A 230 YEAR HISTORY

Turner & Cook Today

Though the Turner and Cook families sold their business in 1977 and no longer own the Whip Shop, each family has a descendant who continues to live in Southfield.

Courtney Turner

Courtney represents the 6th generation of the Turner family since Issac moved to Southfield in 1793 to found his tannery. Dudley Turner, his father, was the last president of Turner & Cook. Though he grew up in Southfield and attended local secondary schools, Courtney became a career officer in the US Army and never worked for the company.

“When I was a school kid, I often visited the Whip Shop to see my father. In those days I knew everyone who worked there really really well. They were like extended family,” Courtney recalled. “My father had this 1953 Plymouth station wagon with the back seats all folded down. I can remember he would load that car to the roof with whip cores and off we would go to Westfield Whip Company.” The horse and buggy days were long gone, but at that time, rawhide whips were still in big demand, because one form of them was used in the stockyards in Chicago. “Turner & Cook had an arrangement with Westfield where they would take our whip cores and use them to make rawhide whips for the stockyards.”

“Where the post office is now was the hammer production area, which was very, very successful,” Courtney said, explaining the importance of rawhide hammers to the economic health of the business from the 1940s onward. “The interesting thing about rawhide hammers is that they can pound on aluminum parts and leave no marks so they were used on aircraft and other industries that needed to shape metal by hand. Boeing and North American, for example, all the aviation industries, were big customers and would buy these products.”

When asked what impact he thought the company had on the local community, he said, “At its height, this would be maybe during the Korean War, Turner & Cook employed just short of a hundred people. Over the years, the company provided work for someone in nearly every family in Southfield and even many in Mill River.”

“When I turned 16 and got a driver’s license, I worked at a nearby farm during summers. After that, I went away to UMass and then after graduation, in 1966, I joined the army. Around that time, Donna and I were married. We still are.” In 1992, after a 26-year career in the U.S. Army, serving around the world (and receiving 2 Purple Hearts), Colonel Courtney Turner and Donna, returned to Southfield to live just up the road from the Whip Shop in the house he grew up in, built by his father Dudley S. Turner in 1936.

Janice (Cook) Stiles

Janice represents the 5th generation of the Cook family responsible for Turner & Cook. Daughter of Martha Cook and Bud Stiles, Janice is holding a photograph of her father Bud as he was inspecting whip cores at the Whip Shop.

Janice Cook Stiles in the Whip Shop public hallway

“I've been part of this place my entire life and I still am,” says Janice. “Growing up, I lived just down the street on the other side of the church in a house that my great-grandfather, Howard Cook, President of Turner & Cook, built in 1899. It was in our family for 110 years until we sold it to Robert Olson, the pastor of the Southfield Church, in 2008.”

“I spent my childhood running up the street to the Whip Shop because my dad worked there. I would come in and out of the building with him. I knew all the old timers that worked here. I would talk to all the ladies in the sorting room. And in those days, all the kids in town were allowed to use the factory’s duck pond in winter for skating.”

“When I got a little older, my mother started working here, and I would get off the bus after school and visit her in the mallet department where she worked. Then, at 16 I came to work here for a brief period with my dad, who was a foreman, as my boss. It was an interesting experience because I had spent my whole life going in and out of the place and thought I sort of knew the whole process, but to actually be hands-on and, you know, grinding down whips through machines and dealing with the noise and smell of the rawhide dust It wasn't the greatest environment here. It was very hot upstairs in the rooms where all the hides were kept for drying, and terribly smelly.”

“My great-grandfather Howard Cook went Into partnership with Julius Turner. Years later, one of the Turners married a Cook, so we're related by marriage. I called Dudley Turner ‘Uncle Dudley,’ but it's strictly by marriage. Cook is my mother's maiden name, so I'm a blood relative of the Cooks’. My mother always told me how it was that her father, her grandfather, and her great-grandfather were all part of the company that brought manufacturing and lots of jobs into our area.”