Coach Howard Firby, born, September 18, 1924, in Birmingham, Alabama, of Canadian parents, passed away in Vancouver on March 30, 1991.

Firby coached Vancouver's Canadian Dolphins Club where he produced a long line of great swimmers, including Elaine "Mighty Mouse" Tanner, and is regarded as one of swimming's greatest innovators and stroke coaches. Like James 'Doc' Counsilman, Howard Firby, was a World War II pilot, and while Counsilman applied his knowledge of aerodynamics to the science of swimming, Firby applied it to the art of coaching.

As a full time commercial artist, Firby used his drawing expertise to revolutionize the art of coaching swimming . His unique drawings and ability to illustrate the strokes from a variety of angles clearly showed how crawl swimmers and backstrokers naturally roll the body on its long axis while butterfly and breaststroke swimmers rotate the body up and down on its short axis like airplanes taking off and landing. Howard Firby's book "Howard Firby on Swimming" (1975) published by Pelham, London, which he illustrated himself, became a classic and is a collector's item.