Loris Cook, surgical services manager at Columbia Memorial Hospital, looked off her father Gene Itzen’s charter boat the Dan B. at a more than 200-pound male, hypothermic and floating near the south Jetty outside Newport. The charter boat he had been in broke up on the rocks, leaving him and others in the icy water.

He was too far below the boat’s rails for the crew to reach, so Cook and her father made a snap decision, piercing the man’s shoulder with a gaff hook before everyone on the boat helped haul him in. They took him to a waiting ambulance on shore and went back out to go fishing.

“We had 12 other people who wanted their fish,” said Cook, remembering the quick turnaround.

She has made her way from managing fishing gear as one of the youngest and first female deckhands on a charter boat in the Columbia River Basin to managing five separate departments at Columbia Memorial Hospital, using her people skills and presence of mind all along the way.

“All of your experiences factor into future decisions,” Cook said. “I’ve never been one who’s afraid of making a decision.”

She started riding her dad’s charter boat around age 10, when he worked as a skipper for Tradewinds Deep Sea Fishing of Newport. Her mother Aileen and sister Linda tended to stay landward.

As a teenager, she managed the deck during trips, organizing the fishing equipment, helping sometimes first-time fishers and otherwise making sure customers were having a good time while her father navigated the boat out of Yaquina Bay.

She started out in 1965, by her recollection, making about 30 cents per trip, or about a nickel an hour. Itzen said she would bring in about $3.60 a day, often working three consecutive four-hour fishing trips. The two worked full time in the summer, before going back to school in the fall – Itzen as a teacher and Loris as a student.

“In 1972, I made 3 percent of the boat’s gross,” Cook said. “I was the highest-paid deckhand in the entire basin. I was the only female deckhand in Newport. It was a whole new era for women.”

She loved being on the boat with her father, doing something that others often take vacation time to participate in. She didn’t, however, like the accompanying responsibilities of a skipper license, such as dealing with mechanical breakdowns, which her father had always taken care of.

Cook took the tests to be a skipper multiple times, always failing by one question, she said, subconsciously not wanting to take the next step.

Instead, she attended Clatsop Community College and Linn-Benton Community College, from which she earned an associate’s degree in nursing in 1976. Soon after, she married Joe Cook, a skipper of Ilwaco, Wash., in Astoria during the Midsummer Scandinavian Festival.

“I graduated on Thursday; my sister graduated from high school Friday; and we got married on Saturday,” Joe Cook said. “We took Sunday off, and went back to work Monday. It was a busy week.”

“Once you get out on the ocean, you’re one big fleet,” Cook said about the bond among fishers that helped bring him and his wife together. They met in a charter office in 1974. Loris Cook would come fish on his boat after her father had gone back to teach for a time at Linn-Benton before moving on to CCC in the early 1970s. They became engaged at a charter boat party.

Cook said she originally wanted to be a neonatal nurse. Her grandfather, as a doctor, had delivered thousands of babies over his decades in practice in Grand Haven, Mich. She started at the small, rural Ocean Beach hospital in Ilwaco – a hospital that didn’t handle births.

“Ilwaco taught me a lot about what my belly said people’s condition was,” she said about following her instinct. “We made our own saline in Ilwaco. There are dozens of opportunities at a rural hospital.”

The experience prepared her for an eventual move to CMH in 1981. She started as a bedside nurse, eventually managed maternity services, became chairwoman of the safety committee and a patient safety officer and made it to supervisor of surgical services in 2006. In 2009, she became manager of surgical services.

She now manages five parts of CMH’s day-to-day operations  – same-day services, surgery, post-surgery recovery, anesthesia and the processing of equipment – while managing budgets, payrolls and other matters. Cook said she still makes it bedside, although not as much as she’d like.

While working at CMH, and while she and her husband raised their son Tony and daughter Sarah, she attended Oregon Health and Sciences University, earning her bachelor’s of science in nursing in 1998. Her family held five graduations at their house in one night – one for her from OHSU, her son from Clark College and her daughter, a family friend and an exchange student from Ilwaco High School.

Most recently, Cook earned a master’s of science in nursing leadership from Regis University in 2010, graduating summa cum laude.

She still goes on fishing trips with her family. Her son, who is an accountant, became a third-generation skipper after Itzen and Joe Cook, a fact Loris Cook said her father enjoys bringing up.

“I have a supportive husband,” Cook said about how she’s managed to do so much. “We’ve both been able to live our lives while pursuing our passions. You can’t be successful without people around you.”

Edward Stratton