Everyman Jack Knox shares tales of extraordinary Islanders in new book

Jack Knox, the self-styled consummate everyman, has spent his career telling the stories of extraordinary Islanders.

Those stories, dripping with rich detail and human emotion, transport readers to a solitary lighthouse off Vancouver Island, to Juno Beach on D-Day, to a sparse jail cell, and to a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.

Some of the people featured in the veteran Times Colonist columnist’s third and latest book, On the Rocks With Jack Knox, lived lives that seemed ripped from a Hollywood movie script: A man who survived an atomic bomb, a woman who fired a machine-gun into the bushes to scare away bandits, an adventure-seeking couple who rowed from Europe to Central America and a man who took cookies from Hitler.

Others are everyday people who didn’t realize they had a story to tell until someone started to listen.

“There are people walking by you every day who’ve got these fantastic stories within them and you’ve got no idea,” Knox said.

Take, for example, Rudi Hoenson, a Victoria philanthropist who has given millions to local charities but was less public about what he witnessed while a prisoner of war in Nagasaki in 1945. It took Hoenson two years before he decided to tell Knox what he saw when the atomic bomb detonated over the Japanese city.

“With Rudi, he’s a humble guy and he thought he might sound like he was showing off,” Knox said of the nonagenarian’s initial reluctance. “He did not want to gain any sort of cachet from such horror.”

Whether it’s a prisoner of war or a prisoner doing hard time for murder, Knox treats these human-interest stories with a reverent attention to detail and a writing style that is innately personal.

For Knox, who has worked for the Times Colonist for 30 years, 20 of which were spent as a columnist, the book is more than an anthology of his best and most heart-warming columns. It’s a way to circle back and reconnect with the people who shared those remarkable tales, Knox said.

“I got to follow up on stories that had slipped away over the years.”

A chapter called “The Veterans” chronicles the lives of Islanders who served in the Second World War, stories Knox wanted to “preserve in amber.” Even decades later, their memories are vivid with images of sinking ships, hails of bullets, bodies strewn across the battlefield.

“It took so long for so many of them to open up and once they did, I didn’t want those stories to be lost,” Knox said.

Unlike the first two books, Hard Knox: Musings from the Edge of Canada and Opportunity Knox: Twenty Years of Award Losing Humour Writing, this book likely won’t be nominated for a Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour (although it has already risen to second place on the B.C. Bestseller List). There are funny bits, but not every story has a happy ending and not every person is a sympathetic character.

“There are inspirational stories within the book, but this is not a book of inspirational stories. There’s some very sad, troubled people,” Knox said.

He talks candidly to a man imprisoned for a drug-fuelled killing about the revolving door of the criminal-justice system.

He evenly recounts Oak Bay resident Richard Reiter’s former life as a member of the Hitler Youth and soldier of the Waffen-SS. That Knox and colleague Dave Obee, now Times Colonist publisher, sat down to talk to a former Nazi enraged many people when the article was first published in 2005. “They thought we were glorifying the guy. I never saw it that way,” Knox said. “He had an interesting story to tell and he didn’t do it in a way that made himself look good. He just told his story.”

Knox said his job lets him sit face-to-face with people with whom, on the surface, he has nothing in common.

Knox, who describes himself as “dead average,” said he likes “finding out about people who aren’t like me.”

Many of the stories come from the far reaches of Vancouver Island, places on the rugged west coast that most city-dwellers or suburbanites will never visit.

“Anywhere on Vancouver Island is an easy day’s drive but you might as well be on the other side of the Earth in some places,” Knox said.

That includes the story of Terry and Ray Williams, the last Indigenous people to live year-round in Yuquot, a community on the edge of Nootka Island. Their life free from Starbucks and Big Macs is grounded by the 4,000-year-old tradition of their ancestors and entangled with the founding history of British Columbia, as the tiny island became a strategic location for the international fur trade.

Some of the dispatches from the wild west coast were a result of an ongoing project called The Other Island, which saw Knox and Times Colonist photographer Debra Brash cast a light onto people and communities that were quirky, interesting and off the beaten track.

“Displaying an unpretentious manner, people were at ease and were comfortable engaging in conversation with him,” Brash said. “I think people who lived in many of the remote areas wanted a keeper of their stories because their way of life was changing rapidly.”

“We started poking our nose in the far corners of Vancouver Island and we came up with a lot of stories that surprised us,” Knox said. “On the Island, one story leads to another story.”

kderosa@timescolonist.com