PHAS Remembers Evert Koster (1944 - 2025)

by friend and colleague, Chris Waltham.

Evert Koster died peacefully on Monday night (Jan 20th, 2025) at the care home (St. Vincent's, Langara) where he had lived for the last five years.

Evert was born in Amsterdam in 1944 and his family moved to Vancouver soon afterwards. He joined the UBC Physics Department as an undergraduate c.1962. When clearing out the fifth floor lab in the Hebb building a few years ago, I found a photograph of the Phys409 class of, I think, 1966; Evert was part of this small group of 6 or 8.

In the intervening time, Evert spent a couple of years at UVic, but in what capacity I don’t recall – this was the only time he was not at UBC. When I first came to the department he was David Williams’ postdoc and when David retired Evert took over the running of the Phys101 lab, a job he did for many years.

Around 2010 I began to realize that Evert had a profound knowledge of and interest in Chinese musical instruments, and was surprisingly well connected with the classical Chinese music community, both here and in China. We started working on acoustical measurements of his collection of instruments, and with cultural background provided by UBC ethnomusicologist Alan Thrasher, and my Masters student Yang Lan, we produced a nice handful of papers and conference presentations on this barely-touched subject.

Toward the end of the decade Evert’s dementia became unignorable, and we encouraged him to retire. The next I heard he was in VGH under the guardianship of the public trustee. A physicist to the end, Evert had been plotting a graph of how far he could walk each day, and realizing that the line was rapidly heading for the horizontal axis, he set off for VGH. He only just made it, collapsing on the stairs by the entrance.

VGH got him healthy enough to be transferred to long-term care at St. Vincent’s, Langara. Once the  COVID lockdown ended I was able to visit him and, for a while, have reasonable conversations. I last saw him just before Christmas; he recognized me, but I could not understand anything he was trying to say. He seemed quite happy, but then he always did.

Mild mannered and unflappably even tempered, I never heard Evert say anything remotely negative about any other person, and he was oblivious to any kind of social pressure. Anti-capitalist to his core (although he would never have used that term), if he bought clothing at all, it was from the Salvation Army. He rode an old Peugeot Racer that had been abandoned in Hennings basement, although he had kept and eye on it for 25 years before finally “stealing” it. Way to go.

For friends and colleagues of Evert, the memorial service will be on February 25th at 2:30 pm at St. Vincent's.