Early Life and Family
Cooke was born in San Francisco, California, to an Irish-American father, John J. Cooke, a flight instructor, who deserted the family shortly after Hope's birth. Her mother was Hope Noyes (the former Mrs. James Mulford Townsend Jr.), an amateur pilot who died in January 1942 at age 25 when the plane she was flying solo crashed.
After her parents' divorce in November 1941, Cooke and her half-sister, Harriet Townsend, moved to a New York City apartment across the hall from their maternal grandparents, Helen (Humpstone) and Winchester Noyes, the president of J.H. Winchester & Co., an international shipping brokerage firm. They were raised by a succession of governesses. Her grandfather died when she was 12; her grandmother, three years later. Cooke became the ward of her aunt and uncle, Mary Paul (Noyes) and Selden Chapin, a former US Ambassador to Iran and Peru. She studied at Chapin School, in New York. She attended The Madeira School for three years before finishing high school in Iran.
Read more about this topic: Hope Cooke
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or family:
“I would observe to you that what is called style in writing or speaking is formed very early in life while the imagination is warm, and impressions are permanent.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful, if man will live the life of nature, and not import into his mind difficulties which are none of his.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“One theme links together these new proposals for family policy—the idea that the family is exceedingly durable. Changes in structure and function and individual roles are not to be confused with the collapse of the family. Families remain more important in the lives of children than other institutions. Family ties are stronger and more vital than many of us imagine in the perennial atmosphere of crisis surrounding the subject.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)