[Cowperson]

I was first introduced to Pete Lougheed in the mid-1970's while dripping wet on the deck of the swimming pool in my small town, only a teenager and competing in some sort of local, minor swimming competition.

Four or five years later, in the late 1970's, I was working as a photojournalist for a small weekly paper and went with a colleague to a press conference at the Capri in Red Deer, sitting myself down just in front of the microphones.

Lougheed walks in, gets near the podium, looks down, sees me, reaches down to shake my hand, looks me in the eye and says: "Hi Rick, how have you been . . . . ."

WTF?

It was early, so I asked him how on earth, with all the people he must meet every day and years intervening plus the completely different circumstances, he could have possibly remembered me. While the passage of multiple decades has dulled my memory as to his complete answer, he did tell me had a system whereby he tried to remember faces and names . . . . and later, from his other colleagues, I learned it was something that made him a brilliant and popular politician, the ability to personalize even a fleeting meeting and bring it back later.

People loved him for that.

And just to show it was no fluke, he did it again with myself a few years after that as well.

He was a great leader for Alberta.

Cowperson