It was the last halfcentury in which that could be said.

Until then, for the more than halfcentury (Galactic Standard) of his life, he had been utterly planet-bound.

But in the halfcentury leading up to that lapsed state of grace, the Company's top management went through a series of stops and starts, scrious internal wrangling and several boardroom convulsions.

And we are left without really knowing any more, and not in a position to do any more informed guesswork, about what brought on the flow of magic from the man's mind to the copy paper for a halfcentury.

As the 50th anniversary of that great storm arrives along with my halfcentury birthday, I look back to this sequence of memory for the start of my curious and paradoxical bonding to the hurricane of 1938.

Each ship was met at the docks by a halfcentury of the first cohort, the Batavian horse-guards, hand-picked for their unswerving loyalty to their emperor and, importantly, their well-tested ability to keep their counsel while blind drunk.

Even though he and Stephen spent most of a halfcentury cutting the youthful Dominion's important business deals, nearly went bankrupt together, and ultimately fathered Montreal's essential philanthropies, Smith wrote Stephen few letters, preferring to discuss important issues personally, even if it meant crossing the Atlantic to do so.