channelMarkers
For the Long Run
High-mileage memories
Mike Cook’s car collection takes brides’ memories from special to classic
F
JUNE 2020
16 LAKE NORMAN CURRENTS
Mike Cook offers brides the use of a 1953 Cadillac named Victoria courtesy of the Heritage House Event Venue.
or some, Mike Cook’s cars are a welcomed bit of nostalgia when it’s needed most. For others, they’re a memorable accent to a special day. To Cook, they’re a chance to provide others what they’ve given him: memories. “For me, it’s all about the experience and realizing life is all about relationships and something they can take away with them,” says Cook, owner of Cavin-Cook Funeral Home & Crematory and a Mooresville mainstay for the better part of seven decades. He was recently honored as Funeral Director of the Year by American Funeral Director Magazine. Cook opened the Heritage House Events Venue on the property a few years ago and has since begun offering weddings. As a bonus he gives the brides a grand entrance via one of the cars in his fleet of classics, headlined by a 1953 Cadillac named Victoria. “It’s a unique thing, and the kind of thing they’ll be able to talk about for years to come,” says Cook. Cook, 68, first found Victoria in a garage in 1984, but the road to owning a 12-car collection was paved back when he was growing up on the “dead-end road called Cherry Street” that would eventually become Iredell Avenue. He’d regularly help his neighbors wash their cars, and on Sundays he’d climb in and pretend to drive the unsold autos at Cherry Motor Company on W. Moore Avenue. “I was always a car guy,” says Cook. Cook began working at the
