V 1 N. 25 John Cobley Creator of "Racing Past" R.I.P.

 George Brose,  John Cobley, and Geoff Williams

    Yesterday I received an email from John Cobley's partner, Linda, that John had passed away peacefully in his sleep on October 6.  

    

    When I visited with John last Spring, he told me his heart was giving out.  He didn't dwell on it or ask for sympathy, he merely stated the fact.  We had a pleasant lunch together near the town of Sydney, BC.  It was a lunch I would love to repeat today instead of writing this note to you.  There was never a wasted word or annoyance in our meetings.  It was always full of humor and sharing of stories of past events.  Little if anything on the future except perhaps the spectre of what awaits all of us around some unpredictable next corner.  It was a meeting I should have repeated more often.   

    I have known of John almost from the time I started writing this blog fourteen years ago.  I was living in Ohio at that time, and John was here on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.  We  began a wonderful correspondence and sharing of stories and connections to our mutually favorite subject of Track and Field.  

    John was an English professor at a college in BC.  He had a deep interest in other fields as well and which he often wrote about including Russian poetry and jazz.   By chance my family also moved to Vancouver Island in 2013 and John, and I finally linked up face to face one afternoon in a  record shop in Nanaimo where he had gone to look for some of his favorite jazz artists' works.  We had lunch together halfway between our residences and found that we enjoyed each other's company and stories and level of looking at life in general.  John had incredible presence and connection to our sport, and he could write as well if not better than anyone who was getting paid to do such work.  He connected me to others in the field who have since contributed to this blog over the years.   His Track and Field interests were almost exclusively on middle and distance running, and I learned that if I were doing research on any of those events I would first turn to Racing Past to see what John had written about it.  He introduced me to an incredible track fan Geoff Williams who also lived on the Island.  John and Geoff had both grown up in England where they developed their love of Athletics as the sport is known over there.  John remembered the sound of the Luftwaffe bombers flying over his home in Hastings on their way to bomb London during WWII.    In school he excelled in running and upon graduation moved to the US where he attended Brigham Young University and found himself a teammate of Lasse Viren who was also a student and runner at that school for a year.  Lasse was not yet a household name in those days.  John also went to some of the Scandinavian training camps for runners in the summer.  If you scour Racing Past you can learn about those days.   If you ever choose to write about this sport, Racing Past  is the place to begin your research and to gain inspiration and  insight into the meaning and development of Track and Field.  It is also the place to learn how to write in the English language.  

I leave you with a link to Racing Past now being maintained by Bob Phillips:  Racing Past    

and a link to Once Upon a Time in the Vest to an article in which I collaborated with John and several others,  Jerry McFadden, Phil Scott, and Jose Sant to tell a story:   About a Picture, A Mystery Solved

George Brose