Grandparents

My mother's parents died before I was born and my father's mother died when I was only seven.  I did know my father's father a little.  We lived in Sackville in southeastern New Brunswick, and occasionally visited him in my father's hometown of Campbellton on New Brunswick's north shore.  He died when I was 21.

My grandfather was a postal worker who sorted mail on trains.  He was a veteran of World War I, where he was one of the Canadian soldiers sent to Russia at the time of the Bolshevik revolution.  He only talked about it once with my father, and said, "Thank God there was a revolution!" (He usually avoided profanity.)

He was involved with youth groups like the Boy Scouts, and knew a lot of boys who became soldiers in World War II, sometimes receiving letters from them.  My father remembers hearing about the D-Day invasion on the radio and how concerned his father was about all the young men in harm's way.  He knew some soldiers in the Royal Quebec Fusilliers who were deployed to Hong Kong just before the Pearl Harbor raid and were doomed to a brutal captivity.  We were watching No Price Too High, a documentary about Canada's role in World War II with footage of a sergeant overseeing rifle practice in Hong Kong, and Father recognized him as one of the soldiers my grandfather knew.