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Cove history column
Former Deep Cove resident Gordon Hilker’s dramatic turn with Theatre Under the Stars in the 1940s.
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Dinghies of Deep Cove
This month we launch a new feature that puts unique neighbourhood boats in the spotlight. April 2017
9900 Circulation East of the Seymour River
Red Robinson recalls career, life in Deep Cove by BEN BENGTSON This is Red Robinson’s town. Or, at the very least, it’s his day. The legendary MC, disc jockey and radio host celebrated his 80th birthday in late March. In order to honour Robinson, the city’s venerable music promoter who is often cited as the first person in Canada to regularly play rock ’n’ roll on the radio, the City of Vancouver declared March 30 this year to be Red Robinson Day. He sounds incredulous about having a day named after himself at first – but then he relents. “It makes me feel like this is my city. Sometimes I don’t feel like it’s my city anymore. It changed so much, you know,” he says. But some things don’t change that much. Robinson, for example, still fondly remembers his almost three decades living and raising a family on the North Shore. And for about 15 of those years, Robinson says, he and his wife, Carole, made Deep Cove their home. “I miss the outdoors,” he says when asked what he misses most about the old neighbourhood. “I used to take my mountain bike all in behind there in Mount Seymour… you know there’s trails there. I used to love that, I used to love nature, I loved the trees and all of that. You feel more akin to real life.” Robinson warmly remembers his time in Deep Cove and the North Shore, much like how he warmly remembers many things from the past 80 years, including his storied career as one of early rock music’s enthusiastic young personalities and advocates. While still in high school in 1954, a young Red Robinson was given the chance to start spinning R&B and rock ’n’ roll hits on Vancouver’s CJOR radio station. Robinson remembers how nervous he was at first. “That was one of the sweatiest days I ever had. I went out on the air with no prep and just winged it,” he says. It worked out for him. Robinson
was a natural. His gifts as a radio personality were only matched by his exceptional ear that was able to cut right to the heart of the music his peers were craving – even if they didn’t know they were craving it until they actually experienced Elvis or Buddy Holly blasting over the airwaves. Prior to those early DJ gigs, he remembers school dances in Vancouver where the music playing was always the music the supervising adults wanted to listen to. Robinson and his friends, however, were enamoured with the new sounds of early rock music and R&B pumping out of jukeboxes in local diners and restaurants. “That’s what we wanted. So I thought, hey, if I ever get the chance – because I had a dream of being a disc jockey – I said, ‘I’m going to play R&B. This is what we want.’ And I did,” he says. “And that’s what changed the whole thing in this market.” Chatting with Robinson is like getting the real scoop when it comes to rock ’n’ roll’s who’s who. He seems to have encountered them all along the way. Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison – and he’s also one of only two people to ever MC shows for both The Beatles and Elvis Presley in North America. A lot of people recently have been asking Robinson about Chuck Berry since the American guitarist and singer’s passing at the age of 90 a few weeks ago. “I MCed his first show in Vancouver in 1956,” he says matter-of-factly of meeting the man widely credited with inventing rock music. “I got to talk to Chuck backstage and it was an interesting interview because he went on about the fact that he had been a hairdresser. People didn’t know that. I said ‘Well, what if rock ‘n’ roll doesn’t work out?’ And he said ‘I’ll go back to hairdressing.’” Robinson encountered Berry and many other famous acts multiple times throughout his career. But a man as congenial and engaged as Robinson still finds time to promote,
Former Cove resident Red Robinson was spinning the hits on Vancouver’s CJOR while still in high school in 1954. PHOTO SUPPLIED
province promoting a brand of hearing aids and services, which makes sense given his lifetime in the high-decibel
appreciate and be part of anything he has a passion for me, music or otherwise. He says, for example, that these days he gets to travel around the
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