In the 1950s, he was Daddy, the quiet father who worked hard to provide for his family. At home in Peterborough, Ontario, he somehow found time to fix up our old two-storey clapboard house and tend a big vegetable garden for our family.

He was a working class guy: a machine operator for a manufacturer of outboard motors. I was vaguely aware of his union and political activities and picked up on his beliefs in equality through offhand comments or letters he wrote to the editor of the local paper.

My earliest memory of him was when I was four years old. We were then living on the town’s outskirts on what he wryly called “the country estate.” He had lifted me onto Charlie, the white horse that normally pulled the plow for his garden. As I rode bareback clutching Charlie’s mane, Daddy gently led him along the fence line of a field, ready to catch me if I fell. He spoke quietly; seemed to have a way with horses.

After we moved into town, I loved helping him in the garden and looked forward to Sunday excursions when he drove us into the countryside. Mom packed a picnic and off we’d go on some adventure: a walk in the woods, blueberry picking amongst smooth rocks with ancient petroglyphs, or a pow wow on the nearby Ojibway First Nations reserve.

When I was about ten, the major renovations were complete and Dad was on to painting and wallpapering. He must have observed I enjoyed painting the desk and bookcase he’d made for my bedroom (blue!) and asked if I’d like to help him. Would I!

I set to work, carefully painting a few feet of the living room base boards. He wasn’t one to hand out praise but that time he did, “Not bad. You could hang out your shingle.” Shingle? I had to ask him what it meant. I was pretty proud when I found out.

Decades after he died in 1982, I finally read the stories he’d written for us in 1977 after we children had convinced him to write about his mysterious life before he met our mother.

I was to learn much that surprised me: he’d been orphaned as a child, was homeless through the worst years of the Depression, his home, when he had one, had been Saskatchewan (not Ontario as I’d assumed), he’d been blacklisted for union organizing in the 1930s, and was on the On-to-Ottawa Trek which ended with the Regina Riot.

I also learned he’d defied Canada’s Foreign Enlistment Act, hastily enacted to keep Canadians from volunteering in Spain. He had slipped into Spain by climbing the Pyrenees at night and fought as an antifascist on the side of Spain’s democratic government against a military uprising that had the backing of Hitler and Mussolini.

A year after his return, in an attempt to escape heat from the RCMP, he left Saskatoon where he’d been hiding out in the boiler room of an apartment building and crossed into the US illegally. He was gone for a year, effectively in exile.  He returned in 1941, went to Peterborough, Ontario where I presume he thought he could shake the RCMP, and met and married my mother.

While working on his book, I was particularly taken with his story about wild horses on Manitoba ranches. He didn’t break them. He gentled them. I wonder why he never mentioned it. I think back to my earliest memory of his gentle ways with me and his horse named Charlie.  To me, that says more about him than almost anything.

As I read his stories, I suspected he had an RCMP file. I was right. When it arrived, I learned he was added to their radical files in 1935 and that when I was calling him Daddy in the 1950s, he had been under monthly surveillance.

I was also finding evidence that my father intended to have his book published:  journalists had encouraged him; one offered to work with him for a fee (money he didn’t have). He even made an application for a Canada Council grant but was turned down. It was clear: My job was to make it happen.

While RCMP harassment may have been my father’s bête noire, and undoubtedly the reason we knew so little, his file was invaluable in documenting his autobiography, Fighting for Democracy: invaluable, despite being purged in the 1960s and redacted before it was sent to me in 2019.

Radical? I suspect it’s a label Jim Higgins would have worn proudly. This Father’s Day I remember my dad with a deeper understanding than I ever thought possible. By example, not proselytization, he has inspired me to see the world as he did. That’s a legacy I value.

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Fighting for Democracy: The True Story of Jim Higgins (1907-1982), A Canadian Activist in Spain’s Civil War can be ordered here.