I am obviously not alone in remembering 43-man Squamish. Someone else at Powerline also remembers, and has put up his obit as a Powerline Pick. The name of so great a person must not go unmentioned. It was Tom Koch (pronounced coke) who infiltrated my mind now these fifty years ago, never to be forgotten.

And as a true confession, it was exactly what I thought had come to life the first time I saw an Australian rules football game (which has 36 men on the ground at any one time!). In fact, I still think it sometimes even after all these years.

No one who has brought such pleasure into other people’s lives should find their passing unremarked. A genius whose name I now learn for the first time at his death. But a long life and I hope a happy one. And I should also encourage you to read the obit in full since there was more to him than this, great as this one contribution was. This is what he said about his own career which sounds as haphazard as any I have every heard, but there is real truth in this for anyone who must live by writing something else after they have already written everything they already have written up to that time:

“People would say I must have had such a great life doing this,” Mr. Koch once recalled, “people who were engineers, doctors, insurance salesmen or whatever. But it was the kind of work where every morning I would wake up and think, ‘My God, I wonder if I can do it again today.’ There is no way you prepare to do it, or even know how you do it.”

Where does the next inspiration come from? Who knows, but for him, it never seemed to have stopped flowing. He was a true genius, an absolute genius.