I first met Bob when he was playing with Dick Owings at San Diego FMF in the mid seventies. We invited him up to our coffeehouse, The Green Cove, in Vancouver and I think he fell in love with the northwest on that trip. We played together in a variety of settings, and when Rika and I produced a 16-show radio series, Bob was our first choice for banjo and squeezebox. He sang "A Hundred Years Ago" on the Deep Sea show and played banjo and squeezebox throughout. We managed to persuade him to join the Editorial Board of Canada Folk Bulletin, and when we Rika and I got married he and Jill King wanted to make it a double, so we did. It was in that time period that he wrote and published On the Northwest, the definitive history of northwest whaling.

We lost track of each other while he was back east until a few years back, when we appeared at Mystic and he very graciously brought us into his set. We'd seen him several times since, mostly at Portsmouth Maritime Festival, as late as this September. Bob didn't look well then, but we supposed it was a flu-like thing.

Our loss with his death is severe, but weren't we all lucky that our lives coincided with his?

Jon Bartlett