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Mitch Owens – Eulogy, Delivered by his son, John; November 22, 2016

Mitch Owens - Éloge, livré par son fils, John; 22 novembre 2016

Mitch Owens – Eulogy
Delivered by his son, John; November 22, 2016

First off, on behalf of the family, I want to thank you all for coming today. The Ottawa Police Presence, the RCMP presence, it means a lot to us. And it would mean a lot to my dad. He always loved a big gathering. And if he were the centre of attention, all the better.

All of us knew Mitch Owens in different ways, for different things. And all of us have different memories. I can only tell you how I found him. To youngsters such as myself, the facts of his life are pretty hard to imagine. Growing up in a hard scrabble farm family in Manitoba during the Depression and the dust bowl years, leaving home as a teenager to ride the rails across Canada several times, holding a series of odd jobs – pharmacy delivery boy, short order cook, lumberman in Northern Ontario, mail order clerk – before he found his calling with RCMP. After nearly a year of tough basic training in Regina came stints in war-time Halifax and North Sydney and then passage on the St. Roch icebreaker to a posting at Pond Inlet in the High Arctic. His duties included, delivering babies, performing dentistry, as census-taker, mine inspector, postmaster, all sorts of official jobs and just about no law enforcement because of the gentleness of the people there. Hard for us to picture the conditions up there in the 1940s. You got mail and supplies once a year. You had to undertake 1000-mile trips by dog sled, because your beat was the size of England. You traveled maybe 30 or 40 miles a day, making a snow house every night, sometimes within sight of the one you built the night before. Catching your food every day or you didn’t eat, carrying a ton of whale meat for the dogs who always ate first. You and your guide becoming lost and disoriented in howling blizzards. And you have to do that for weeks, sometimes months, on the trail, oh, in minus 40 weather. For almost every story he told about the North - and he told a lot of them – my only reaction was: we don’t know nuthin’ about hardship. But he didn’t look at it that way. It wasn’t hardship; it was adventure.

His three years on the northern tip of Baffin Island, beginning when he was just 23, in many ways defined the man he became. He loved the land and, more importantly, he loved the people because the Inuit were tough, kind, honest, practical and very funny. In short, they were everything he was. So much of his life was about service. That was obvious as a member of the RCMP where he referred to his policing as “keeping things on the up and up”. His service to the Force after he retired was also obvious as he became the longest serving member in the RCMP Veterans Association.

And it was obvious in his 25 years as a local politician. It’s worth noting what type of politician he was. As old school as it gets. He believed that municipal politicians should take care of things he knew his constituents cared about. Making sure the roads were fixed. Streets were ploughed, garbage picked up and that the kids had lots of parks to play in. He was fierce about helping anybody who had the courage to start a business. And he was astounded when practical, obvious things weren’t done. If I wanted to get the old man cranked up, all I had to do was mention the Airport Parkway. Why wasn’t it made 4 lanes, 40 years ago? The bridges over it were designed for 4 lanes! A 2-lane road to the Nation’s Capital for 40 years?! What a disgrace! It’s not done anymore but back when he held office, gifts came in every Christmas. An LCBO’s worth of bottles around the house, mostly from developers who had business with Gloucester. He’d drink it all and then go to war against them, arm-twisting to cut the best deal he could whether it was more green space or higher development charges. But there were other types of service he delivered. He could fix just about anything mechanical and so would find himself at the neighbourhood farms, repairing toasters, washers, tractors, cars, anything with moving parts.

He was proud of the mobile homes park he built, not just because it provided for his family but because he saw it as a service for young people just starting out who needed low cost housing and a chance to build a new life.
His real passion was his family. He saw ahead to the setting he wanted his kids to grow up in, so, 63 years ago, on an RCMP corporal’s pay, he scraped together enough money to buy 112 acres and an old stone house on a dirt road in South Gloucester. And what a life he gave us! We never had a lot of money but there was always lots to eat and a giant playground we could explore from dawn to dusk – without anything like adult supervision. It was a life that we could pass on to our kids because all three of us built homes beside his. And now Natasha and Cassandra are passing the same life onto their kids. He was in his mid-50s when he bought a 2-bedroom house near the beach south of Clearwater. For the better part of 40 years, he and my mom spent large parts of every winter building a new family of friends down at Indian Rocks Beach. And he got to do what he loved perhaps the most: fishing. And my mom got to do what she loved the least – cleaning fish. By the way, this wasn’t off the dock fishing by a retired snowbird in black socks and sandals, but getting into a tiny boat with a buddy and no life jackets and heading miles into the Gulf of Mexico out of sight of land kind of fishing. That he did into his 80s. He could be stern, he could be opinionated, and his temper – especially towards us kids who weren’t behaving - was a thing to behold. But you always had an idea of why he was upset; there was a logic and fairness and sense of justice about it.

My father could also be incredibly intolerant. He couldn’t stand liars and hypocrites and show-offs and whiners and bullies and con men. And he passed this intolerance on. For him, life was a whole lot simpler when you told the truth – regardless of the consequences - and you did the right thing. Not most of the time but all the time He believed in a funny kind of equality. For example, when my sister fell ill with tonsillitis, he whipped all 3 of us off to hospital to have our tonsils out at the same time. Or when one of us kids messed up – I’m sure it was usually Marty - he punished all of us because we should’ve been policing each other. I never heard him complain about his health or his safety. Not even when almost died in Florida – twice. And because he was so tough, we knew enough to not go to him for sympathy over the minor cuts and scrapes and bruises of childhood. He’d examine the injury and conclude with a phrase I still use and my son, a paramedic, still uses: “Not too close to the heart.”

