Here’s something that I never expected to see.
I had been going through searches on Newspapers.com when I came across a picture of my father from 1969.
The fact that Richard would have been a member of a ship’s company when that crew was expected to speak French at all times is fucking mind blowing to say the least.
He was a prairie boy growing up in Fort McMurray, AB before enlisting in the Royal Canadian Navy in 1963 at a stone frigate in Edmonton, AB. I can’t see him as ever having learnt French at home. When grandma came to live with us I can’t ever remember her speaking a single word of French, and I don’t think that she would have learnt French in the two years that she attended Indian Residential School.
When I was a kid, Richard had absolutely no time for French. Even though the schools on base were giving military dependents French classes, Richard would get upset if I tried speaking French in the PMQ.
The photo answers a bunch of questions. The HMCS Ottawa DDH 229 was fitted with a landing pad and a hangar for the Sea King helicopter. And the HMCS Ottawa was amongst the ships that had sailed to the United Kingdom and were involved with the HMCS Kootenay incident on October 23rd, 1969.
As Bill Parker had said to me in August of 1985 on Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Ontario, “I wish you had known your father before the Kootenay, he was a much different man then, I think you would have liked him”.
This photo was taken on July 22nd, 1969. That’s almost 3 months before the events of October 23rd, 1969 when the HMCS Kootney suffered a massive explosion due to overheated oil vapour in one of its reduction gearboxes. 9 men died that day, and according to Bill Parker in 1985, and my mother in 2013, three of those men were close friends of my father that he had served with in the Royal Canadian Navy before unification in 1968.
This photo was taken two years and two months before I was born. The man in the photo is not the man I grew up with. The man in the photo looks calm and inquisitive. The man that I grew up with was a piss tank alcoholic with rage issues and a hair temper trigger who had copious amounts of contempt for just about everyone else around him.
Looking at this photo I can only wonder what Richard would have been like had the HMCS Kootenay event not occurred. Or even if it had still occurred, I can only wonder what home life would have been like had the Canadian Armed Forces treated mental health as a priority instead of simply turning a blind eye to mental health issues and expecting the guys to deal with it on their own and self medicate through abusive behaviour, alcoholism, or hard drugs.
I know from my personal involvement with military social worker Captain Terry Totzke that the mental health and wellbeing of military members was the least of the military’s concern.
Does seeing this photo make me change my opinion of my father.
No.
He was still a broken inconsiderate self centred man who should never have been allowed to father children.
But what this photo does show is that Bill Parker and my mother weren’t lying when they said that Richard was a completely different person before the HMCS Kootenay disaster.
Beeshive 