Red Around Town, August 2013

I was saddened to hear that Eydie Gorme had died. She was in her 80’s. For 55 years she was married to singer Steve Lawrence. The two had hits together over the years including This Could Be The Start of Something Big, penned by the man who discovered the pair, Steve Allen. Eydie had many solo hits including Blame It On The Bossa Nova which went to the top of the charts in the Sixties. Steve had many solo hits on the Billboard charts: Footsteps, Pretty Blue Eyes, Go Away Little Girl, and many more. The couple were show business legends, having appeared on TV over the decades and in clubs in New York and Las Vegas. They were no strangers to Vancouver, playing the Queen Elizabeth Theatre a few years back. The opening act was Dick Van Dyke’s brother Jerry, who brought the audience to their knees. Thanks, Eydie, for entertaining us. You will be missed… Big changes coming to the Boulevard Casino in Coquitlam. It is being renamed Hard Rock Casino and should be fully up and running in the winter months. The restaurant next door has also undergone a change and rumor has it that it is to be renamed Fish and Fowl. I announced the name change from the stage of the Red Robinson Show Theatre… Farewell to some people dear to me. First, my friend Jan Nablo, with whom I worked with in various creative capacities over the years.

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Jan single-handedly created and wrote Trivia Challenge, a game show I hosted on CBC-TV in the late Seventies. Three unemployed journalists on the Montreal version of the show went on to be inspired by  the show and created Trivial Pursuit. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we were inches away from millions. They had to call it Pursuit because Jan and I copyrighted the name as applied to a board game. In the end we brought out our original version but it did not sell as well because by that time there were a multitude of trivia games on the market. Jan also produced many years of Timmy’s Christmas Telethon on CBC-TV, a show that I hosted for 23 years helping to raise a hundred million dollars for children with disabilities. In addition, Jan contributed many scripts for The Beachcombers series. Always the itinerant creative brain. The last project I worked on with Jan was two years worth of Entertainment Flashback, a radio series heard across Canada on over 300 stations, sponsored coast-to-coast by McDonalds. We shared some great experiences and I will never forget him… Farewell also to my Uncle Charlie. “Chuck” Robinson passed away at the age of 84. He was one of the pioneers of hot rod racing in B.C. and a driving force for the sport. He loved cars and was still talking about his automotive adventures up to his last days. Chuck taught me to drive my first car – the 1957 Ford Fairlane 500 shown below. The flag is down and the race is over but you held your own always…

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