Jack Poole speaks on his prostate cancer during a press conference in Vancouver July 12, 2005.JOHN LEHMANN
Like the pull of an invisible whirlwind, the proud forest of Vancouver skyscrapers attracted a posse of unorthodox business tycoons whose fiscal fantasies had a habit of coming true. The greatest and yet most modest of them was John W. Poole, the co-founder and moving spirit of next year's Olympic Games, who died Friday at 76 after an epic battle with pancreatic cancer.
Unlike most of his contemporaries who tended to regard themselves as sun gods cavorting on the playing fields of the Lord, Mr. Poole was never smug or satisfied with his several skyline-altering achievements. He rightly described himself as "an unpublic person" and, in his pre-Olympic days, seldom appeared in the press. He was ill at ease with journalists, especially when being interviewed in his 18th-floor chairman's office at Daon Development Corp. which was large enough to hold a platoon of foot soldiers, complete with camp followers. On one such occasion, his nervous answers to my nervous questions about his next megaproject left me with the impression that he was as apprehensive as a wrestler sweating in the ring, convinced his championship rounds were yet to come. As it turned out, this was a fairly accurate reading of his withdrawn personality, since Mr. Poole had indeed spent part of his youth as a professional wrestler.
A photogenic six-footer, the youthful Poole, who grew up in Morlach, Sask., graduated in civil engineering from the University of Saskatchewan, where he married his high-school sweetheart, Darlene, when he was 17. He jobbed around Alberta for a while though his lucky gusher was not an oil well, but his meeting with a financially brilliant misanthrope named Graham Dawson. A perpetually angry visitor to our discontented Earth, Mr. Dawson never learned to spend his money, and vainly tried to impose Upper Canadian Puritanism on Vancouver's Lower Granville Hedonism.
When Mr. Poole and Mr. Dawson became co-founders in Daon, their two-bit construction company was struggling on the down side of breaking even. To give the upstart firm what then passed for gravitas, the partners hired former Lions quarterback Joe Kapp as their in-house celebrity.
In 1976, during a brief holiday to California, Mr. Poole counted up the houses-for-sale want ads in the Los Angeles Times and was stunned to discover there were only 1,400 vacancies in a city of 3.6 million. "We thought, Gee, can this really be as good as it looks - well, it wasn't, it was a hell of a lot better," he told me.
Within the next 20 months, Mr. Poole had amassed California's largest land bank and expanded into half a dozen American metropolitan areas. By 1980, with net income running an incredible $1-million a week, Daon had become the second-largest publicly owned real-estate firm in North America. His personal holdings of Daon shares were worth $100-million, which bloomed forth an annual dividend of more than $1-million.
Unlike his Howe Street peers, who expended their extra energy on exotic hobbies such as squiring young chicks in aubergine bikinis who, they seriously claimed, were a useful hedge against inflation, Mr. Poole stuck to raising Hereford and Simmental cattle on his 160-acre ranch near Surrey. After years of hesitating, he did purchase an expensive motor yacht but his logbook seldom entered more than 10 outings a year.
Those who knew him best realized that he lived on the tongue of the wind, a man driven more by his dreams for others than for himself. One of the 21st century's hallmarks is that no one is indispensable - that, like it or not, most of us have become interchangeable.
Not Jack Poole.
Every country is a mystery composed of the lives of strangers who meet at great occasions such as the Olympics, and feel good about their country and better about themselves. Such spectacles inevitably have more than one founding father. But suffice it to say that those who are in the know, quite simply insist, "There would have been no Olympics without Jack." God bless.
Peter C. Newman lived and sailed on Canada's West Coast for 20 years. His latest book is Izzy , being published this week in paperback.