Sheila Gamble Cook was born on September 10, 1919 in Boston, MA. She was the second of five children born to Elisabeth Chafee Gamble and Dr. James Lawder Gamble and spent her childhood growing up in New England. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College and in 1945 married Dr. Charles Davenport Cook, with the couple soon settling in Cambridge, MA. They had four children together in the family home on Coolidge Hill. Sheila continued her studies at Harvard Universitys Department of Urban Planning and Design and took on an active role in Cambridges City Planning and Zoning Commission, including helping to write the Cambridge Zoning Code in the 1960s. The couple moved to New Haven in 1965 where Sheila received a Masters Degree of Social Work from Southern Connecticut School of Social Work. They divorced in 1976 and Sheila settled back in Cambridge where she focused her time on social work, writing and local community activism. In 1979, she founded The Women's Job Counseling Center which offered career counseling, seminars, support groups, and job opportunity resources to women seeking to enter the job market. While spending her middle and elder years in Cambridge, Sheila remained incredibly engaged in local politics, zoning, historic preservation and civic causes. She voraciously took the pen authoring numerous books including Dear Miss Hyde and The Great Swamp of Arlington, Belmont, and Cambridge. Additionally, she was a passionate supporter of Womens Rights and the Democratic Party | if there was ever a time for such ardent engagement, no doubt she would have been at the fore. Sheila was also an avid gardener and loved to spend summers surrounded by her family in her second home in Sorrento, ME. Sheila moved to Providence, RI in 2015 to be closer to family and passed away peacefully at home on January 22nd, 2017, at the age of 97. She is survived by her four children (Andrew, of Brunswick, ME, Peter, of Greenwich, CT, Heidi of Bellevue, WA and Charles of Norwalk, CT), their spouses, nine grandchildren, 12 great grandchildren and loving caregivers. A memorial service is planned for her in the spring in Cambridge, MA and one this summer in Sorrento, Maine. Donations can be made in her name to Planned Parenthood and the Democratic Party.