I always knew in the back of my mind that having a best friend 44 years older than me would end badly for both of us – though, as she would interject, it ended worse for her. Mimi Hook, known to our family and to readers of this newsletter as Aunt Mimi, was 89. For those new here, I started this email in 2014, sending it to friends, family, and others unlucky enough to be in my contacts list. Mimi would be driven mad by the typos, circle them, and text me a screen shot. Eventually I told her that if she was so bothered by them, it was her duty to fix them ahead of time. She agreed to become this newsletter’s volunteer copy editor.
She was in the top 1 percent of technically adept octogenarians – I’d often go to her for help rather than the other way around; she was coding in the ‘60s – and she was also a night owl. So each night – I used to send this email more frequently, not sure how, when I think about it – I’d send her a link to a Google Doc and she’d go through and flag not just typos but also broken links or broken thinking. On the very rare occasion she wasn’t around to edit, she’d send me the resulting product with the typos circled in red. That she can’t do that to this message is a gut punch.
Mimi would send me an image of my newsletter with the typos circled or underlined if it went out without her looking it over
Many of you may remember that years ago – 2018, I think? – I sent out a note on Christmas Eve asking readers to tip Mimi. It was mostly a joke, and Mimi found it amusing and a little embarrassing, but then real money started coming in. By the end, you had donated more than $1,000. She was moved beyond words, as was I, and she bought herself a really nice smart TV, which she made good use of until the end.
She lived an almost unbelievable life. She was a fierce, funny, and independent woman who spoke her mind long before that sort of thing was girlboss cool. “Oh, she’s a character,” was the near universal line I would hear from more-or-less everyone who was fortunate enough to cross her path. She was blunt, frank, honest, and could slice right to the heart of it. It could be too much for some people – but me, I loved it. Born in 1934, the youngest of three sisters, she would have turned 90 on Tuesday, January 23, a birthday she was very much hoping to make. She wanted a party rather than a funeral, and we’ll be holding it at her apartment. (Email me for details if you were a friend.)
Left to right: Jean Wilmot, her sister; Genevieve Boyle, her mother; Sally Wilmot, my first grandmother; Cindy Quinn, my mom; Mimi
She’s been known to friends and family alike as Mimi her entire life, but was born Mary Kathryn Wilmot in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, back when it was a booming coal town, one of the wealthiest areas of the country for a brief spell. Her grandfather, George Wilmot, spent years as a “breaker boy” – a kid whose job it was to stand next to a conveyor belt with a hammer and smash the coal rolling by into small pieces – but quit when he was 16 and went back to school. He was apparently brilliant, and wound up inventing something called the “rivetless chain” in 1908, which he patented in 1914 as a so-called “drive chain.” The Wilmot Company, as far as I can tell, still exists, and he got fantastically rich. His son, who I knew only as Papi, though I’m not sure I ever met him in person, expanded the fortune. A few years ago, I drove Mimi and the kids back there for her 75th Hazleton Area High School reunion, and we got to see the home she’d grown up in.
Mimi, always rocking blue or purple hair, this time at the 75th Hazleton Area High School reunion in September 2021
I’d always heard her childhood home described as something of a mansion in the middle of town, but in our era of McMansions, it seemed quite modest, a vibe enhanced by its dilapidation. A few blocks away was the Wilmot office, the tallest building in town, where her father worked out of a penthouse office. The family was doing well: the car she was driven around in as a child had electric windows. But there was a darkness, too. Her parents were distant. The youngest of three sisters, she felt out of place and unwanted. One morning, she woke up in bed with her bloodied wrists bandaged, yet nobody ever spoke a word of it to her.
Mimi on a date in high school in Hazleton
She and her sisters, Sally and Jean, all went to college, quite unusual for the time, with Mimi graduating from Wilson College in 1955 with a degree in economics. She went from there to New York City where she got a job as an actuary at an insurance company. Six months later she landed at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York doing econometrics. She also soon met her husband, as unique a man as you’ll find. Bill Hook was in and out of homelessness, with a fondness for chess, painting, and gambling, all of which he mastered. He was living out of the U.S. chess center for a long stretch, playing tournaments and spending his days either at Washington Square Park or a famous chess flop house called Fisher’s, where he became good friends with Stanley Kubrick (who later put Fisher’s in his movie “The Killing,” it’s the chess club where the robbery is planned) and a motley assortment of artists and vagabonds. He appreciated the hospitality of the chess center, but it didn’t open its doors until 10 am, which meant he couldn’t leave the building until then.
