Robert William Gordon Egely, 1944-2012
By Jane Switzer - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - 0 Comments
A master barber, he endured a series of gruelling hardships in his later years. Through the darkest days, his scissors kept him going.
Illustration by ian Phillips
Robert William Gordon Egely was born on June 20, 1944, in Penticton, B.C., the eldest of four children born to Wilma, a homemaker, and Clarence, a salesman. Clarence changed jobs frequently and ran a number of businesses over the years: fruit stands, bicycle repair shops, a restaurant and even a bowling alley. Bob, as he was known, spent his childhood criss-crossing the Okanagan Valley with his family. “Sometimes we would move three times in one year,” Bob’s sister Carol recalls. Perpetual new kids, they were often bullied, but Bob was their consummate defender. “He was my protector if anybody picked on us,” Carol says.
When Bob was in Grade 12, Clarence decided to become a barber and, after graduating high school in Vernon, B.C., in 1962, Bob followed in his dad’s footsteps and enrolled in a Vancouver barber school. He opened his first barbershop a few years later in Golden, B.C., where he met and fell in love with Theresa, a butcher’s apprentice who passed by his shop every morning on her way to work. The two were married in Golden on Oct. 28, 1967, and had three children: Ryan, Aaron and Nicole. Continue…
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Feuds: fightin’ words
By macleans.ca - Friday, December 9, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 4 Comments
From Google and Apple to Newfoundland and a ballooning moose population–bad blood runs deep
Getty Images; CP; iStock; Corbis; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute
Environmentalists Vs. Keystone XL Pipeline
Environmentalists and anti-oil sands groups managed to delay U.S. government approval of a $7-billion, 2,736-km pipeline that would carry oil from Alberta to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. Though pipelines are normally nothing to get excited about, TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline was singled out by those unhappy with U.S. energy policy and Canada’s development of the oil sands, a carbon-intensive source of crude. Protesters ranged from Hollywood celebrities like Robert Redford and left-leaning luminaries like Naomi Klein to concerned ranchers and residents along the pipeline’s proposed route.
Google Vs. Apple
The battle for control of the ballooning smartphone market got personal as Google’s open-source operating system, Android, overtook Apple’s iOS, which runs the iPhone. Steve Jobs, Apple’s late CEO, told his official biographer the search-engine giant didn’t play fair and accused Google of “grand theft” of the iPhone concept (among more colourful language). Google chairman Eric Schmidt, who once sat on Apple’s board, responded by saying “the Android effort started before the iPhone effort.”
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Big Mike vs. the hairstylists
By Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 18 Comments
“There’s a history of barbers and hairstylists here feuding”
Photograph by Mitchel Raphael
To hear New Brunswick barbers tell it, they are members of a persecuted race whose very existence is threatened by the province’s hairstylists. As Mike Doucet, of Big Mike’s Barber Shop in Grand Bay and head of the New Brunswick Registered Barbers’ Association, puts it: “There’s a history of barbers and hairstylists here feuding.”
Now the barbers, who number just a few hundred province-wide—there are 7,800 stylists—are seeking to settle another score: they want a law regulating who can use the classic barber’s pole, preventing stylists from appropriating the pole and bringing the province in line with the 40 or so U.S. states that restrict it to licensed barbers. The barbers hope the idea will be tabled next month in the legislature as a private member’s bill; it’s believed it would be the first law of its kind in Canada.
