“I decided that I’d make clothing until something better came along”

After I started reading intently about the Revolution in New England, one of the first living historians I remember chatting with was Henry Cooke.

He was presenting the life of a tailor by, you know, tailoring clothes. He mentioned researching the career of a Boston tailor and militia officer named Thomas Marshall.

“Ah, the man with the shovel,” I said. Referring to Marshall’s role in the merchants’ confrontation with John Mein.

That’s when we knew we’d get along.

Cooke and I were part of the team that reenacted the Boston Massacre for several years leading up to its Sestercentennial. His face should also be familiar to anyone who attended the reenacted tea meetings at Old South Meeting-House in that period, and many other events.

Earlier this summer, the Tufts Now website shared Marc Chalufour and Alonso Nichols’s profile of Cooke as a university alumnus.

The interview reminds me how unruffled Cooke is, for a man who can make his own ruffles:

How did you get started doing historical reenactments?

When I was in high school, my guidance counselor said if I was going to go to college, I needed to have extracurricular activities. This is 1974, and he said there was this minuteman group starting in Randolph, Mass., and maybe I should join them. I have been doing living history in various forms ever since.

When did you start making your own costumes?

That happened very early. When I first got involved, the only clothing patterns that were available to us were from something called Sketchbook 76. But they were little more than sketches of pattern pieces and a drawing of what the finished object should look like.

When I was a college student, I started making historical clothing for myself. A lot of the guys in the unit would say, “Hey, I need an extra shirt, can you make me one?”

When I finished my master’s program, I was putting out résumés. I had done internships in archives, in museum collections, and assumed I would end up doing something like that, but I was competing with people with Ph.D.s for entry-level jobs. I decided that I’d make clothing until something better came along. That was 1984 and I’m still waiting.

At the same time, Henry Cooke takes his work quite seriously, learning from it and teaching others.

What have you learned from studying original 18th-century garments?

The clothing is a mold of the body that lived within it. I’ve studied Ben Franklin’s clothing, John Adams’s clothing, John Hancock’s clothing. You get an understanding and an appreciation of the humanity and the physicality of these people.

Franklin, I always thought, was this pudgy little guy. But he had a very muscular upper body because he was pulling on a printer’s beam throughout his career, and he loved to swim. He had the body of a swimmer.

For more, here’s a Journal of the American Revolution interview with Henry Cooke from a decade ago.