Recipes for Living Joanne Cox

I was born in the small town of Sidney, New York to Donald and Gladys Baker. My parents were also native New Yorkers. My mother was raised in Sidney; my father was born in Rome, New York. His family moved to Sidney when he was a young child. They had begun their relationship as high school sweethearts.

When I was three years old, we moved to Unadilla, New York which had a population of about 1200. I was four years old when my brother, Don, was born. Ten years later, my sister, Tami, came along. The house in Unadilla was where I grew up, and where my Mother and Dad still live.

I had a great childhood! There were no fears and no pressures. I have very fond memories of my neighborhood where I had lots of friends. My sister was not as fortunate as I because there was no one her age by the time she came along. It made me appreciate my good fortune even more.

However, I wasn't much of a homebody. I was always going somewhere. My mother's parents lived in Sidney, and my father's in West Pittston, Pennsylvania. It was a drive of about two hours but my grandparents came to Unadilla every weekend. We always had a big Sunday family dinner. My grandparents were my friends and I spent quite a bit of my childhood with them and an aunt and uncle in Unadilla. They made up games and thought of fun things to do. My brother is now in Florida and my sister in New York State. She and I speak every week and we are very close to my parents.

Elementary school came and went. It was a small school and it was okay but there weren't many activities to take part in. I was in a choir, which was the biggest activity until I was in sixth grade.

I had a terrible experience with my kindergarten teacher and I have never forgotten it. It is still painful to talk about. We had a nest with robins' eggs in the window, which was beside my chair. I got up to go to the bathroom and must have brushed against the eggs. They fell onto my chair and broke. The teacher blamed me and I had to get up in front of the class and apologize. It was all my mother could do to get me to go back to school, and even though I tried to avoid that teacher, everywhere I turned I seemed to run into her. She was my aunt's friend and her son associated with my parents.

That was the only bad experience that I had through the rest of grade school. Luckily, I had a very pleasant first grade teacher, who created a positive environment in her classroom. My third grade teacher was a rock hound. She had quite a collection and would invite us to her house to see it. She interested many of us in collecting rocks during those years; but I didn't stay with it.

In fifth grade we could do patrol duty and help kids across the street. In that grade we got to go to Washington, D.C. It was a four-day excursion, and I think now that our chaperones must have been very brave to volunteer. We toured the White House, Mt. Vernon, and all the usual tourist places. We visited Gettysburg on the way home. It was quite an educational experience. Being from a small community, it was good to have our eyes opened to know there was much more to the world. That trip helped me a lot, not only what we saw but also learning to be with other kids for an extended period. I remember getting lost, and that our bus driver hit a car. Those were the outstanding memories for this fifth grader!

When I was in seventh grade, our community combined with another school. We were in the same building as the high school. I was in the first class to go all the way through the new school. It was kind of scary to be in a new school and meet kids from another community. I was again involved in choir and enjoyed art, encouraged by trips to see museums in New York City.

A music teacher who had taught us in elementary school was hired to teach us in the new school. She was a special lady and it was good to perform for her. She was one of those teachers you liked to hang out with.

When I was in eleventh grade, I took part in an exchange program. A class of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades from John F. Kennedy School came to visit. Each of us took a student to be a guest in our home. A very interesting aspect of that event was that we each read a particular book and discussed the ways in which we saw it differently. Later we visited them at their school, and they performed a musical for us. The administration was so impressed that, to give us the same advantage, the following year our school hired a theater teacher. We did the play "Oliver" and he procured a set designer, a choreographer for the dance numbers, and college students to do makeup. Through this we learned to do everything from scratch. We were very fortunate as high school students to have the advantage of learning from these people.

Through the theater department, we also went to New York to see "Candide" and. "Greece." I am so glad that I carefully kept scrap books from sixth grade through college. They help me show my husband the things I experienced and enjoyed while I was growing up. In addition to the theater work, I was a majorette in band and a cheerleader. My tendency was to be quiet and behind-the-scenes. It was good to make myself be in front of people to get over my shyness. From fifth grade to my senior year, I took piano lessons. I had a sweet teacher but she wasn't a "pusher." It is nice to be able to read music, and I play for my own pleasure: However, I realize now that I would have been a better pianist if she had expected more of me.

