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Riley Park: Red Robinson skips down memory lane

Before he became a famous disc jockey and hung out with Elvis Presley, Red Robinson was just another East Side kid growing up in the Riley Park neighbourhood.

Before he became a famous disc jockey and hung out with Elvis Presley, Red Robinson was just another East Side kid growing up in the Riley Park neighbourhood.

Robinson was five years old when his family moved from Comox to a little house at 28th and Prince Edward. He lived there for about 13 years with his younger brother Bill and his parents, Alice and Gordon.

At 18, he earned enough money from his radio career to help his mother buy a house at King Edward Avenue and Inverness. He now lives downtown. This week, the Courier caught up with Robinson, now 76, for a short chat to reminisce about his days growing up in Riley Park, where he attended General Brock elementary school and spent some of his days... catching snakes and moths?

What do you remember about the old house?

It was drafty and there was a coal-burning stove in the living room. It was a rat-trap house that my dad and mom rented. You've got to remember this was during the war years and you were lucky to be able to find a place. But it was a clapboard house I was glad to get out of. I always related to Elvis that way. He was in a shotgun shack. Same thing.

Q: What was life like for you back then?

A: We didn't have anything, but nobody had anything. Not that we were starving or anything like that. It was just that there was no richness around. A treat for us was to walk over to the other side of Ontario Street at 25th and look at the contrast between the houses there and the houses in our neighbourhood. It was amazing and I always said to my brother, 'You know, one day we'll get out of here and I'm going to live over on this side of town.'

Q: What do you miss most about those days?

A: My friends. The memories are so indelible that there isn't a day that goes by that I don't think of an incident of something stupid that we did. I remember one time we dug a pit in Riley Park. There was an empty lot at 33rd and Prince Edward that had an unbelievable number of snakes - all kinds of them, black snakes, garter snakes. So my brother and I and about four other kids rounded them all up and dug this pit at the park and invited everybody the next day to come and have a look. Of course, they had slithered out by then. I mean, what do kids know?

Q: You also had a thing for moths?

A: My brother and I were little rascals. We'd get Mason canning jars and we used them to catch the moths off the lawn in the springtime. Then when we got to the Windsor movie theatre (at 25th and Main), we'd release them. On the screen, it looked like these huge bats were flying around. The lights would come on and the movie would come to a grinding halt with the manager yelling, 'You kids!'

Q: Four years ago, you helped get a school reunion together at Brock elementary, where another graduate named Jimmy Pattison, the successful businessman, also attended. How did that go?

A: I put it on, Jimmy came, it was an amazing day. It was very difficult to round up the people because you don't have yearbooks like you do in high school. So I put a committee together, they knew people and I knew people and that's how it worked. Jimmy flipped out when 640 people showed up.

Q: The Main Street corridor has changed quite a bit from your childhood - homes are incredibly expensive, the Windsor Theatre is gone but Brock school remains. Has change been good for the neighbourhood?

A: There was a real true sense of community back then and it's happening again. People are looking for that sense of community, that connection.

(This interview was edited and condensed).

mhowell@vancourier.com

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