Interviewing for a job early in her career – I can’t remember which one, I think the Fed – she was asked: “Does your husband know you’re looking for work?”
Of the two, only Mimi would ever be comfortable in a professional setting, but Bill’s claim to chess fame is about as solid as you can get: He beat Bobby Fischer. Okay, he was 12, but still. After one such loss – Bill beat him four times – he left the blitz tournament crying. But he came back later for multiple rematches. Here’s how Uncle Bill later described it in his memoir, Hooked on Chess: “But one night at the Marshall Chess Club rapids we played a French Defense and a very peculiar thing happened. In the middle of the game Bobby made a strong move and I suddenly had an almost physical sense of the power emanating from it. And Bobby moved again with the same effect; it was as if he were playing with dynamic rays of force that I had a heightened sensitivity to. It happened once more, and my position was busted, as the coffee house players would say. I never won another game from Bobby, and I wonder if any other players have had this experience while opposing him.” While I play at a much, much lower level than this, I can say that I have actually had that physical experience while playing against Bill.
It tells you a lot about Mimi that she saw through his situation to see the man she’d spend her life with. That life would take them to Washington; to the British Virgin Islands, where Bill would captain the island nation’s team at the chess olympics; and around the world multiple times – eventually as professional gamblers hustling money from casinos that hadn’t mastered probabilities yet.
In 1957, Bill won a Hallgarten Prize, quite an honor in the art world and one that came with a $5,000 award – an absolute fortune at the time. They got married.
Mimi quit her job at the Fed and the two boarded a boat to Ibiza, the island off the coast of Spain that is now a legendary drug-and-party scene, but which then was a beatnik artist colony (you can imagine how it would go from one to the other over the course of a half century). When they returned to Manhattan a year later, she was eventually able to get back to the Fed, while Bill kept painting and playing chess. He won another prestigious award in 1960, from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and both thought he was destined for an extraordinary career. Instead, he barely ever sold another painting, and eventually gave it up entirely, switching to photography.
Off Ibiza, they had taken up snorkeling, and Bill would turn underwater photos into semi-abstract paintings.
One of Bill’s underwater photos
One of Mimi’s favorite paintings by Bill. You can see the seafloor influence.
To keep that going once they’d returned stateside, they rented a place in the British Virgin Islands on Cooper Island near Tortola. And then they decided to stay. Combining his fellowship money with help from Mimi’s super rich dad, they bought a tiny plot of land on the mostly empty Cooper Island and Bill, with help from locals, lived on a diet of beans and creamed corn while building a small, solar-powered cinder block home.
The view from their Cooper Island roof
They spent a year there, but Mimi was eventually wooed back to the Fed. They continued spending long stretches of the year there until they mournfully sold the place in the 2000s.
Mimi was famous for her storytelling ability, and I won’t do this justice, but one time when they returned to their home, they found it filled with bale after bale of cannabis. Traffickers had apparently considered their cinder block bunker and ideal storage facility. There were on great options: Go to the cops, and you’ve angered the traffickers. Don’t go to the cops, and you might spend your life in a BVI jail. So they went to the cops, who came and collected the weed – and, they later heard, sold most of it themselves. But when they left, they realized they had a bigger problem: the cops had locked the door with the key inside. And a storm that would become a major hurricane was on the way.
They eventually found a key that they had hidden outside years ago, went inside and, the adrenaline still flowing, Mimi fixed a drink to watch the storm come in. Bill came out to join her.
“Bill, did you unlock the door?”
No.
“Bill, do you have the key?”
No.
Now they were panicking, the rain was falling hard and the wind was picking up. There was quite literally nowhere to go. The island was unoccupied otherwise, and none of the other structure would – or did – survive the hurricane. Bill managed to smash a small window and crawl into the kitchen. He opened the door from the inside and they waited out the storm in the dark, the wind whipping through the broken window.
