When he retired from radio in December of 1984 he said 30 years was long enough and he never wanted to face a live microphone again. But he had worked for every major station in the market except CKNW and when they came around with an offer he was back in front of a live mike with three hours of Saturday night rock 'n' roll nostalgia, rekindling the cold old bones of poor Buddy Holly.
Now Robinson says he's done with the agency business, that after 21 years in advertising he never wants to face another live camera in another client's car lot. "Some days I feel like a white sidewall," he says.
The agency business has been Robinson's flip side, providing a cash flow that permitted him to never have to grow up, to be the kid disc jockey forever, working only for radio stations that let him ignore the captive program directors, to play Chubby Checker when the smart playlists clearly demanded Def Leppard, or whatever.
Robinson has tendered his resignation to Vrlak Robinson Hayhurst and says he has no plans, except to see if he can handle doing nothing.
We'll put just a grain or two of salt on that idea because the last time Robinson did nothing was in 1953, when he was in Grade 10. By Grade 11, he was earning $30 a week as an afternoon disc jockey on CJOR with a request program that locked up half the radios in Vancouver.
Twenty-one years ago, when he was program director at CFUN, he started a one-man ad agency called Trend. He got his first major account when a man came to discuss ad spots for a hamburger business he was starting. The man was George Tidball and the hamburger place was Canada's first McDonald's outlet.
When Robinson needed help to service his accounts, a CFUN secretary suggested her boyfriend, a marketing student at SFU. Robinson hired him, a young guy named Rich Simons. Robinson was at his printer, soliciting advice in photographing hamburgers, when the shop's artist came out of the back in an ink-spattered printer's apron and made some shrewd suggestions. That's how Robinson hired Frank Palmer.
In 1968, Jimmy Pattison bought CJOR and asked Robinson to program it. Robinson sold Trend to Palmer and Simons who renamed it Simons Palmer. Simons left to form Simons Advertising and the old firm became Palmer Jarvis. When Robinson left CJOR, he and Mike Dixon and Steve Vrlak formed an agency that, when Dixon left, operated as Vrlak Robinson for 13 years until merging with Hayhurst this year. And when Simons merged with Palmer Jarvis, the notion was irresistible that the agency business is a revolving wheel with very few spokes.
But the item isn't what Robinson has done, it's what he hasn't done. For all the radio stations he has worked for, he has never owned one. But four years ago he and two buddies nearly created the broadcast story of this second half-century. That was when Robinson, CFUN's Fred Latremouille and Tony Parsons of BCTV, with the financial support of Vancouver millionaire Joe Segal, put in a $5-million bid to buy CJOR from Pattison.
Parsons was ready to give up television to read radio news. Latremouille would have been the morning man, Robinson the program director. They would have scrapped the 'OR talk format for music and news and planned to hire Rick Honey from CKNW and Wayne Cox from CKVU and they hoped to lure Paul Ski away from CFUN as general manager.
They never negotiated directly with Pattison, but dealt through intermediaries, "bean-counters," Robinson calls them in retrospect.
Denny Boyd - Vancouver Sun March 29/88 - edited