For the Long Run —Mike Cook’s impressive car collection

For the Long Run High-mileage memories

Mike Cook’s car collection takes brides’ memories from special to classic F 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 Mike Cook offers brides the use of a 1953 Cadillac named Victoria courtesy of the Heritage House Event Venue.

funeral home as a high schooler and became sole owner in 1995. He found Victoria while working a five-year stint as a funeral director in High Point and has since accumulated several other classics, many of which were once owned by friends or their relatives; a 1959 Buick, a 1967 Lincoln 4-door, a 1950-era Ford F1 truck that once belonged to D.E. Hardware – he even owns a 1976 hearse that reportedly carried Elvis Presley’s body from the medical examiner’s office in Memphis back to Graceland.

They’re not all classics; his 2016 Cadillac CT6 is an everyday car, while his bright yellow Saturn Sky convertible is perfect for his fundraising efforts, whether he’s helping animal charities or working as a member of the Masonic

Mike Cook with a 1976 hearse that reportedly transported Elvis Presley’s body back home to Graceland in Memphis.

Lodge, Shriners or the Oasis Color Guard, among others.

But the ones that are? They give him something the others can’t.

“I find myself riding down Main Street (in Mooresville) and I catch myself looking in the reflection of the car in the windows as I go by—it takes me back to a simpler time, I

guess,” says Cook. — Aaron Garcia Photos by, Photos courtesy of Cavin-Cook Funeral Home & Crematory and Heritage House Event Venue