When it finally subsided, the island was a wreck. The locals who had mocked their home as “the bunker” had to admit the construction had its purpose.
What kills me, though, is that I’m near-certain I have some of those details wrong, despite having heard it many times (each time better than the last). What kills me is that I can’t pick up my phone and text or call Mimi and ask her to clarify a question. How did the cops lock you out? What did you say to Bill when you realized he might have just gotten you both killed?
For several years now, I’d been thinking about recording a several-hours long conversation with Mimi, so we’d have these family stories memorialized. Something held me back. It seemed too final, like an admission that I would need it someday. I regret we never did it. I’m lucky though to have Bill’s memoir, Hooked on Chess, published by New In Chess, a Dutch Chess publishing firm. I consulted it and realized I had mashed two unrelated stories together. The pot – 1,300 pounds of it – was found by Mimi when she took a solo trip to the island in 1973. Their neighbors had written to them, saying that some of the furniture had oddly been put outside the house.
The hurricane story, meanwhile, was 1997, I discovered when checking his memoir. I’ll just quote from his book so you can get a sense of the way chess pervaded everything. Imagining all this from Mimi’s perspective helps explain how animated she got telling the story, especially given Bill’s near fatal decision to toss the key on the bed here:
Our windows were mostly boarded up except for a few in the back of the house, furniture was brought in from the porch, loose items were put away, and our small boat was hauled up on the beach. Chris Tilling, the beach club manager, expressed concern about our being alone in the house during the storm, but we would feel secure behind our thick concrete walls. Our house has two separate wings [me here: “Wings” is a bit of a stretch. It was a two bedroom bunker with separate entrances to the two bedrooms] and we holed up in the section with the bathroom, kitchen and our bedroom
The sky darkened, and both the wind and rain intensified by the minute. We watched with mounting excitement from our open porch as ever more violent waves crested against the shore below, completely obscuring our jetty. When things got too wild we retreated into the house and barricaded our kitchen door, which faced the rear.
After some hours, the screaming wind quieted down a bit and we ventured out via a patio door. It seemed to be the relatively calm ‘eye of the storm’ but very quickly a strong gust of wind came up, knocking aside the piece of wood I had used for a prop and the door slammed shut behind us. We had locked ourselves out, with the second violent part of the hurricane approaching fast!
Of course a good chess player knows how to deal with unexpected moves and so we went to the north house wing to look for some sort of tool to pry open the patio door. Opening the other building with the key we had resourcefully left in the lock, I very carefully laid the key on a bed while we searched. Upon finding some implement that might work, we returned to the south wing where our efforts to gain entry did not succeed. And now the other door slammed shut and we were locked out of both wings! I suppose I have to admit to a slight inaccuracy, although it would be preferable to say that hurricane Georges was outplaying us!
With the howling wind and pelting rain again increasing, we made our way to a back window which was sheltered by the hill. We were able to remove the glass louvers and tear open the metal screen to gain entry into the house. In a somewhat unorthodox manner, we had castled out of danger!
When the hurricane finally moved on, what foliage remained on the hillsides had turned brown from the high-flying sea spray, and the smell of dead fish which had been hurled ashore pervaded the air.
Bill was lucky to survive the hurricane, but even luckier to survive Mimi, after not once but twice locking them out of their house with Georges bearing down.
In 1969, they finally left New York for Washington, when Mimi was offered a job doing econometrics at the Brookings Institution. She badly missed the buzz of New York, and deliberately kept her NYC dentist so they’d have excuses to go back. DC was a quiet, southern town then, with Richard Nixon, whom she despised, occupying the White House.
By this point, it was fairly clear to her and Bill that they weren’t going to have kids. Relatedly, Mimi was deep into the bottle. Booze was ubiquitous among the World War 2 generation, a mass self-medication after the traumas of the Great Depression and the war, and she told me she’d often mix a gin martini at work and finish it on her drive home, where there were more to be made. She’d make dinner – it’s hard to describe how good a cook she was – and then pass out on the couch as Bill did the dishes. Later, when I was living with them in my early 20s, Bill and I would trade this responsibility off. One night Mimi quipped that whoever had the “cleanest thumbs” ought to do the job. It took me a moment to get the joke: She had apparently caught us doing a sloppy job and washing them with our thumbs and (hopefully) a little soap.
