It Takes a Village

Linda Cooke says it took Kate Fletcher, Manager of Cibola County, two months of encouragement before she applied for the Village of Milan Manager job. “I’d just lost my husband. There wasn’t a whole lot for me. I was [going to] retire, but Kate had faith in me. They shocked me by hiring me.” Cooke had already been working as the Assistant Manager/Interim Manager for Catron County for the last 20 years but still doubted the full extent of her abilities. Sometimes we need to see ourselves through someone else’s eyes to know we can do it. “Kate Fletcher was my mentor. She made me see I could do it.”

Cooke says that in the current configuration of the Village of Milan Manager’s Office there are no employees. “We have team members. When an issue arises, we talk it out. You have to have faith in the team and trust them. This gives us a wider range in which to investigate a situation.” The team approach is clearly working. Three years ago, the Village had a bad audit. The last audit was unmodified with no findings and lauded by the independent audit team. “I have the best Project Manager in the state and a great Finance Manager. When I first came here, I observed how things were done. I made it a team. We started with communication and respect for one another.”

“When I was growing up, I wanted to be an actress or a singer like most kids, but I’m happiest doing this job.” Cooke has spent most of her life in New Mexico but was born at a naval hospital in Portland, Oregon. She had been a sickly child, and by the age of five, her parents were advised by doctors to relocate her to a drier climate. They ended up living above the gas station and store her grandparents owned in the little mining town of Mogollon located in Catron County.

“My mother always said I was happiest when I had lots of work to do.” Cooke, the self-described wallflower, married at 19 after a two-month courtship. That marriage lasted 51 years until her husband died in 2020. “He wanted me to be an independent person. I broke through from being a wallflower to being someone who could survive without needing someone to take care of me.” Cooke helped her husband run a trucking company. “I took care of the books, booked the loads, even changed the oil in the trucks when a driver went home. I learned how to drive six different transmissions. We hauled cattle from central Texas to California.”

Upon reflecting about all that has come before her work with the Village, Cooke said, “I’ve ended up managing something in one way or another.” After trucking came her work with the government of Catron County where she was able to work in almost every departmentfrom finance and projects to payroll. “If nobody else wanted to do it, it wound up on my desk.” Cooke’s plan to retire in 2020 was derailed when Kate Fletcher told her to apply for the Village Manager job.

“I think about what is best not only for the Village but for the employees,” Cooke said regarding her approach to managing the Village. When it comes to her own life philosophy, Cooke directs me to a sign on her business cards and on her wall behind her desk that displays a quote from British author Vivian Greene: “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.”