The year before my graduation I went to the Virgin Islands for a two-week stay with my aunt and uncle. That was my first plane ride by myself and I was a nervous wreck until the plan took off. Once we were in the air I was in absolute awe over how beautiful it was to fly. It was a wonderful experience, and since then flying has never bothered me.

A dreaded experience for tenth and eleventh grade students in New York State are the Regents Exams. One week after the end of the school year, there are tests in math, history, science and English. There were Regents classes and practice tests. They were always difficult tests and caused some anxiety. Perhaps now authorities look more at SAT’s, but in those days the results of these tests were important factors in being accepted to a college. I remember the commotion it caused when I was in the eleventh grade and the Regents tests were stolen. The teachers had to devise replacement tests. The Regents are not my favorite memories but not bad either. Through my whole student life I never felt horribly stressed. I was an easy-going student, never getting into much trouble.

I graduated from high school in 1975 and enrolled in a two-year college at Morrisville for a Liberal Arts degree. My world came clattering down shortly thereafter. I have mentioned that I feel so lucky to have grown up when I did. My friends and I never had a worry. We could walk the streets, speak to everybody, and feel no fear or stress. We even occasionally took the bus to Binghamton; which was about a 15-niinute ride. Our parents didn't worry about us, and we thought we were pretty cool. This naive view of the world began to change shortly after I settled into a dorm at college, and a girl was raped. I will never forget the shock of hearing that news.

College, however, was a good experience, especially meeting kids from all over the country. I became involved in theater but quickly discovered that theater people liked to work through the night and I couldn't do that. In order to continue to participate in that area of interest, I became the theater representative in student government, trying to get money to support the theater department.

In college I met Mark Lyman from Cortland, New York, and we were married. After college we moved to Cortland and I went to work for a pharmacy chain. Within two years I became the manager. I worked there seven or eight years. Then I applied for work at an independent pharmacy that was expanding and had decided to hire a manager. It was a lucky break and a good opportunity.

I started with the expectation of working 40-hour weeks. Forget that. The 40 grew into 70- to 80-hour weeks. I started working in May. In January and February they began an expansion. The owner allowed me to learn all the different aspects. It was different to be working for an independent store instead of a chain. We were purchasing according to our own decisions. I became the "front manager," which entailed purchasing all the over-the-counter merchandise and giftware from the wholesalers. Next we put in food and I began doing the food purchasing. I learned how to run sales.

The next learning experience came as the result of a disastrous computer crash. We completely lost the hard drive. I knew nothing about computers and saw my opportunity to avoid learning by taking the manager's place at a buying show. I expected to come home and find that the problem had been corrected. Forget that, too. Nothing had been done. We had lost about 10 days of entries. Among our customers were 10 nursing homes for which we kept records of hundreds of prescriptions. The only good part was that this happened before we had entered the inventory.

As often happens, what I was forced to learn because of an emergency turned out to be a great benefit to me. The fact is, I became quite involved in the computer. I worked tightly with programmers and did some programming myself. We did our own custom work, providing "med" sheets for the nursing homes. We were among the first to offer some new services to our clients, even before some of the nation-wide companies started offering them. All of this added to the manager's job. I made up the med sheets and printed them, and did the hiring and firing. I went to school for a week to become a fitter for prosthesis. The school attempts to teach everything about anatomy in one week- everything you didn't really want to know- along with teaching us how to fit stockings and corsets. Students were required to take a written exam and have five graded fittings. That became another one of my jobs.

Mark worked for Buckbee Mears, a manufacturing company that had an affiliate in Germany. They invited us to vacation there and we spent two weeks with families of the company, having picnics-one in the Black Forest-and going to street festivals. We did none of the usual touristy things so it was more like living there than vacationing. I get attached to people very easily and didn't want to come home, realizing that I would probably never see our host family again. But, of course, we came back to the U.S. and each of us became absorbed in our jobs, which is probably when and why we grew apart.

