The tall curly-haired stranger was entering our home unannounced and caught me by surprise. He was invading family territory and my friend Henry and I were pretty well alone in the old rambling house on Second Street East. My sister was upstairs, supposedly doing homework, although I doubted that.
The stranger advanced with a smile on his face that I interpreted as a sneer. I drew my pistol and shot. One shot to the chest and the second to the stomach.
The stranger grabbed the edge of the trestle table that stood in the hallway that led to a kitchen with a living room off the left.
That tall man in a dark blue, three-piece pin-striped suit crumbled to the floor. I hovered over him with my still smoking gun at the ready.
Then, the victim looked up at me and smiled. It wasn’t a sneer after all. I glanced past him and saw my mother entering the front door with another woman named Florence who I knew fairly well. They were giggling. The curly-haired man grabbed the edge of that trestle table again and righted himself. He stood upright and was now hovering over me with that smile.
He reached into the small vest pocket of his suit, pulled out a shiny silver 50-cent piece and handed it to me.
“I hear it’s your birthday, so happy birthday and spend this wisely,” he said, or something to that effect since by now I was really confused.
I holstered the pistol that I had just received for my eighth birthday, and I guess I should make it known this pistol emitted smoke when fired, but no bullets could ever be emitted from this so-called weapon. It had been a gift from my buddies who knew I liked a whole bunch of cowboys and were happy to give me this cap gun as their gift.
My mother and Florence were now standing beside this guy they called John as I thanked him for the big coin and was now feeling a little guilty for having shot him just a few seconds earlier.
He tapped my head and, again, wished me well as he and Florence advanced to the living room while my mother scrambled to the kitchen to prepare a pot of coffee and slice up the remains of a birthday cake to serve them.
So who was this guy named John? I asked my mom.
“His name is John Diefenbaker, he’s from Prince Albert, or Wakaw and he’s a politician,“ she informed me.
“Do you think he’d give me another 50 cents if I shot him again?” I inquired.
“No, and you two are banished to the backyard now, go play catch or something,” she said in admonishment, as she spotted my friend Henry who had been hanging around the living room while all the action was happening in the hall. He was the last of my party attendees. We disappeared into the backyard to seek new adventures, armed with a cap gun, baseball gloves and 50 cents of ill-gotten gains.
I sort of knew what a politician was, but wasn’t too interested in what they did, but I was interested in how he got into our home.
My mother, who was a professional photographer had been contracted to do a “photo shoot,” of Diefenbaker just prior to the start of his campaign. So I guess I was only the second one to shoot Diefenbaker that day. Florence, who was helping with his campaign tour while he was in our district, had accompanied him to mom’s studio for the photo shoot, so that’s why they had been invited for coffee and my birthday cake.
The photos must have turned out well because I spotted at least two of them in the months and years that followed as “John” made his mark as a politician and later as Prime Minister. One photo I remember seeing in a magazine or newspaper was definitely my mother’s work because it was a posed shot with John Diefenbaker standing beside a hip-high pedestal, one that my mother often used as a prop. His hand rested on a book and he was wearing that pin-striped suit that had gotten a little dusty when he crumbled to the floor in our hallway.
I have that pedestal in our home now. The bride uses it for sundry purposes depending on the season and needs. We may have even used it for a couple of our own photos.
As an adult reporter, I happened to run into John Diefenbaker a couple of times, once in Saskatoon and another in Prince Albert, but the encounters were definitely too brief to enable me to reconnect with the man I shot, who later became a Prime Minister of our country. I definitely would have thanked him properly for that 50 cents and maybe even for being a PM because by then I understood how being in that role is a pretty difficult job. I would have loved to have reminded him of the afternoon he went down in a crumbly mess in our house in east-central Saskatchewan and a kid had emerged with some cash and a memory of a shooting that did not need to go down into Canadian history books, but rather just as a fun event that stuck in his mind.
Post note: Henry and I purchased two ice cream cones with that cash. Thanks Mr. Diefenbaker.