She continued to rise, and in 1972 won a staff job at the Council of Economic Advisers. She was conflicted about the work: it was not only intellectually satisfying and came with a plush office in the Old Executive Office Building, it had the potential to make people’s lives materially better. It also meant she was technically working for Nixon. As the Watergate scandal mushroomed, she started sleeping on the couch, so that she’d be able to hear the Washington Post get tossed by the paperboy against her apartment door every morning. She’d devour the latest Woodward and Bernstein scoop before breakfast.
She moved on to the Bureau of Economic Advisers, where she similarly helped answer the question of how to most accurately measure growth through GDP, or gross domestic product. The Nixon White House would relentlessly try to manipulate the data, though she wouldn’t have to deal with him for long, as he resigned in the summer of 1974. Mimi stayed at the BEA until her sort-of-retirement in 1999.
The connection to the BVI allowed Bill to start playing chess at a high level and Mimi to see even more of the world. Through a loophole, he joined the U.S. Virgin Island’s chess olympiad team in 1968 and was able to form a national team for the BVI in 1974, with Bill as “first board,” Mimi as manager, and the rest of the team made up largely of amateurs. Every two years, they’d travel to the chess olympics, where Bill would square off against the best players from other countries. It wasn’t hard to talk Mimi into, given the chance to travel to a new city each time, or return to one they’d loved before.
Chess also allowed them to go behind the iron curtain. I won’t tell too many stories, but here’s one more: In 1980, at a tournament in Havana, Bill helped a Soviet international master, Igor Ivanov defect. Ivanov’s flight home had a layover in Canada and Bill took his photo and sent it to the Canadian embassy, so they’d be prepared to allow him in. Ivanov then went to a Havana bar and boasted loudly about his plan. The next morning, he found that his return flight had been rerouted through Dakar, Senegal. He simply approached a travel agent and changed it back. The year the Olympiad was held in Malta, and Bill drew a Finnish grand master, Heikki Westerinen, in the first round, beating him. In the second round, he drew against a Tunisian international master. After that, because the BVI stunk, he played lesser opponents for a stretch, beating them handily. In the final round, he was in contention for the gold medal, and needed to beat Kenyan Saifudin Kanani, who was also in the running; either player could win the gold by winning that match as long as Philippine grandmaster Eugenio Torre lost. Torre lost and Bill won his match against the Kenyan. (Gary Kasparov, new to the scene, had not played top board for the Soviets.) Bill won the 1980 chess olympics, a victory memorialized by the BVI, which issued four stamps to celebrate, one showing the final position of his winning game.
Mimi and my mom on a bout off Cooper Island
Mimi loved the travel, loved the characters, and was an extremely talented bridge player, but never loved chess. Bill and his friends, she would say, believed they were doing something productive with the endless hours they spent playing the game — but in the end they were playing a game, she’d remind them. Nothing wrong with that, she’d note, but don’t get carried away with yourselves.
After Mimi’s mother died in 1967, her father had remarried – his secretary, as I was always told, decades younger than him. In his old age, his will was rewritten, and his three daughters were written out of it by the time he died in 1991. A family that had been extraordinarily wealthy for two and a half generations was now starting from scratch, except for one asset. He passed down a small cottage to all three daughters on the Sassafras River on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where I was growing up by the 1980s. I only ever knew the rundown cottage as my grandmother’s home, and I only learned much later in life that while we grew up in poverty, living on a combination of public benefits, child support, and my mother’s low-wage work at a nursing home, that we had actually descended from extraordinary wealth. I also only learned much later, from Mimi, that the cottage, with its gorgeous view of the river, technically belonged to all three sisters, but my grandmother had simply moved into it. You can imagine the tension that created, even as she told Mimi and their sister Jean they were welcome to visit and stay whenever they wanted. That’s not quite the same.