Growing up, I have no memory of him sitting around the house. Every minute he was outside, doing things, digging holes with his beloved back hoe just for fun, fixing things, breaking things, then fixing them again. Or just walking in the bush because Nature was his cathedral. He’d take his children, then our children for long walks, stopping to build campfires, pointing out animals and birds and naming types of trees and showing us things like what side of the tree moss grew on so you’d never get lost. My father was a natural-born cop. He didn’t miss much. All the things my brother and I thought we got away with in our teen years – well, we didn’t. He’d just let some things slide, because he wanted us to experience life, not experience lectures about life from a parent. He wanted to know about everyone he met. In business, in politics, on a plane or a Florida street corner, he would engage strangers all the time. “Where are you from, what do you do, where are your people from?”In his year and half at Orchard View, he knew the life stories of every care worker there. And he even connected with an Inuit woman whom he brought to tears with his knowledge of her language.
He supplied me with a pile of memorable quotes – just about none of which I can repeat to you here today. But there is one that sums up his life-long curiosity, his interest in people and places and things. And I apologize in advance, Father but I’m just quoting here: Mitch would say “Poor goddamned day if you don’t learn something”.

He was also a natural born story teller. With a phenomenal memory and a real sense of the absurd, he told story after story to the point that it became a running joke about the way he introduced a tale – “Do you mind the time?” and then his request: “Stop me if you’ve heard this one”. We, of course, had heard it before but we never told him to stop. Because they were all great stories and he told them really well. To give you some measure of the man I knew and with your permission, there are a couple of stories I’d like to tell. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

To give you an idea of how engaging he could be: After my mother passed, Marty and I took Dad, now in his mid-80s and slowing down, to an all-inclusive hotel in Cuba. We had a ball. One day, we escorted him across the pool to the swim-up bar. Because he didn’t care for weak drinks, I told him to order in Spanish by saying “ron y co*ke boom-boom”. And we left him there for a couple of hours. When we returned we found him holding court in front of at least 10 twenty-year olds, kids who had come to the resort for a wild party. There they were, just quietly listening to his stories. They were from Halifax and dad was able to amaze one of them by coming up the name of the kid’s grandfather and the street he lived on.

To give you an idea about how he let us experience things: I ran away from home when I was 16. Not because I wasn’t happy there but because I was in love. I hitchhiked to Oakville on Easter weekend and then called to let them know where I was. Dad suggested that it would be a real good idea to get back home as quickly as possible because otherwise he was going to break every one of my 200 vinyl records on the front lawn. As my girlfriend had just dumped me, I agreed. Rides were slow and I didn’t make it back to Ottawa until about 5 in the morning. He was sitting at the kitchen table with my uncle. No anger, no lecture. He just glanced at the clock and said “Kinda late for dinner, aren’t you?” And then never mentioned the episode again. Case closed.

To give you an idea of how seriously he took his job as a law enforcement officer: Just after WW 2 ended, the cold war began. Dad was still in a cold place, when a US submarine and 2 escort ships showed up in Pond Inlet harbor. Dad put on his uniform and marched to the end of the rickety pier and refused the American landing boat permission to dock because they hadn’t been authorized to use this official Canadian port. The war ships left, and dropped anchor a few hundred yards down the coast where they welcomed dad on board.

To give you an idea how much he cared for children and how little he cared for rules: When he was up North, a three-year old Inuit child named Moses became sick from germs off a ship from the south. He was seriously ill and dad was warned to let nature and the native medicine woman take their course. He couldn’t do that. He tore apart his supplies, found some antibiotics, interrupted what had become a death watch and injected the kid without knowing the dosage or even if it was the right drug. After several suspenseful days, much resentment for his intrusion and several more injections, the child recovered. And dad was fine with giving the medicine woman full credit for the miracle; all he cared about was that this child have the chance to live a full life.

As a postscript, about seven years ago, I was visiting dad at the house. An Inuit man strode across dad’s kitchen with his hand outstretched. “I’m Moses; your father saved my life.” Not a lot of us are told that. I really could go on and on. But I hope you get the picture.

I never heard dad grumble about the hand he had been dealt in life. He was a poker player and he believed poker was not a game of chance. It was never about the hand you’d been dealt; it was always about what you did with it. What he did with it was design the life he wanted to lead and then he went out and lived it. I think I admire him most for that. He was a big man. With a big heart and a big laugh and a big appetite for life. His legacy as a policeman, a politician, the head of our family speaks to that. So does the road where most of his family still lives. For a man to die at 95, one of the clichés we use is “Well, he had a good life”. The fact is: my father had a GREAT life. And I feel privileged that I knew him for 2/3 of it. Despite the tragedy of his daughter’s death, the sadness of losing his loving and supportive wife, my father was the embodiment of the expression “livin’ large”. Above all, Mitch Owens lived large. And the world seems a quieter, less fun place today.