The David Cobb I Wanted to Be

David Cobb, Jack Batten and Ron Base

The first phone call I ever made as I started writing for Toronto’s fledgling Sunday Sun was to David Cobb.

I remember being terribly nervous as I made the call to get a quote for a piece I was writing. This was…David Cobb… one of my writing heroes. As a teenager yearning to be a writer I had read him avidly in the entertainment section of the Toronto Telegram. If only I could write like David Cobb, I used to think. Now that would be an accomplishment.

My nervousness didn’t last long. David came on the line immediately, happy to talk to me in those trademark clipped English tones of his, softened by years in Canada but still quite evident. He was everything I had hoped he would be, welcoming, intelligent, insightful, all the qualities I would come to know so well—not the least of which was his sublime talent when it came to the smooth, beautiful prose he brought to his work.

When I heard of his death a month short of his 90th birthday, all these years later I found myself still wishing I could be David Cobb, wishing I could write anywhere close to the way he could write. Impossible of course. David was unique both as a writer and as a human being.

He flowered during what was probably the last great era of magazine and newspaper writing in Toronto. In his heyday at the Canadian magazine and at Maclean’s, he soared above just about everyone else. By then, I had gotten to know him and his delightful wife, Loral. Even so, I always felt a trifle in awe meeting up with him.

Not that he put on airs or demonstrated anything like the occasionally breath-taking arrogance of some of his contemporaries. At the same time, he exuded an intelligence that was as much a part of him as that perpetual half-smile, and slightly devilish gleam in his eye that suggested nothing should be taken too seriously.

I remember talking to him once when he was still single about going over to a girlfriend’s apartment and inspecting her bookshelf. “What put me off,” he said ruefully, “she was the only person I’ve ever met who had Harold Robbins in hard cover.”

A few of his longtime friends who knew David and loved him have lamented that the worst thing that ever happened to him was when he got rich.

Scott Abbott and Chris Haney, a couple of Montreal newspapermen who looked as though they had been out far too late the night before, had shown up at the Irish pub where Cobb and a few fellow scribes gathered each Friday. I happened to be at their lunch that fateful afternoon.  

Abbott and Haney explained they had created a board game and were looking for investors. I thought they were crazy. David obviously didn’t. He invested in what became Trivial Pursuit. The game exploded in popularity. As a result, David no longer had to write for a living and so, sadly, he didn’t.

But then maybe he slipped away in the nick of time, before the collapse of newspapers and magazines, the ignominious downsizing of rank-and file journalists. You don’t have to look very hard at the current journalism landscape to realize that the breed represented by David has become extinct, that era all but forgotten.

But that kid who wanted to be just like David Cobb has never forgotten. Old now himself, he keeps working at it, trying hard each day to do the impossible, to be a little bit more like David Cobb.