Two years later, the place of business where I worked got involved in home health care. I worked with the boss in setting up the program. It was another new experience- one of those crazy things that you learn from scratch each day as you go along.

The next event was when the owner sold the business to a chain of home health care services. I stayed two more years and worked at another pharmacy, a closed shop that was used for nursing homes, and a separate professional pharmacy in a physicians' office building. I was in charge of computers and third-party billing. I stayed there for two years and had some good experiences in my work, but it was during this time that Mark and I divorced and went our separate ways.

My previous boss contacted me and asked me to open a pharmacy in Pennsylvania. So I packed up my belongings, moved to Pennsylvania, and learned what a nightmare it is to open a new business. That is when you learn all the things you wouldn't do again. I can say there were good learning experiences even if not all good moments. I was accustomed to working long hours, but hours couldn't be considered in this case. We started with an empty building and proceeded to fill it. Philosophically, we can say that all these experiences make us who we are but we can say it more easily in hind-sight.

After two years, the business sold again. I stayed on another year and found myself with more free time and a less stressful schedule. Even with all the computer experience I had, this was the first time I had my own personal home computer. I had some trouble and called the repairman who persuaded me to get on the internet, which I had never done. Suddenly I found myself with a whole new world opening in front of me. There was so much good information, and it wasn't long before I found a chat-room. I met many wonderful people as I was chatting good Christian people who at the time may have had problems and needed someone to talk to. I liked finding them. I've always been a "fixer." In school, I was forever trying to fix the disputes between my friends, talking to each side, and trying to get them to talk to each other.

One March night I struck up a conversation with a fellow from Osceola, Iowa. His name was Charley Cox and he was a retired Marine. We had wonderful conversations! We could talk about anything. He had been married and raised two sons and we talked about them and just everything. I feel that if you learn to read people, you can tell if someone is not being genuine. I knew that in our conversations we were being honest with each other.

Two months later I flew to Iowa so we could meet. That isn't like me, but I did it. The meeting confirmed the impressions I had. There was nothing about Charley that wasn't real. I was in Osceola about two days, returned home, and came back in July for about a week. At that time both of his sons were here. It was my first opportunity to meet his older son and wife, and the second time to be with the younger son. On that trip we decided that I wasn't going to be flying back and forth. I would be moving here.

I gave my employers notice in August and learned they were going to close our site. They asked me to stay on to help them close. Charley came to Pennsylvania at the end of September and we gathered up all my belongings for the move to Iowa. I flew back to Pennsylvania and lived in an empty apartment for two months, sleeping on an air mattress and being entertained by my tiny TV. I came to Iowa in November.

We were married on July 16, 1999, and it was confirmed that all my instincts had been right. I was welcomed into Charley's family, and my parents, who came for the week, took to Charley. Both my parents felt comfortable in my new home. Dad, Charley, and the boys played golf and had a ball. Mom and I came home from running errands and discovered Dad and Charley chatting as though they had known one another forever.

The first year I was here, I didn't work. I got settled in and enjoyed some breathing time - something I had never had. I began going to church again. I had always gone to Sunday School when I was in the elementary grades and as a young person I continued to be involved in church, singing in the choir and being active in our youth group. But during the years when I was so involved in the business world, I had let that slip.

It was wonderful to find everybody so welcoming. It is such a good way to become acquainted in a new community. Until then I had never taught a Sunday School class, but I began teaching the combined fifth and sixth grades. I don't know who was more frightened on the first day, my students or me. That led to my becoming co-chair of the education work area.

I am now working as a teller different than the pharmacy. I very much enjoy my fellow employees and our customers. Osceola is a really nice community. I like it a lot. I have joined the Optimists Club and next year I will be their secretary and treasurer. Charley is very supportive but doesn't care as much for social involvements as I do.

I do lots of gardening, particularly flowers, and Charley and I golf. Strange as it may see Charley and I still chat with each other on the computer. We have found that it is a most effective way to communicate!