by Walt Boyes
It is my unwelcome duty to tell you that we have lost another member of the 1632 family. This time, it was Head Geek Rick Boatright. Rick passed away on July 22 from pancreatic cancer. He was 66 years old. Rick was a polymath. He knew something about nearly everything and his ability to research little squirrelly facts was astonishing. He and I came up with the Aqualator at a con, and he wrote it into the series. He was the lead presenter, along with Kevin Evans and me, doing Weird Tech at Minicons. (The fact that we lost both Rick and Kevin within eight months, leaving me the Last Amigo, worries me.) He said he wasn’t really a writer, but he had a respectable body of work, and his latest novel (with Kerryn Offord) was published in August.
But above all, Rick was a teacher. He gave up teaching because he wasn’t politically correct enough for the Topeka Board of Education, but never stopped being a teacher. He taught everyone he met.
The world is much poorer without him in it.