Still, she and Mimi did come often. My mother, my brother Greg and I would be there regularly, and as a kid I didn’t quite understand what all the ruckus was, but I now know they were partying hard. That lifestyle claimed her sister Sally, my grandmother, who died of lung cancer in 1994. That same year, Jean’s daughter Meagan was murdered by a stalker. Meagan was herself a gifted writer with a shining spirit. I was 16 at the time and held her in the kind of esteem that 16-year-old’s hold their super-cool older cousins. Her violent and senseless killing was a blow from which Jean never recovered and Mimi took with her to her dying days. I later inherited her word processor–-a machine I used in college that had a tiny screen and the mechanics of a typewriter. You’d press print on, say, a five-page paper and it would type it out in front of you. It also had her poetry and short stories saved; she was so good.
Meagan’s loss, I’ve sometimes thought, pulled Mimi and I closer, but not till much later. In the early 2000s, I was trying to figure out a way to get off the Eastern Shore. Much as I love it there, there really aren’t any jobs you can turn into a career. What also helped was Mimi getting sober. She started going to AA in the 1990s and was dry for the rest of her life. She also turned her life around physically, citing a photo taken of her at my high school graduation party. She was morbidly obese at the time and came to realize it gawking at that photo. She left it on her refrigerator for the rest of her life. Determined to lose weight, she went on an experimental diet (since banned, as it was too dangerous) and lost well over a hundred pounds.
Mimi at my high school graduation party in 1996 in Still Pond, Maryland. She always thanked me, saying this photo saved her life by waking her up. It’s still on her refrigerator, as a before and after, as of today, when I took this photo.
I hit on graduate school at the University of Maryland as the way off the Shore. College Park is just inside the Beltway, and I figured that if I could get there, I could somehow find a job doing something interesting in Washington. It was Mimi who made it possible. She had retired from Brookings by then, and was alternately gambling at casinos and spending long winters on Cooper Island. That meant she needed a house-sitter in Silver Spring, close enough to the school. But she also let me stay in a spare bedroom while they were still there, and we got to know each other as adults, an even greater gift.
On weekends, they would often go to Atlantic City, and took me with them a few times. A group of investors several years earlier had began paying Mimi, Bill, and a handful of other geniuses who formed a gambling team that would sack casinos. Back then, there were a handful of video poker machines that paid out a rate that made playing them advantageous for the player rather than the house, as long as the play was statistically perfect and the well of funds was bottomless. Because of the amount of money they played with, they were treated like royalty at Tump’s many casinos.
She once even had dinner with Trump himself, and when he ran for president, she told me about that evening, and said that it was clear he was drunk or on drugs, as he rambled incessantly and never made any sense. After he’d been running for president for a while, she corrected herself: apparently he wasn’t high after all. That’s just how he is.
After the BEA, she took her econometric and computer programming skills global. Saudi Arabia as well as several African and South American countries hired her to move their budgeting process from paper to software, giving the couple another chance to travel the world. In Saudi, she was required to wear a full black abaya with a hijab that covered her face. She let me wear it later, and while the fine cloth is translucent, I can testify that it is not easy to see through.
As I moved from graduate school into the professional world, we stayed close, having dinner at her place regularly. When I was fired from my first real job at the Marijuana Policy Project (a long story), she helped explain to me the dynamics of the professional world that had led to it. When, at 27, I decided to upend everything and try journalism instead, she was (rightly) nervous but supportive. She was the best collaborator I could ask for and I badly miss her voice on my shoulder, or in the Google Doc comments, straightening me out, saving me so often from myself. In 2010, Bill died of congestive heart failure. I got her call that he had died in the middle of the night, and biked toward Silver Spring until I could catch a cab. We sat with Bill.
Bill never got to meet our children. Iris was born in October 2010, followed by her sisters, Virginia and Sidney, in 2014, and then George in 2015. By then, Mimi had begun introducing me to people as her grandson and my kids as her great-grands. Each of them built a strong and unique bond with her. Over the past few years, she taught Sidney and Virginia how to use a braiding wheel, tutoring them in her apartment at the senior living facility she moved into in 2011, Maplewood. It’s hard to get my kids to leave the house for anything. Going to Mimi’s was the lone exception.
