to be connected to the sport and interacted with its leading figures. He attended meetings of the Rules Committee with the likes of Walter Camp and John Heisman. In 1911, he proposed a "radical" change in the rules, allowing each team a single set of five downs within which to score. He also became a well-known game official. In 1921, he was the umpire for the Notre Dame – Army game played at West Point. Organizer and political activist In the fall of 1911, Cochems moved to New York and announced that he had abandoned football for politics. Over the next 20 years, Cochems engaged in a career as an "organizer, speaker and as political campaigner." He was director of the National Speakers Bureau in 1912 during the campaign of Theodore Roosevelt, and again in 1916 during the Charles Evans Hughes campaign. He also worked in the campaigns of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. During World War I, he served as civilian aide to the adjutant general at Long Island. He was a national organizer for the American Commission for Relief in Belgium. Cochems led an effort to end Prohibition as the president of the Association of American Rights—Repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. He also served on the staff of the Gibson Private Relief Association of New York. Later years After living in New York for approximately 20 years, Cochems returned to Madison in the early 1930s. In 1933, he was appointed as one of three assistants to the state's NRA director and was doing speaking engagements throughout the state. In 1940, he was employed "installing a system of educational recreation in state institutions." When the position of head football coach at St. Louis University opened up in 1940, Cochems put in his name, but the job went to Dukes Duford. Family and death Cochems married May Louise Mullen of Madison in August 1902. Their wedding trip ended at Fargo, where Cochems had been hired as athletic director. They were together until his death and had five children: daughter Elizabeth and sons John, Henry, Phillip and David, who was killed in action in Essen, Germany in the closing weeks of World War II. Cochems died after a long illness on April 9, 1953, in the same Madison hospital in which his 14th grandchild had been born a week earlier. Football legacy Father of the forward pass Recognition of Cochems' role