SIX IS ENOUGH FOR COOK

JEFFERSON CITY -- Whatever Bekki Cook decides to do after her term as Missouri's secretary of state expires next January, one thing is certain: She will be doing it from Cape Girardeau.

"For sure I'm coming back to Cape. The whole reason I'm not running again is because my family has been divided, and I have been unable to convince my husband that he should move to Jefferson City," Cook said, laughing.

"The reality is we love our life in Cape and always have. We'll be happy to be back."

By the time her tenure is complete, Cook will have spent just over six years in office. For the most of the first year, she worked in the state capital during the week and spent weekends back home with her family. Her two children, Hunter, now 18, and Morgan, 17, moved to Jefferson City in September 1995. Since then the roles have switched with Cook's husband, John, a Cape Girardeau attorney, commuting to Central Missouri each weekend.

While she enjoys her work and has received strong family support, Cook said six years of being apart will have been enough.

"John and I never intended to live apart," Cook said. "We got married for a reason, and that was to live together."

Cook, a Jackson native, was sworn in as Missouri's 36th secretary of state Dec. 16, 1994. She was appointed to the post by fellow Democrat Gov. Mel Carnahan to replace Judi Moriarty, who had been removed from office.

Carnahan's selection of Cook surprised political observers, who were expecting a better known, politically experienced replacement. A non-practicing attorney who served on the State Board of Education but had never held any elected office, Cook registered nowhere on the state's political radar.

No one was as surprised about the appointment as Cook.

"I got this phone call out of the blue from the governor the day after Judi Moriarty was ousted in which he suggested I consider looking into this position," Cook said. "Obviously I was floored, but interested, so we discussed it."

She drove to the capital that night to discuss the matter further. Three days later, she was secretary of state.

Her immediate task was to address the mess created by her predecessor's ouster, which came after Moriarty was convicted on a misdemeanor charge for backdating campaign filing paperwork for her son, a candidate for state representative. The secretary of state is Missouri's chief election official.

"The first thing that I worked on was trying to restore the public's confidence in the functioning of this office and be sure people could trust us to operate with integrity here," Cook said.

That meant reviewing the leadership of the office and convincing quite a few Moriarty appointees "that they probably ought to move along," Cook said. "I had to do quite a bit of housecleaning."

As if replacing a disgraced official and reorganizing the office wasn't difficult enough, Cook was about to become unintentionally embroiled in a bitter political dispute in the General Assembly.

On Jan. 4, 1995, just three weeks into her tenure, Cook had the duty of presiding over the House of Representatives as it elected a temporary speaker, usually the senior member of the majority party. The temporary speaker would then preside over the election for the House's top job.

"I was supposed to be very much perfunctory," Cook said.

However, a group of Democratic representatives joined the minority Republicans to support Rep. Mark Richardson, R-Poplar Bluff, for speaker. The move was a challenge to long-time Speaker Rep. Bob Griffin, D-Cameron, whose once considerable political power was in decline.

"I thought I was just there to handle the election of the temporary speaker, which I was," Cook said. "Unfortunately, they moved the whole argument about who should be speaker up to the election of the temporary speaker, and they did not want just the election to be just perfunctory."

What was supposed to take only minutes dragged on to the next day. Cook was widely criticized by Republicans for "stealing" the speaker's post for Griffin by keeping the voting board open as the two sides negotiated. Most of the dissident Democrats returned to the fold and Griffin eventually prevailed.

Cook admits to being blindsided by the situation, which she called "a surprise attack," but says criticism of her actions was unjustified.

"My view of this is it was one of those things that was blown out of proportion for political advantage," Cook said.

Republican John Hancock made the incident an issue when he challenged Cook for the post in 1996. Cook won the election by nearly 70,000 votes. The victory made her the first person from Cape Girardeau County to win a statewide election in 108 years. The last was Edward T. Noland, who was elected state treasurer in 1888.

Fortunately for Cook, her tenure has been controversy-free since those early weeks in office. After getting the staffing situation resolved, she was able to focus on the duties of her post.

"If there is anything that will be a hallmark of my administration, aside from restoring the integrity of the office, it would be the development of the technology in this information-intensive office and bringing it dramatically forward to catch up with the way people do business in our state and country," Cook said.

Technological gains include compilation of a number of different databases for easy access to information, posting the state manual, or Blue Book, on the Internet and developing a centralized voter registration system.

"If there was any one technology project that was the most critical to accomplish and that was the most important to the operation of elections in this state, that was it," Cook said.

The database lists 3.6 million registered voters and allows for cross referencing to eliminate duplicates, thereby cutting down on voter fraud. Cook said tens of thousands of duplicate registrations have been trimmed from the voter rolls.

Other achievements she points to include stepping up enforcement of securities laws, integrating the State Library into the Secretary of State's Office and cutting down fraud and streamlining the initiative petition process.

Cook's last year in office promises to be a busy one. The year will 2000 be the biggest election year in Missouri history with four statewide election dates, including the Missouri's first permanent presidential primary in March. Also, for the first time a secretary of state will preside over census efforts in Missouri.

Although Cook, 49, said she would "never say never," she doubts she would accept any full-time, appointed state post if asked by a future governor. If she wanted to stay in Jefferson City, she would be seeking reelection, she noted.

The desire to return to Cape Girardeau is also the reason she has rejected calls from fellow Democrats to run for Congress from Missouri's 8th District.

"The same problem would exist, only worse, trying to commute from Washington, D.C. to Cape," Cook said. "Cape is our home, and it's going to be our home. I'm not looking for jobs that will make me live someplace else."

For now she is focusing on her current duties. The future, she said, will sort itself out.

"I now know so many great people all over the state and know so much more about the needs of our state that, if I choose, I can do lots of things," Cook said. "Even from Cape Girardeau."