This summer, we visited France, and my mother-in-law gave each of the kids 50 bucks to spend on souvenirs. In a market in Aix-en-Provence, Sidney saw a blue glass ball with an abstract underwater scene inside. She had 20 euro left and spent all of it to buy the piece for Mimi. Unlike pretty much all the other stuff they bought, Sidney remembered it immediately when we got home, and insisted we go give it to her. It was one of the few times I saw Mimi cry. She set it down on her table, where it fit seamlessly with a collection of similar pieces. To return the favor, Mimi dug up an old, small set of stuffed monkeys. Both gifts were perfect.
Her mind stayed sharp until the very end and she was still able to text until the weekend before she died. “I think I am winding down,” she texted on November 12, a Sunday. “By coincidence David and Sara are coming out for lunch tomorrow. If you want to join us, you may. It’s lobster roll day.” I asked how she could tell she was winding down, as discussions of hospice had been ongoing, but some hope still remained, at least in my own mind, that she may rebound from her cascading series of bodily failures. “Extreme lack of strength,” she said. “I had to ask for help to get from one side of the bathroom to the other.”
Lunch was wonderful – the Maplewood lobster rolls always were – and she was in deceptively good shape. That weekend, on Saturday, she responded after I sent her Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times column on a fracture within the Democratic Party, noting that my forthcoming book was mentioned in it. “Wow! And not just a short mention. Wonderful!” she wrote back, unusually effusive. She loved the New York Times, and I’m deeply grateful to Michelle for writing a column that gave her a chance to see the book in the Times before it came out. Why that matters to me, I can’t explain.
I asked if she was feeling any better, and she responded, “They won’t let me too go The dining room for dinner.” She used voice-to-text, and her messages were never hard to decode, and she enjoyed making me decode them. This one was easy. “Oof,” I responded. “Too hard to get there?”
I was at one of Iris’s swim meets and sent her a video of Iris racing the 50 free. “Yes,” she tried to respond. “I am entering hospice tomorrow.” When I came out early the next week, she was in rough shape. I looked at her phone and saw that she had typed me that message, but had been unable to hit send on it.
Earlier, she had told me that she didn’t fear dying. When I asked why not, she said, why should I? It just meant nothingness. But as it drew closer, she said, she took that back. She wanted to live, she said, so she could see the kids keep growing up. She wanted to celebrate her 90th birthday. She had plans to ride with a friend to my first book reading, at Politics and Prose, on the Monday after Thanksgiving. But by that week of Thanksgiving, we were speaking in the past tense. “Did they like me?” she asked about Iris, Sidney, Virginia and George.
“They love you,” I told her, “and they also really like you.”
“Good,” she said. My wife Elizan got to spend some quality time with her, too, as did the kids, while she lay on what we now know was her deathbed. She had given my kids a giant stuffed doggy named Corky, and had joked at the time that she wanted them to bring him back to visit sometimes. They made sure we brought him out on what turned out to be her last day, and she snuggled with Corky. “Everyone else can go,” she joked.
Mimi and Corky
“I could get used to this mushy stuff,” she said at one point, and I wonder if that’s true. Cruelly, she lost her hearing aids, and no amount of searching by the staff or by us could dig them up, making communicating the final days harder. But I could still type on my phone and show her the words. I thanked her for being the loving grandmother I needed, and so much more. “I’ll see you on the other side,” she said at one point, perhaps the most spiritual thing she’d ever uttered to me.
Mimi Hook was 89 and 10 months. She leaves behind a nephew, David Quinn; a niece, Cindy Quinn; a grand-nephew, Greg; a grand-nephew-turned-grandson, Ryan; and her great grands, Iris, Sidney, Virginia, and George. We love you, Mimi, and we’ll see you on the other side.
I found 2 typos. A tribute to your grandmother Mimi. May her memory be a blessing.
Ryan, Thanks for sharing this wonderful tribute of your best friend. What a loss. I hope you will write more about her life. It sounds as if she has quite a story to tell. Hope to see you in TV when you visit your dad.