This is a story about my reaction at the age of 16 or 17
_Source: 20260928132104_VoiceLog-20260928-132101.wav_
_Recorded: 2026-09-28 13:21:04_
_Transcribed: 2026-09-28T13:26:03_
Story
This is a story about my reaction at the age of 16 or 17.
The reaction I had with a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman.
One day I was home alone. The folks had gone to a meeting or something and so I stayed at home on the farm. door and I opened it up and there's a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman standing there and he tells me, "I'm sorry to bother you but I got stuck in a mud hole on the road just down from our house." So I said, "Okay." I got up and got a chain for the tractor, put it on the tractor and went out to the mud hole where he was at and I had him hook the chain to his car because I didn't want to be put in the wrong place and told him, "Now you just put it in neutral. Don't even try and I'll pull you out. You don't need to try and help me at all." Which he did and I pulled him out of the dry land and disconnected and everything and we were all done and he pulls out his wallet and he was looking through it and I guess he couldn't find...
I think he was looking for the dollar bills to pay me with and he didn't have any so he took out a five and in them days a five was more than day wages for an average person. The average wage was like 50 cents an hour. We're talking about 1952 around there someplace. So he offered me the five and I thought, "I can't take that." So I said to him, "No, farmers do these courteous things. We don't expect to get paid for it." And he thanked me very much and I told him how to go to get the closest way back down and not go through the mud hole he'd been stuck in. And that was the end of it.
So in rural Saskatchewan we had no crime. I don't think 10% of people ever had a lock on their front door. They just left it open. Nobody bothered anybody. The only police work, the only way the RCMP justified their existence was catching the local people when they were doing little speeding or run a stop sign or drank too much. Minor little infractions that they could charge you $10 or $15 for. That justified their existence. Most people didn't like them at all. So they had very few friends. So to carry on a couple, not a couple of months, a year or so, Buddy and I had went to a dance in the neighboring town and we were coming home and we get a flat tire. So we were working on getting the car jacked up and along comes the policeman because he was there looking for people who drank too much and stumbled upon us and we both thought we were cooked. Then he got out of his car and I noticed it's the same policeman and I pulled out of the ditch or out of the mud hole. So he looked at the situation and said, "Let me get a flashlight and help you."
So he went and got a flashlight and we were feeling a little too good and having a little trouble. So he kind of laughed. He said, "I'll tell you what, I'll change my mind. I'll change the tire and you hold the flashlight." So he fixed the tire for us, changed the tire for us, told us, "Have a nice day," and drove away. My buddy couldn't believe it. It's not like policemen treat the public like that. So anyway, then I told him the story. Well, I had pulled him through a ditch and had not charged him. So he said, "Well, that makes him a damn good policeman, I guess."
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