Like father, like son

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/10/2016 (3267 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It seemed the most obvious, and perhaps insightful, of stories still waiting to be told about Winnipeg’s next police chief.

So, earlier this week, I emailed Danny Smyth with a question: could he arrange an interview for me with his retired police officer father, Stan Smyth?

I had admired Danny since he was a rookie constable and the only officer responding to the historically pivotal 1988 shooting of J.J. Harper who resisted the culture of covering up for a fellow officer and simply did his job straight up.

“That’s one of those defining moments,” Danny would tell me this week, “that’s so early in your career you don’t even recognize it.”

Back then, his father, sergeant Stan Smyth, was an award-winning marksman nearing the end of a career on the firing range, teaching recruits how to safely handle their weapons.

And how to shoot straight.

On Tuesday, it didn’t take the city’s next police chief long to check with his widower father and email a response that concluded with a touch of teasing for his old-school dad.

“He generally is not at a loss for words,” Danny wrote. “However, when I shared the news with him, he was speechless. Hopefully he will recover and speak with you.”

Stan will be 84 on Remembrance Day.

But when we met this week, what struck me most was how tall, handsome and joyful he remains. Particularly because of what he shouldered when Donna Yeo, the pistol-of-a-girl he met in high school and married, had a devastating stroke that left her unable to talk or walk . And because Stan dutifully and lovingly brought her home and became her primary caregiver; taking her for drives in the countryside every afternoon. He did all of that for the 11 years after Danny’s mother had the stroke.

For the last 13 years, since Donna has been gone, Stan has lived alone.

But on Sundays, Danny and his wife, Cynthia, have him over for dinner, which is where he was last Sunday when they handed him a wine glass even though Stan rarely drinks alcohol.

“Cynthia poured me some wine,” Stan said, reaching his arm out as if he was still in that moment.

“Then, Danny said, ‘Let’s make a toast. We clinked glasses, and he said, ‘I got the job.’”

“Well, I’m standing, holding the glass,” Stan said, his arm still outstretched, still frozen the way it was momentarily Sunday when he learned his son was the next police chief.

Speechless, just as Danny joked in the email.

Well, almost speechless.

“I just said, ‘Jeez. Congratulations, I’ve been waiting and waiting.’”

Then Danny told his almost-speechless dad not to tell anyone. The public announcement wouldn’t be made until Monday.

Now it was Wednesday, and Stan was in the elevator at the new police headquarters with Danny, on his way up to the fifth floor where his son works, when someone along for the ride asked the dad if he was proud of his son.

“Yeah, definitely,” Stan said. Then he added a disclaimer: “I had nothing to do with it.”

He did, of course.

Fate is life’s wild card.

And it was that wild card that brought the child who would be police chief to Smyth’s door.

Donna had already given birth to Debbie, who was six years old, when Danny arrived with a child-care worker.

The Smyths had been having trouble conceiving, and the child-care worker asked if they would be interested in seeing a little boy who was just over a year old and walking. Stan had been against adopting. The arrival of the irresistible little guy in their home would change that.

“A soon as we saw him,” Stan recalled, “That was it. He didn’t ‘make strange’ or anything like that. So we knew he was the kid for us.”

Even if he had dark, curly hair, and they didn’t.

His birth father, it turned out, was Irish, like Stan’s family. His birth mother was Italian.

“Even at one year of age, he’d give you that big smile. So we fell in love with him. Then Donna got pregnant almost immediately.”

And along came tall, blond-haired Stanley Smyth Jr.

So what was Danny like as a kid?

“Very outgoing,” Stan said.

Self-reliant, hard-working, responsible and, of course, bright, too.

By 10 or 11, Danny was hanging out at the Public Safety Building with his dad, changing the targets at shooting competitions and then competing as a junior shooter himself.

“He’s been dragging me around since I was a kid,” is the way Danny described it.

But even though young Danny might have been destined to be a cop even back then, he went to university thinking he would go into physiotherapy because, well, back then he didn’t measure up as Winnipeg police officer He was 5-7, and the minimum height for recruits even as recently as the early 1980s was 5-10. But that was about to change.

It has been 30 years since Danny Smyth joined the police service, which he did without telling his father or mother.

“He did everything on his own,” Stan said. “There was no push from me. Basically, after he was accepted, he came home and said, ‘Dad, I applied with the police, and I got in.”

“Holy moly,” summed up Stan’s reaction.

Danny had quietly signalled his interest in becoming a police officer by working in what amounted to a social worker role at Stony Mountain Institution while he waited for the next police class opening. Between Danny’s hanging out at the Public Safety Building and his dad being a “strong role model,” Danny was destined to be a cop.

But Stan wasn’t only surprised Danny got in, he was worried.

“I was concerned because of his stature, you know. I mean, back then, you were hired for your brawn, not brains. I was concerned about his stature, that he would be picked on or beaten up,” he said.

As for being surprised, that was because Stan didn’t know the minimum height had been dropped a year or two earlier.

I wondered if Stan ever stopped worrying about Danny because he was far more brain than brawn.

“Not necessarily.”

As it turned out Danny’s “stature” would make him the perfect choice of his superiors for undercover jobs.

“They seemed to think that because of his stature he would make a very good undercover officer. Nobody would believe that this guy here is a cop. He’s too small.”

His size didn’t hurt, either, when Danny was selected for what was then known as the emergency response unit. In fact, it helped when they chose him to be the first officer through a door or even a window.

“Because I’m relatively short,” Danny said, “it’s easy to get in and out.”

Either way, the role as the so-called “down man” required leading with courage, which Danny Smyth has demonstrated in various ways over his career; including facing the cameras and the barrage of media questions on high profile or controversial cases.

Stan witnessed Danny’s gift with public speaking much earlier, when his older son gave the eulogy at Donna’s memorial service. It was at Chapel Lawn. Stan said Danny spoke so well, and with such presence, one of the staff there mistook him for a clergyman.

“He’s not a minister,” Stan corrected him. “He’s my son. He’s a policeman.”

Stan thinks his son’s greatest gift, though, is his fairness.

Plus his gift for relationships.

I wondered if Stan ever imagined that one day the curly-haired little boy he loved on first sight would grow up to be Winnipeg’s police chief.

“No, I didn’t,” Stan said. “I had no indication that he would end up where he is today.”

In part, that’s because Stan remembered what getting to the top was like in his day.

“It was you pat my back, and I’ll pat yours. It was an old boys’ club.”

And Stan didn’t see Danny being anybody’s boy. Except his.

It was near the end of our time together that I told Stan, the old firing range instructor, what he has most in common with Danny, the soon-to-be leader of the city’s police service.

“You’re both straight shooters.”

And, I told Stan, he doesn’t have to worry about the stature of his police officer son anymore.

It couldn’t be any higher.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca