At a Ketchikan Chamber of Commerce meeting in the early 1970s, Len Laurance said that eventually Ketchikan would host more than one million cruise ship passengers each season.
The proclamation, made at a time when less than 70,000 cruise passengers visited the First City, was met with guffaws by the audience.
But Laurance, who died at 88 on April 8, was right. In both 2018 and 2019, Ketchikan had more than one million cruise visitors and would likely have had more than 1.3 million in 2020 if not for the COVID 19 pandemic that shut down the entire Alaskan cruising industry.
In an interview in 2014, Laurance said his projections were simply based on a 10 percent increase every year.