In the early 60s, Robinson was a janitor at a folk club in Calgary. There he met Barry McKinnon, an aspiring jazz musician, now a noted poet. After McKinnon told him that he practiced bebop drumming and writing, Robinson demanded to see his words. He later told McKinnon to lose the drums because he would make a much better writer. McKinnon recalls, “…we’d meet almost daily – he giving me advice, directions, praise, and sometimes shit for going off the poem’s track. Without his attention, who knows? … At that certain fork in the road, someone in your life says, ‘You gotta take it!’ Brad was that man!”
Robinson worked at the Toronto Metro Reference Library in 1964, where he met Alan Suddon, head of the Fine Arts Department and Canada’s foremost collector of vintage women's clothing and sheet music. Suddon and his wife Mary “adopted” Robinson, and gave him a sense of place in a loving family. Suddon had an impressive artistic intellect and outrageous wit, which he generously shared with Robinson until his own death in 2001. In a letter to a friend, Robinson wrote, “In my sentimental moments, I wish there were a Heaven, or some such place, so I could find Alan… He was simply the most wonderful man I have ever met, and he was my surrogate father. I cannot imagine what my life would have been like if we had not met.”
In the mid-60’s, Robinson married Lally Cadeau, who later became a well-known actress; the marriage ended in 1969.
By his late 20s, Robinson was in Vancouver, where he worked as a columnist for The Georgia Straight. Writing under the pen name, Engledink Birdhumper, he developed a satirical style of political and social criticism that would mark his prose for the rest of his career. During this time Robinson penned three works of short fiction and a variety of magazine articles. It was the most productive writing period of his life.
Comox ValleyIn 1973, Mr. Robinson moved to the Comox Valley. For the next decade he worked at local newspapers, on the B.C. Ferries, and learned a new trade. His newspaper career culminated with the publication of Robinson’s Fortnightly, a self-published newspaper. The Fortnightly gave Mr. Robinson an unfettered platform for pithy broadsides at the powers-that-were, but more importantly it gave him a vehicle to publish his novella, The Stiff in a Country Cadillac. The fourteen issue run was successful on both counts.
For a year in the mid-1970s he was a deckhand on the Sechelt Queen, a B.C. Ferry that ran from Little River to Powell River. Being a swab was the most enjoyable year of work he ever had, in large part because he found the men and women who worked aboard the ship to be “…fine, charming, and imaginative people.”
He later worked as a labourer on a house-building job, enjoying the experience immensely. He asked a contractor friend, Lou Klupsas, if he could work with him. Klupsas agreed and hired him on a number of projects, including a luxurious home in Whistler. Robinson considered the time with Klupsas as his carpentry apprenticeship and credited him for the carpentry skills that allowed him to make a good living for the next twenty years.
Robinson was not a sportsman in the typical sense. He was not athletic, and his personality did not lend itself to activities dependent on team spirit. He preferred Mozart to Mantle. But he did lace them up on occasion. Robinson played in the Kozmic Softball League in Vancouver in the early 1970s. George Bowering, Poet Laureate of Canada, reports that Robinson was his second baseman, and together they turned a mean double-play. Robinson also had a passion for tennis and his muse was Bill Tilden. This led to the initiation of an ad hoc tennis tournament in Comox called Wombledon that brought together “…eleven young men and a broken-down pederastic ex-tennis tyro newspaper writer.” The annual event ran for twenty years under his stewardship as “Papa Doc, aka the Bradector”. It was the highlight of Robinson’s social calendar.