Discussion: Carl (Coach) Moore

We celebrate the life and mourn the passing of our beloved brother, husband, father, grandfather, teacher and friend.

Carl Moore was born in Minneapolis on July 21, 1934. He attended Southwest High School in Minneapolis where he played Center for the Twin City champion football team, and won city honors in pole vaulting. His many talents earned him a scholarship to Yale, from which he graduated in 1956. He then earned a degree of Doctor of Jurisprudence from the University of Minnesota Law School. After practicing patent law for a short time, he entered the teaching profession, taking a position at Woodrow Wilson High School in Tacoma, Washington, where he found a career that he loved, teaching mathematics and coaching cross-country running. He stayed thirty years at Wilson, and never taught anywhere else.

Carl was an avid hiker, orienteer, trekker, skier and mountain climber. He was the organizer and leader of many trips and expeditions – in the Pacific Northwest, among the Colorado “Fourteener” peaks, to Alaska, India, Nepal, Peru and elsewhere. He rode the Trans-Siberian railway from Beijing, China, to Moscow. He visited the sacred Potala Palace in Tibet. He climbed the steps to Machu Picchu, the hidden Inca city, in Peru. His advice to novice hikers, skiers, climbers and trekkers was always sound and trustworthy. He was a natural leader.

In 1990, Carl married Linda Rimbach and the two of them stayed together for Carl’s remaining years. Linda shared Carl’s love for the mountains, the hiking trails and the ski slopes. She was with Carl at the very end. She brought to him her wonderful family of three daughters, Deidre Stroosma, Heidi Tollackson, and Amy Hodgson, their husbands and their eight children. Carl is also survived by two brothers, Stanley Moore of Chicago, and Dave Moore of Minneapolis.

We all lost a great friend to our sport of orienteering. He made a number of maps as some will recall. But to me, he was a best friend that made our sport special.
Carl and Linda shared a Beautiful home overlooking the Catalina mountains near Tucson Arizona.

I'm so sorry to hear this. Carl & Linda attended many RMOC events over the years and I enjoyed getting to know them both.

More photos --

At a Laramie training event in 2007:


At 2009 North American ROGAINE Championships (Mogollon Rim area near Heber, AZ):


At Anza Borrego in 2012 (with Ludwig):

Any trip to Colorado meant running into the Moore's at an event. Their zest for life always inspired us to do as many adventures as possible during our lifetime. Thanks to Brooke for including the pictures.

I remember Carl from when I first started orienteering in the Washington Interscholastic Orienteering League over three decades ago. Although he was the coach of a rival team, he seemed to be a supporter, friend, and mentor to all the youth he encountered. The size and success of his Wilson High School Orienteering Team are a testament to his infectious and inviting warmth and love of adventure. I'm sad that I won't see him at another meet, and I hope I can honor his spirit by paying his gifts forward to other young people. My sympathies are with his surviving family members.

I remember meeting Carl (and Linda) when I first started orienteering. Such great folks, always offering help to neophytes like me. The friendliest folks around. Plus, Carl made our club's first new map in years--Fishtrap Lake--setting us (EWOC) up for our first national meet. He will be greatly missed.

It was always a treat to run into Carl at an event. My sympathies to Linda. We will all miss him.

For me, Carl Moore will always be known as “Mr. Moore” because he was my high school math teacher and orienteering coach at Wilson High School. He was my math teacher for all 3 of my years in high school and although I was not good at math, I still loved going to class because Mr. Moore was so cool and interesting. He was one of the pioneers of the Washington State Interscholastic Orienteering League and started a club at Wilson. My interest to try orienteering came from my curiosity of Mr. Moore’s stories about his weekend adventures. He often came to school on Monday with scratches on his arm from the many blackberry bushes he had encountered during the weekend’s orienteering competition. I was fascinated by these stories and decided I wanted to give this a try! Although my orienteering skills are about as mediocre as my math skills, Mr. Moore instilled a lifelong love of the sport in me and helped to spark an interest and appreciation for outdoor pursuits. Mr. Moore was very supportive of the kids who joined the orienteering club, and would help to arrange transportation to get to events and set up training courses at Pt. Defiance park in Tacoma (which he mapped). He created an annual 3 hour score-O event at Pt. Defiance known as Ramb-O and also arranged for a group of us to drive across Washington State to attend the 1989 Centennial Games in Spokane. We loved listening to his stories about mountaineering, orienteering, skiing, etc. He was the ultimate mountain man, but with no ego, just a good story to tell and sound advice. Northwest “old timer” orienteers may recall a series of jokes (and a very limited edition T-shirt!) in the early 1990s which arose from Mr. Moore’s teasing of me and my fellow high school orienteering buddy Lisa. In his Nisqually orienteering club newsletters, Mr. Moore started to sketch a series of humorous “advertisements” for “Lisa and Ellen’s O-Boutique, “ which carried such products as high heeled orienteering shoes and perfume that let you “smell like a swamp all week long.” Mr. Moore had a great combination of intelligence, humor, being down to earth and someone who made the most of his life and left others feeling inspired to do the same. Through the years, when the topic of “who has been an inspirational person in your life?” comes up, Mr. Moore is, and will continue to be, one of the people that instantly comes to my mind. As a teacher, I hope I can honor Mr. Moore by finding ways to be inspirational to my own students and ensure that being active in nature is a top priority in my life. I send my deepest condolences to Linda and the rest of his family.

Thanks to everyone for sharing their stories.
Carl is my uncle. It's thanks to him that I orienteer, and thanks to orienteering that I was able to spend a lot of time with him and Linda over the years.
When I was a kid, Carl sent me encrypted letters. He'd send Mom the code, just in case. I loved math and he always encouraged me. I sent him a paper I wrote once: "Impressive. I 'read' the article and noted there were 56 footnotes. Be sure to send a copy to David Moore. He will pretend to understand it."
We both inexplicably loved Pride and Prejudice.
He gave me advice and sometimes I took it ("stay high!" when orienteering on slopes) and sometimes I didn't (don't get too involved administering orienteering).

From email in 2009 - I had asked about his orienteering coaching. My O "coaching" started at Wilson when I first began O myself, about 1985. Since high school orienteering in Washington happens in the winter, it fits perfectly between cross-country and track. No conflicts. We had sometimes up to 30 on our O "team", about half girls, and maybe about 1/3rd runners of some kind. The team staggered on for a few years after my retirement, but the school no longer has a team. But the high school league is still going strong, with other schools taking over the banner.
I did almost no coaching except to get them to the meets. I just basically threw them out into the woods and let them figure it out. I received no pay from the administration, but our reward was a banner which still hangs in the gym, showing our "league championships" years, (very few teams in our unofficial league at that time), right along with football, basketball, track, etc.




This is the youngest photo of him I could find quickly; he's on the left with his two brothers Stan (my dad, next to him) and Dave (between Hadley the English cousin and my mom)