Greg Obrigewitsch may originally be from Daven, SK, but has seen a lot with each mile travelled becoming a great memory to be shared.
As a youngster Greg's parents moved into Regina where he and his brother would find a job with the dime delivery.
"We made quite a bit of money too by golly, considering we didn't have any to start with," Greg explained. "So, every dime just added up. So, that would keep us out of trouble."
As Greg grew older he would find himself leaving the seas of grass and wheat for the high tides of the North Atlantic Ocean. After heading down to the recruiting offices in Regina, Greg would become a sailor on the HMCS Petrolia during World War II.
"I was in the navy for two years and I'd probably still be in it but the war quit,"Greg said.
Greg's time in the navy was mostly spent aboard a ship patrolling the waters of the North Atlantic for u-boats (submarines).
"It was better than any place I'd been in until that time," Greg stated. "It was a lot of fun, I enjoyed my time in there. I was more fortunate than some of the guys, I got on board ship without too much delay..."
The rest of his time was typically spent in Ireland at a base when the ship needed to refuel or restock supplies.
"The best part of the whole thing of being in the navy is, we were on the North Atlantic chasing submarines, and for going to port or to refuel or something we would have anywhere from five to eight days on the Emerald Island [Ireland] where our home base was at that time," Greg reminisced. "Boy talk about a nice country, every once and a while they have it on television here but it was just a beautiful place, almost like a garden all the time."
Smiling widely he exclaimed, "And the beer was just super!"
Though aboard for two years his ship never did catch a u-boat and the majority of fighting he saw was amongst allied sailors as the Englishmen and the Canadians often found themselves in disagreement.
"I don't think I ever got into a brawl with anybody, though the opportunity there was always some guys fighting and I don't know if they'd say the wrong thing then boom, and I'd just keep walking," Greg said. "...if they wanted to fight, argue, and curse go ahead I don't have to listen to that."
"... the English sailors and the Canadian sailors always had a difference of opinion," Greg remembered. "They're actually the senior service, but God they could just get into a fight and so quick, eh."
One specific instance included Greg hiding in a pub until the fighting was over.
"There was a hell of a brawl going on and they were looking for reinforcements to get everything under control," Greg explained. "And I got in the pub, into a corner, and I can still remember telling these Irishmen, 'For Christ's sake don't tell them I'm here.' A lot of these Irishmen didn't think too great about the Englishmen to start with, so I had no trouble being hidden.
"'Nah, nobody in here, nope.' They hid me in the pub, so i wouldn't have to fight the Englishmen," Greg laughed. "That was probably the best fighting I could have gotten into but I missed it."
One event he didn't miss, however, was seeing the ship, the Queen Mary, cut through the water as it travelled between Europe and North America.
"Honest to God if you've never seen a big ship go by!" Greg said incredulously. "The Queen Mary was used for shipping and we weren't any use for escorting her because we couldn't go even half as fast as she could. They had destroyers to escort her form Ireland to wherever she was going."
"I remember someone came running up, 'There she goes, do you want to see the Queen Mary? Hurry up, hurry up!'"
Rushing out of the boiler room where he was stoking, the crew reached the deck.
"There she's going and I don't know how fast she went, but the spray from the water, she must have been wide open because you couldn't see the front half of the ship from the water that flew up, then there was the rest of it behind it. Somebody up on the bridge got in contact with them and I guess they were loaded with soldiers."
"If somebody would have shown me a picture I would have said ah bull, but to look at her when she was coming it almost was like she was half as big as she is, that's just the way she was cutting through the water."
To this day though, Ireland has remained Greg's favourite place in the world.
"If someone said, 'You have to get the he[ck] out of here and go anywhere you like, but you can't come back home here,'" Greg smiled. "I would go to Ireland. The country is so green, it's so nice, they've got pubs all over where there's fiddles and you can play cards. That was worth being in the navy in the first place."
Once the war was over Greg returned to civilian life and found himself back in Saskatchewan as a farmer near Corning, but he also enjoyed time up north driving Caterpillar tractors, drilling for water, and working as a municipal maintainer.
"I enjoyed what I did. It didn't matter if i was in the navy or whether I was driving truck..."
Remembering some of these other jobs, Greg laughed at his time drilling for water: "I was a well driller for awhile and my golly I could get water at many places, but I couldn't get any at my place. Go to the neighbours, go someplace and it would be a pretty good well."
Greg has always enjoyed finding the fun in life from making wine and sausage, to fishing, to photography.
"I had a varied life, different things, but mostly I enjoyed doing what I was doing," Greg stated. "Sometimes it got monotonous but I always had something going and something else would come up."
