Article content material
Bob Stall was the most well-liked columnist in The Province within the Nineteen Nineties.
Article content material
He was a gifted author who might write about something, and did, whether or not it was underworld murders or a retired trainer who wasn’t keen on his syntax however nonetheless wished him to do a column about cats.
Article content material
Why? As a result of they reminded her of tennis participant Daniel Nestor.
Sadly, his profession was reduce quick when he had a coronary heart assault in 1999. Stall wound up retiring at 56, however lived one other 23 years earlier than dying of a coronary heart assault on March 14. He was 79.
Robert Zev Stall was born in Montreal in 1943, and was one thing of a boy surprise as a journalist, getting his first byline within the Montreal Star in 1963.
He would rise to the Star’s Ottawa bureau earlier than leaping over to Weekend Journal within the early Nineteen Seventies. It was of the good gigs in Canadian journalism, writing options all around the nation.
Article content material
He adopted the Rolling Stones on their 1972 Canadian tour in Toronto and Montreal. He went to the Rockies to jot down concerning the railway staff who stored the CPR mainline up and operating. He bought up at 5 a.m. to profile the cleansing girls of Parliament in Ottawa.
At one level, he was the managing editor of Weekend journal, which was stuffed into Saturday newspapers throughout the nation. It had a circulation of two million.
However Weekend faltered within the late Nineteen Seventies, so he jumped to the Montreal Gazette, then got here west to work at The Province.
He began off because the editorial web page editor and rose to assistant managing editor. However he wished to return to writing and, on Sept. 16, 1990, grew to become a columnist.
Not like many columnists, he favored speaking to folks, which grew to become the fodder for his tales.
Article content material
“He was not a type of cold-hearted columnists,” mentioned a former colleague at The Province and Weekend, Wil Wigle. “He talked to everyone.”
In retirement, he put up lots of his outdated tales on his web site, stallstories.org.
A few of them have been first individual, like a column concerning the final time he drove drunk.
Others have been profiles of characters like “Alice and Enid, the legendary Eden twins of Watch Lake, B.C.,” who have been “indisputably the hardest, cussedest, most similar sisters who ever strode, rode and hoed the Cariboo.”
He gained 4 Marjorie Nicholls Award as B.C.’s high newspaper columnist, however misplaced the 2 instances he obtained a Nationwide Newspaper Award nomination. This led him to label himself a “repeat loser.”
His hottest columns could have been a collection in 1998, when he wrote an open letter to Vancouver Canucks proprietor John McCaw, imploring him to not commerce Pavel Bure. Lots of of readers despatched in letters.
Stall was by no means a sports activities author, however possibly ought to have been.
“Strikes? Watch (Bure) in heavy site visitors,” Stall wrote in an April 11, 1993 column.
“He bounces the puck off every of his skates, again to his stick and thru his personal legs earlier than flipping across the final dizzy defenceman and over a lifeless goaltender. The stupefied faces in the group are eerily just like those round Michael Jordan when he’s making mid-air strikes towards one other form of web.”
Stall is survived by his longtime accomplice Jacqui Bishop and 4 kids, Joshua, Shaughnessy, Cassidy and Riley.
Originally posted 2023-03-18 00:54:12.