Judith Neches Cooke

Student

“My son took me by the hand into Admissions and said, ‘My mother’s going to enroll here.’ I sat there, cringing. And that was that.”

On the day she was being born in a military hospital in San Diego, the father of Judith Neches Cooke was having a very different experience half a world away in the wartime Pacific. “My father was the captain of the USS Neches, and on January 23, 1942 his ship was torpedoed. I was being born when my mother got the news, so she gave me the middle names of Neches.” Judith’s father survived, as did mother and child. And though she has sailed serenely on since then, when last seen Judith was heading for UCLA—on crutches.

“I fractured my leg, and now I’m going to be covering that big campus on crutches,” she says with grim humor. But Judith has seldom, if ever, taken the usual approach to experience. “I look at my time at SMC as living a vital stage that I missed,” she says. “When everyone else was getting their masters from Berkeley, I was in Europe watching the Berlin Wall go up! I was either a romantic or just plain stupid,” she says, laughing darkly.

But Judith’s ambition now, after seeing the world and raising a family, is a decidedly literary one that has taken shape nicely at SMC. “I want to be able to read Spanish literature in the original language with an eye towards starting a Spanish language literary agency,” says Judith. And she reports that her experience at SMC has strengthened her resolve. “Most of the teachers here could be teaching elsewhere, but they’ve chosen this place because they love what they’re doing here. I think it’s a wonderful operation with a high level of excellence that’s well suited to get older people back into the stream of education. And the kids I’ve been sitting next to in class have always made me very comfortable. Honestly,” she continues, “this next generation works so hard that they really make you feel good about where the future is headed.”

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