Having been acquainted with J. Lawrence Cook, I am curious about his
marriage status.  I thought I saw someone mention that he was not
married, however, to the best of my knowledge he was married.

Sometimes in our conversations he would mention a name which I was led
to believe was that of his wife.  He did live in the New York City area
when I knew him, I believe in the Bronx, to be more precise.

By the way, his first name was Jean, but because it was spelled (as he
told me) "like a girl's name," he almost always used Larry, or more
informally J.L.  He permitted me to call him Jean from the first and
that is what I always called him face to face.

Re: Drinking;  Well, yes, he certainly enjoyed having a few drinks,
and, having shared an evening or two with him and visiting some
watering holes, I've never seen him refuse a drink;  while on the other
hand, I never saw him in what I would call a drunk condition.  He could
drink and he could control it without any problem that I ever
witnessed.

The last time we got together was in the summer of 1975, not long
before he passed away, and I was in the process of making a new indexer
for his perforator so he could punch Wurlitzer rolls.  Alas, he was
gone before I could complete that project.

I do still have a couple of "A" rolls that he gave me some twenty-five
or thirty years ago and they are not of the standard that he was
capable of years before.

While we were friends, we were not really close as friends go, and I
felt a personal loss at his passing.

He was, for many years, the main source of music for player pianos in
this country, and without him the QRS piano roll company might not have
survived through the thirties, forties, and fifties when the rest of
the roll companies went belly-up.

Hal Davis