Santa Rosa teacher and watercolor artist Marjorie Gardner Cook Jaffrey dies at 97

Longtime teacher and artist Marjorie Gardner Cook Jaffrey loved to create plein air watercolors of her native Sonoma County hills and valleys and had a passion for the Victorian era, reflected in her paintings of historic homes on Santa Rosa’s McDonald Avenue.

Born in 1922 to Gussie and Edmund Gardner, she attended Dunbar School in Glen Ellen before moving with her family to Santa Rosa, where she lived and taught most of her long life. She died Aug. 16 at 97.

A graduate of Santa Rosa High School in 1940, she soon married Larry Cook, who became the first principal at Herbert Slater Middle School in Santa Rosa when it opened in 1954.

“Montgomery High School was being built then, and my father was supposed to become principal there, but he died of lung cancer in 1957,” said son Bill Cook of Yorkville. Montgomery High School opened in 1958. Later, Laurence Cook Middle School in Santa Rosa was named in his honor.

In 1959, after her husband’s death, Marjorie started teaching fifth and sixth grade at Doyle Park Elementary School in Santa Rosa, where she worked for the next decade, her son said.

“Marjorie didn’t teach just art, but she loved art and she did a lot of art with the children,” said her friend, Dorothy Maximov of Santa Rosa, who taught first grade at the Doyle Park school. “She and I would spend the weekend when it was Halloween and put up all of the pictures at the school.”

After raising her sons, Bill and Tom, Marjorie devoted her time to her art. Many of her landscape paintings were commissioned by a Santa Rosa interior decorator. In the late 1970s, she married Dr. George Jaffrey, a radiologist at Memorial Hospital, who died in 1985, Bill Cook said.

In December of that year, the Healdsburg Museum displayed a 6-foot-tall, $35,000 dollhouse created by Marjorie Jaffrey in the style of an 1870 New York townhouse.

“She was particularly interested in Victorian furniture, architecture and aesthetics, and she decorated this dollhouse in great detail,” her son, Bill Cook, said.

Her favorite spots for plein air painting included the Sonoma Coast and Sonoma Valley and its surrounding hills, he said. Some of Jaffrey’s paintings of Santa Rosa’s McDonald Avenue were donated to benefit the Living Room, a local day center serving homeless and at-risk children.

“She was a wonderful artist,” Jaffrey’s friend, Maximov said. “She was outstanding, one of the best in Sonoma County.”

A painting by Jaffrey of the Duncans Mills Train Depot is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Sonoma County in Santa Rosa, said Eric Stanley, the museum’s associate director and curator of history. She is also credited as the illustrator of the book “Walking” by Maude De Turk Allen, published in 1988, he said.

Jaffrey is survived by sons Bill Cook, and his wife, Kathy, of Yorkville; Tom Cook and his wife, Nanci, of Eugene, Oregon; sisters Shirley Churchill of Sonoma and Lucille Webb of Los Angeles; four grandchildren and four great grandchildren. Her sister, Vivian, died before her.

A private family memorial gathering will be held later this month.

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at 707-521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @danarts