to enter nursing school at Essondale Hospital when she met Dad at a dance at the Harris Road Community Hall in 1952. They were married a short time later. They had four children, two boys and two girls. The girls became nurses; the boys became policemen.
An update on the police side of the author’s family so far includes, wife: senior director, Vancouver Police Department; brother: inspector, VPD; father-in-law: chief constable-retired, VPD; brother-in-law: sergeant, VPD; nephew: constable, VPD; another nephew: Vancouver civilian peace officer in the VPD Information Management Section; niece’s husband: constable, VPD; cousin and black sheep of the family: staff sergeant, Canadian Pacific Railway Police. Recently, at a very large family gathering, I commented to another brother-in-law, who owns a construction company, “Did you know that you are the only person in this room who doesn’t work for the government?” He responded, “I just took a contract from the Burnaby School Board.”
I Blame Television
I was born in Saint Mary’s Hospital in New Westminster and raised in Vancouver’s “Little Italy” on Commercial Drive, which in those days was a thriving working-class neighbourhood populated by new European immigrants. However, we lived across the street from Clark Park, which was the local gathering place for thieves and hoods known as “Clark Parkers,” many of whom graduated to become outlaw motorcycle-gang members. In later years I learned that the Vancouver Police Department solved the Clark Park problem by creating the “H” or Heavy Squad. Dressed in dark plainclothes with signature fedora hats, the members of the squad would sweep through the park several times in the course of an evening, using baseball bats to encourage the thugs to leave the area. When the problem was miraculously solved, an elderly female resident living across from the park commented to reporters, “It seems as though an older gang has taken over the park, and they are so much more polite than the other group.”
My friends were Joe Barsilli, Billy Turkanoff and Victor the Knife. I don’t remember what Victor’s last name was, but he earned his unfortunate sobriquet on our first day of kindergarten when a discussion with the teacher about whether or not he would participate in nap time deteriorated into an ugly incident. He wasn’t there for the second day of kindergarten. Joe and Billy were relatively tame. I remember sitting in the lunchroom at Grandview Elementary School enjoying my daily Wonder Bread sandwich with peanut butter and jam that I had just taken out of my Roy Rogers lunch kit. Watching the other kids chewing on home-made filone, pane Siciliano or ciabatta heaped with provolone and prosciutto, I thought, Boy, eating that rotten-smelling stuff … they must be poor.
Television was black and white with no cable or remote control, but we watched Bonanza every Sunday, and Gunsmoke, Have Gun—Will Travel (and no, Alex Trebek, the first name of Paladin was not “Wire,” even though his card said, “Wire Paladin, San Francisco”—the reference meant “Telegraph Paladin in San Francisco”), Dragnet and Sea Hunt during the week.
One of our favourite pastimes was running through the neighbourhood playing “cops and robbers.” Mom alleges that when I was on my way out to play, she would always caution me to “play the cop, not the robber.” I don’t recall this, but I have no evidence to the contrary. One day in 1962, when I was in grade two, our teacher, Mrs. Brandon, had the children come up to the front of the class one by one and tell everybody what they wanted to do when they grew up. I was seven years old when I stood before the class and proudly proclaimed that I wanted to scuba dive and be a policeman. My mother claims credit for my career; I blame James Arness and Richard Boone.
President Lupo
In 1973, after graduating from Gladstone Secondary School, I enrolled in the Criminal Justice Program at Langara College in Vancouver. The instructor was Ian Bruce Campbell, and I really enjoyed the classes he taught. He had been a bobby in Great Britain and then served with the British military to put down the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya before immigrating to Canada, where he joined a small municipal police department back east. My classmates and I enjoyed diverting him from the mundane curriculum so that he would recount the more interesting experiences of his past. He once told us of the time he and his squad were out in the jungle on an anti-rebel patrol when they were ambushed. One of his friends on the patrol, badly burned in the firefight, asked his troop mates to kill him, as he could not deal with the pain and disfigurement. They carried the soldier to base hospital, where he was treated and survived. Several times since then that injured soldier thanked Campbell for not complying with his request. Campbell said that this was one of the most difficult decisions he ever made.
While studying Criminology at VCC Langara, my class created this jacket crest.
After he came to Canada, the town where Campbell served as a police constable was suffering thefts from parking meters. It was a particularly embarrassing crime because the location of the thefts was so public. Campbell staked out a likely row of parking meters near the town square in the early hours of the morning, then hid to await the thieves’ arrival. When he saw two shadowy figures emptying the coin meters, he moved in and discovered that the petty crooks were, in fact, fellow police officers from his own department. He told our class that he was surprised at the way some of his co-workers treated him as a result of arresting these two thieves. He still advocated doing the right thing, but he advised us that “whistle blowers” should have a thick skin. The arrest of his two co-workers likely precipitated his move to the West Coast. Ian Campbell made a great contribution to public safety, training hundreds of students who would go on to serve with distinction as peace officers throughout the province.
Other than Campbell’s classes, I found academia boring and spent a lot of my time at Langara supplementing my lifeguard’s income (I had been a lifeguard at various pools and beaches in the city since I was fifteen) by playing blackjack in the cafeteria. I was also attracted to student politics, and in the spring semester of 1974 I was elected vice-president of the student union. When the president stepped down later in the year, I took over as head of the council. Some years later, when I was serving in the Vancouver Police Department’s Traffic Division, a group of us were having breakfast in a restaurant on Denman Street when I was approached by Betsy Dennison, a fellow former student representative. We had a few words, and when she left the table, the guys asked, “Where do you know her from?” I told them that we had been on student council together, and when I became president, she had taken over the office of vice-president. And that was it. From that moment on I was “the Pres.” It was written on my locker and DynaTaped to the back of my motorcycle helmet.
In policing, many people have nicknames, and you hope and pray that if you acquire one, it won’t be too humiliating. I got away pretty lucky. Some of the good and bad ones included: Spanky, Frank, McStabb, McSnapper, the Poisoned Dwarf, Renatta the She-Wolf of the SS, the Outlaw, the Commander, Skipper, Tripod, the Peeper, Dog-balls, Big Yellow Bird, RAM, Cathy Alphabet, the Schnozz, the Horseman, the Purple Onion, the Poodle and Electra. One of the constables acquired an unfortunate nickname that followed him throughout his career. On one dark and stormy night, four of us were wearing our yellow rain slickers as we worked a roadblock in the West End, when Constable Jim Davidson arrested a driver for being impaired. As the other three of us huddled together watching the formalities, Jim dealt with the driver, who refused to take a breathalyzer test. One requirement of Canadian law is that to make a legal arrest, a constable must formally identify himself, touch the offender and tell him or her the true reason for the arrest. Davidson touched the drunk and said, “You understand that I am a police officer?” The drunk responded, “A police officer … a police officer? You don’t look like no police officer. You look like a duck.” And that’s how the legend of “the Duck” was born.
My own nickname didn’t change until years later, when I was a patrol sergeant and my crew decided that I reminded them of “Lupo”—not the lone, silent predator, skirting the shadows, waiting to lash out at criminal prey, but a psychopathic, meat-cleaver-swinging
