Welcome to Bob Brink, Writer
What About Bob?
Bob Brink was born above a barber shop in Muskegon, Mich. His first memory was at age 2. Somehow, he had managed to slip away from his parents and toddle out to the staircase landing on the side of the building. Staring balefully at him from the bottom was one of the barbers, a man with a full head of thick, dark hair. He probably was angry at the little brat for creating a racket by continually rocking back and forth in his high chair, causing his parents to worry that he would tip it over and brain himself on the floor.
When he was 6, the family left the sandy shores and whitecaps of Lake Michigan for the green cornfields of Iowa, where he attended two colleges and earned a B.A. in English and German, then completed graduate studies in journalism at the University of Iowa. At his first newspaper job, with The Herald-News in Joliet, Ill., the intensity he showed in the high chair translated into a zeal to uncover fire hazards in shabby downtown hotels, in which he stayed. His investigation won him an award. Three nights after Dr. Martin Luther King was shot to death, he came upon the aftermath of rioting that no one was covering and walked into the ghetto to write a mood piece, which made the front page.
His next stop was The Associated Press in Chicago. Six weeks after his arrival, he was sent to O’Hare International Airport to cover the crash of a plane into a hangar, killing 30 people. Inside the temporary morgue, he pretended to be an investigating official. His ruse was discovered and two burly Chicago cops escorted him into the freezing cold.
Riots erupted on the anniversary of King’s death, and Brink was sent to the infamous Cabrini-Green high-rise public housing project. Still possessed of Iowa’s small-town naïvete, he walked to within 125 feet of about 150 young blacks crowded around the entrance of a shabby dry cleaners they were looting. He left after a middle-aged black man on the sidewalk yelled to him, “You better get outta here. They gonna jump you.” A car with six AP newsmen later saw him walking in the area and ordered him into their car, wondering if he had lost his mind.
Preferring expository writing, Brink turned down an offer to write radio news at The AP’s New York headquarters and went to the Milwaukee Journal (now Milwaukee Journal Sentinel). A highlight of his tenure there was his tenacious investigation of a murder that the police had swept under the rug. The story forced a coroner’s inquest. He left the snow and cold for Florida and the Tampa Tribune, where his story on bait-and-switch tactics by appliance dealers brought disciplinary action by a state agency.
Next, Brink spent 14 1/2 years at the Palm Beach Post as a reporter, feature writer, and jazz and entertainment writer, interviewing and writing profiles of a plethora of jazz stars. His last assignment was classical music critic, a position he was unprepared for and did not seek, but one into which he dived enthusiastically, if unremarkably.
He then tried his hand at entrepreneurship. But tiny gourmet food operations abound, he found, and his line of divine chocolate and butterscotch dessert sauces turned out to be a sticky business.
Following a few short-term writing jobs, he was hired to write and edit for Palm Beach Media Group in West Palm Beach. After he became senior writer and de facto copy chief for the group, its flagship publication, Palm Beach Illustrated, won an award for best written magazine in Florida. He won two writing awards during his 9 1/2 years with the company.
Brink now is a freelance writer and editor, and has been authoring books. He ghost-wrote a short book for a single woman about the physically and emotionally anguished ordeal she underwent in heroic, and ultimately successful, attempts to have a baby through in vitro fertilization. His novel Murder In Palm Beach has garnered considerable attention, and his next novel, the legal thriller Blood on Their Hands, has been compared to the writing of John Grisham. He is seeking a publisher for a work of narrative nonfiction about a woman who led a life of crime, had a long affair with a notorious bank robber, and was a part of the first marriage of a death row prisoner in Florida prison history.
Brink learned to play the clarinet at age 38, then tenor saxophone, and was a clarinetist in a crack, 65-piece community symphonic pops band for 31 years. He played a few professional big band gigs on tenor saxophone.
He is a health aficionado and a fairly proficient ballroom dancer.
