Alan Hustak
The Gazette
Robert Stewart, a high school dropout who became a highly respected author, essayist and freelance journalist, died of cancer in the Royal Victoria Hospital on Dec. 28, 2003 at age 65.
His first book, Sam Steele: Lion of the Frontier - a biography of Canada's most famous Mountie, the superintendent of the Northwest Mounted Police during the 1885 Riel Rebellion - was originally published in 1979. But it was as the unsung author and editor of the Royal Bank Letter for 22 years that much of his best work was published anonymously.
The popular newsletter used to be distributed free to the bank's customers until it ceased printing 21/2 years ago and went on-line instead.
"He was an incredibly talented essay writer; a gentle, thoughtful man, who was also a great historian," said David Moorcroft, the Royal Bank's senior vice-president of corporate communications. "He would retrieve so much wonderful material from history and weave it into his essays. He brought so much intelligence, so much depth and perspective to his work."
"At its peak, the newsletter had a circulation of over one million, and was one of the most quoted publications in the world."
Robert Stewart was born Sept. 23, 1938, in Kenora, Ont., and grew up in Schreiber, a CPR divisional point on the north shore of Lake Superior. He dropped out of school in Grade 10 to work for a newspaper in Huntsville. He moved on to Manitoulin, Cornwall, Pembroke, and then to the Ottawa Journal. His only advanced education came after he won a Southam newspaper fellowship in 1966 and studied political science and Canadian history at University of Toronto.
"I learned everything I know about writing from working on different newspapers," he once said, "and I dare say by having a lot of good editors."
He built a solid career in journalism, eventually becoming the managing editor of the Financial Times of Canada. He also wrote for Time magazine and Reader's Digest and many of his articles appeared in The Gazette's opinion pages.
He was an avid fly and salmon fisherman and contributed stories to outdoor and travel magazines.
In addition, he was a ghost-writer for corporate executives too numerous to mention and was never given any of the credit for the speeches he wrote.
"He was very good behind the scenes," said longtime friend and colleague Roy Howard.
"If ever there was a person who could regularly deliver a philosophical essay, it was Bob. He was a determined freelancer".
Howard said he will forever remember Stewart as "someone who knew every popular song from the '30s and '40s. Not only could he sing an astounding number of songs, he wrote parodies of the songs with lewd lyrics that were not suitable for public consumption."
Stewart started writing the Royal Bank Letter in 1978 and remained its editor until it ceased to print in 2001. It was, he said, a much more challenging job than he imagined.
"You have to have an idea pretty well in every sentence," he once told a reporter. "You have to do a helluva lot of thinking., You can never coast in an essay. And you're not dealing, as I did for years, with newspapers and magazines, with facts or what somebody said."
An engaging raconteur with an appetite for good scotch, Stewart was working on The Sitting Bull Affair, his history of events in Canada after the chief of the Sioux nation massacred 220 men led by General George Custer at the Little Big Horn in Montana in 1876.
A complete collection of Robert Stewart's Royal Bank Letter essays may be found on-line at www.rbc.com/community/letter/.