Former Kamloops newsman writes of life as a war correspondent

BOOK REVIEW By MEL ROTHENBURGER

TITLE: Kings, Killers and Kinks in the Cosmos (paperback)

AUTHOR: Robert Egby

PUBLISHER: Three Mile Point Publishing

Have you ever known someone for years and then discovered there’s a whole bunch of stuff about that person’s life you had no idea about?

Long-time Kamloops residents — especially those with any connection to local media — will remember Bob Egby as a somewhat overweight, friendly and first-rate journalist.

They may well remember his political reporting — for example, his interviews with politicians like Pierre Trudeau — and his Sunday morning Eggers For Breakfast show on CHNL, not to mention his work in public relations for the Weycan pulp mill.

He was, as well, my predecessor at this newspaper.

What they might not know (I didn’t) is that Robert “Bob” Egby was a seasoned war correspondent before he landed in Kamloops. This seemingly easy-going small-town newspaper editor and radio host turns out to be a battle-tested veteran of international intrigue and conflict.

Indeed, Egby has led a fascinating life, before and since his time here in the 1970s.

His career took him from his birth place in England to Cyprus, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon and, later, Canada and the U.S. He came to know army generals, presidents, assassins, dictators and royalty, and had his share of scrapes with death. On one occasion, he barely escaped a rampaging mob in Nicosia; on another, he found himself running for his life from a helicopter gunship in the Lebanese desert.

This is fascinating stuff in anyone’s book.

After growing up to the sound of German bombs dropping near his home, and almost dying from a childhood ailment, Egby got involved in film and TV, meeting many of the industry’s top animaters.

Alas, what might have been a promising career was interrupted at the age of 18 by a stint with the RAF.

One day, he was told he was being posted to the Suez Canal, and his war zone experience led him into journalism, first in radio and then as a newspaper photographer and correspondent.

Egby is one of those fellows who knew nothing about journalism but brazened his way into it and learned on the job.

“There were no journalism classes available so I took to studying news story structure,” Egby recalls, and “grasped the story-telling ability of journalism.”

He was in Nicosia in the mid-1950s when Cypriot guerrillas launched their war of independence that eventually led to partition. That conflict became Egby’s bread and butter as a correspondent for several years, and it was risky work. One day, Egby bought a bow tie in a clothing store. A few minutes after leaving the store, the man he’d bought the tie from was assassinated in the street.

The pictures he took of that incident — and the bowtie — provide the cover for Egby’s book Kings, Killers and Kinks in the Cosmos, and his acquaintance with the shop owner’s killer is but one of many stories inside its pages.

This is no thin volume of quaint recollections written only for the interest of grandchildren. This is a serious, well-researched and well-told autobiography. At almost 400 pages, there’s a lot of stuff packed into it but, even then, Egby admits he had to pick and choose what to include.

“One of the things I found in writing an autobiography is there were so many things I should have included, but then I would have had to create volumes one, two, three etc.,” he told me.

Besides the adventure, there are stories of awards won, failed marriages and lost loved ones, and musings on the cause of the wanderlust that took him to so many different parts of the world.

The book is not without its annoyances, of course. It could have used the hand of a good copy editor in places. He uses one particular device so many times that one rapidly comes to expect him to end every sub-chapter with the line, “little did I know” or “While I was pondering this, there was a kink in the Cosmos that took me in another direction.”

Somewhere in the last third of the book, after Egby has moved on from Kamloops to Vancouver (where he handled public communications for ICBC and then SkyTrain), it starts getting a little weird.

Indeed, the reader might be tempted at this point to write Egby off as a total whack job who reads minds, talks to dead people and takes advice from spirits including a little Chinese guy named Chang who died in 1893. (“Suddenly, I felt a presence. It was Chang, dressed as usual in old Chinese. He never felt the cold.”)

Dismissing Egby as some kind of loon ball and setting aside the book, however, would be a mistake. His views on life and death add a surprising, even jolting, dimension to his story. As that story progresses, one comes to realize how much influence his pre-occupation with fate and spirits had — and still do — on his remarkable life, which continues today in his home in upper New York state.

As I said, sometimes people surprise you with what you didn’t know about them.

Kings, Killers and Kinks in the Cosmos is available through Amazon.ca or the publisher at www.threemilepointpublishing.com, and will soon be available as an Ebook from Smashwords.com. Price about $15. This is Robert Egby’s fourth book and he has two more on the go.