in memorium…

the online root beer reviewing world is a pretty small place. i found that when i was contacted for my ‘Modern Marvels’ appearance a couple years ago, the producer and i both ran through the list of who else was out there. i have never physically met any one of these people in the meat space, but i feel almost like i know them in a way. i have traded emails if not sodas with almost all of them, especially the ones who have been around a few years.
just now i found out that we lost one last year. Luke Cole was killed in a car accident abroad in June of 2009. i always liked his site and found it very humorous that we both loved root beer and gigantic roadside characters. he always had root beers on his site that i had never heard of and will probably never have. his press releases of the best root beers of the year each year around 2002-2005 did make me a bit flustered, who was this guy to have a press release about root beer?! what qualifies him to decide this junk?! after 2006 or so he did not seem to update his site although i checked in every couple months or so to see, hoping he would have found more new sodas for me to then acquire somehow.
it is a shame that i really knew nothing of all of the great things he did outside of the root beer world. he was a lawyer, working for environmental justice, founder of the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, and he seemed like an amazing person.
nope, i never knew you Luke, but i shall miss you.