J.R.S. Graziano

Pillar Location: Pillar VI, Row 4, Column D

Story: 

Memories of an RCMP Kid Growing up in a Small Town

Written by: Marlyn Graziano

My very first car ride (home from the hospital where I was born) was in a police car.  My first motorcycle ride was on a Harley: my Dad’s highway patrol machine.  It was LOUD and the thundering sound of Dad coming home for supper would send my brother and our dog both diving under the bed, quaking – sure that the world was coming to an end.  I, on the other hand, would dash out to the driveway, begging for a ride before dinner.

When we drove 40 miles to church, we often went in a police car so Dad could remain in radio contact while out of his jurisdiction.

Such was the life of an RCMP Officer in small-town Manitoba in the 1960s and ‘70s. It was a life in which could never separate family and business. My Dad was always the town cop and we were always the town cop’s kids.  We lived in RCMP barracks, with “the office” (as we called it) as part of our house.  Dad was never away from work.

We all lived it and breathed it, except for those couple of weeks each summer when we escaped on holidays.

I can remember sitting at our breakfast table, eating corn flakes while Mom slaved away over the stove, frying bacon and eggs, flipping pancakes on the griddle, making mounts of toast and jugs of juice and coffee.

It smelled great, and my brothers and I were more than just a bit disappointed when the trays filled with all that great home-cooked breakfast were carried right past our noses, down the hall and into the office.

That meal was destined for the prisoners my dad had picked up the night before.  Mom, as wife of the Mountie in charge of a small-town detachment, go to play chief cook and bottle-washer whenever there were prisoners in that cell.  She too took responsibility seriously – no corn flakes for them!  She also had to learn to work the police radio, in case she had to get hold of Dad or one of the other members at the detachment when they were out on the road.  If people wanted the police and got no answer at the office door, they simply shuffled over a couple of steps and rang our doorbell.

I remember my Mom sternly telling a man to sit down on the outside step and wait while she dashed into the office to radio Dad.  This man had come to confess to a crime.  Mom dealt with him as she did with us:  “Wait till your father gets home.” It worked.  He sat there until Dad arrived.

There were hundreds of other families like ours scattered all over the Prairies.  There’s a kinship of sorts that forms between RCMP families, especially those who live and work in small towns, towns where you’re often considered outsiders by virtue of the fact that, at some point, any could have a run-in with the cop in charge of the detachment.

The guy you invite to your home one night might well be the guy who gives you a speeding ticket the next night. Or checks out the noise complaint from your home at 2 a.m.  Or takes your wife to the hospital to have her black eyes and broken ribs attended to.

He’s not a guy too many want to get too close to.  So small towns can be very lonely places, indeed, for Mounties and their families, and the often turn to each other for friendship and understanding.  Those bonds last through the years and decades, through transfers and retirements.

My parents recently headed to Ottawa to meet up with old friends and acquaintances at a retired members’ reunion.  There’s something to be said for the way of life among RCMP families, that after all this time (more than a dozen years after my dad’s retirement), they still seek each other out, get together, pick up where they left off, and remember old times, perhaps with a bit more fondness that they would ever have suspected when they were living through those years.

There were happy times, to be sure, but sometimes the sadness was inescapable – like the afternoon in which Dad, on highway patrol, was called to traffic accident, only to find that the victims were my aunt, uncle and two cousins.  Or the time he got called to help rescue a young boy who’d fallen into a truck being loaded with fertilizer.  They couldn’t save him, which was tragedy enough.  But then Dad had to come home and tell me that one of my classmates had died and that he had been unable to help him.  Too often, work hit too close to home.

As I grew up, I learned that being a Mountie was not a job, it was a way of life.  Until you’ve lived the life of a Mountie, I don’t think you can begin to understand the dedication that comes with that Red Serge.  I am proud of my Dad, his colleagues and all those families who together made up a larger family.