintendent.

John helped create opportunities for women to lead the National Park Service. His own daughter then rose to lead one of the nation’s most significant cultural parks.

That is a powerful legacy—not simply protecting places, but developing people.

Lafe chose a different profession, but the same family principles followed him to Kingsport.

Rather than managing a national park, he became responsible for another treasured public institution: the Dobyns-Bennett High School Band.

The word public is important.

National parks are public places. They do not belong only to those who can afford private retreats, exclusive clubs or distant vacations. They belong to all of us. The child seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time has the same claim to its wonder as the wealthiest visitor standing beside him.

Public education rests on the same promise.

A public school belongs to the entire community, and every child who walks through its doors deserves the opportunity to discover his or her potential. Talent is not limited by ZIP code, family income or geography. Opportunity should not be, either.

Lafe has honored that idea throughout his career.

He has taken public school students from Appalachia to the nation’s highest levels of band competition. At the Grand National Championships, Dobyns-Bennett students have competed against programs from affluent suburbs, well-funded school systems and specialized arts magnet schools.

The playing field is not always even.

Some competing programs draw from enormous populations, benefit from extraordinary financial resources or enroll students specifically for advanced arts training. Dobyns-Bennett represents a public school in Northeast Tennessee, drawing students from the same community where they grew up.

Lafe has never taught them to view that as a limitation.

He makes them believe they belong on the same field, under the same lights and among the finest programs in the country.

Then they prove him right.

That may be among his greatest accomplishments. Long before the first note is played, he convinces students from Appalachia that excellence is not reserved for someone else, somewhere else. They learn that preparation, discipline, teamwork and belief can carry them far beyond whatever boundaries others may place around them.

They do not go merely to participate. They go knowing they have earned the right to compete.

Like a national park, a great public school program does not belong to the person temporarily placed in charge. It is inherited from those who built it, cared for during one period of leadership and passed forward to those who follow.

Lafe has guided generations of students, protected a tradition nearly as old as Kingsport itself and helped the Dobyns-Bennett Band remain one of our community’s most visible ambassadors.

His influence cannot be measured only in performances, awards, championships or national appearances. It lives in young people who learned discipline, teamwork, responsibility, confidence, and the pursuit of excellence under his direction.

Perhaps the best explanation of the Cook family’s values, however, is not found in a résumé or job title.

It is found in one small artifact.

Lafe told me that, while visiting Point Barrow, Alaska in his younger years, he picked up an arrowhead that the gentle Arctic tide had exposed from an ancient Inuit archaeologist site and slipped it into his pocket—even though his dad had specifically told him not to.

Years later, John noticed the ancient artifact in Lafe’s dorm room and asked where it had come from.

Lafe admitted to taking it from the shore.

His father made him send it back—with a letter of apology.

It was only an arrowhead. No one would have noticed it was missing, and its removal did not visibly alter the landscape.

But John understood that the principle was larger than a single arrowhead.

It was not ours to take simply because no one was watching.

That is stewardship.

It is doing the right thing when the object seems insignificant, the consequences appear negligible, and no one else would ever know.

The artifact itself was returned, but the lesson created ripples. It shaped the way Lafe understood responsibility, service, and the care of things entrusted to him. Through the thousands of young people he taught and inspired, those ripples have continued to spread.

A few years ago, John moved to Kingsport to be closer to Lafe and his family. Our community is fortunate to have become home to someone whose life and work reached from the ancient cultural landscapes of the Southwest to Alaska and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Many of us are grateful that those ripples reached all the way to Kingsport.

John Cook passed on July 3, 2026, on the eve of America’s 250th Birthday.