I’m sifting through some old emails to save the ones from Will that made me laugh.
It’s almost every last one of them.
His sense of humor kept our mood buoyant and his easy, infectious (okay, goofy!) laugh was downright inspirational.
Something he said pretty regularly:
“If we can’t have fun, who can? We’re a theme park, for goodness sake!”
Who could be grumpy around that sort of logic?
I’d email or call Will a dozen times a day just to share silliness. Sometimes it was a delicious pun, other times a bit of irony I knew he’d appreciate. We never made fun of others, we just delighted in the simple typos of life.
All week, I’ve instinctively grabbed my phone to call Will. One time was to chuckle about a sweet email sent to us. The email said we were all such good people, indeed we were all angles. I can just hear Will wanting to know if he could be an obtuse angle … of course, I would want to be an acute angle.
Here’s another example: A guest wrote in asking about something she’d heard in the park and found hard to believe. Was it true that children actually “shrink” during the day as they ride rides.
Sounded pretty far-fetched, but I sent it to Will just in case it was something I’d missed in physics class way-back-when.
His reply: I think it has something to do with foreshortening of length due to travel at relativistic (approaching light speed) speeds. The good news is that there’s also a time dilation effect. Kids who spend a day here traveling at near light speed actually age less than if they were sitting at home stationary on their couch. In all seriousness, I can’t imagine where this came from!
The good folks at Amusement Today sent us this photo of Will from a few years back. It’s one of the many times he was awarded a Golden Ticket for the Cleanest Park in the World.
It’s been a tough week for us all. Someone we loved dearly was taken from us much too soon. But as we’ve clung together in our grief, smiles and laughter have broken through as we remember this wonderful man and all he gave us.
Rest in peace, Will Koch.
