Ever since he was a young boy, art and military service have been entwined within Airdrie-based artist and Royal Canadian Air Force veteran Bob Harriman.
Harriman’s grandfather, Major John Harriman, fought at Vimy Ridge. One day when Harriman was just a boy, his grandfather sat him down on his knee to teach him how to draw Scotty dogs. It made a lasting impression, according to Harriman.
“He (John) had gotten gassed,” Harriman recalled, “and his left hand was sort of curled up. He had the fingers there, but they weren’t very useful.”
He said his grandfather would walk down the street in Niagara Falls and a lot of the guys going by would greet him by saying, ‘Hi, Major.’
“They all called him the Major,” Harriman said. “I assume all those who knew him knew he had gone to Vimy, what he had survived and gone through over there. There was just that kind of respect.”
Harriman idolized his grandfather, and when the Korean War broke out in 1952, he dropped out of school to join the military. The 17-year-old and a couple of his friends all had left Niagara Falls together to enlist without their parents’ permission.
Harriman was the only one who went through with signing up, but admitted his parents and grandfather were not happy about it. They only reluctantly let him go.
His grandfather later wrote him a letter in boot camp expressing his disappointment, and had told him he had planned to either send him to Ryerson University in Toronto (now called Toronto Metropolitan University) to become a millwright or Allbright Art School in Buffalo, New York to enhance his art skills.
His choice to join the military might have been different had he known in advance what his grandfather had planned for him, but Harriman said he has absolutely no regrets about his military service.
“In hindsight, I am glad he didn’t,” Harriman said. “Because the experiences I had all through the air force, the travel I had, the experiences I wouldn’t have had. I even met my wife, Pat, at a Legion dance in Montreal.”
Harriman would spend his first five-year term of service as an airframe technician. He never served in the Korean War personally, but had friends who did. Two of them died while fighting in those far-away fields, and Harriman has difficulty talking about it to this day.
Harriman would re-up for five more years after he received a last-minute promotion to corporal. This time, he would be able to fulfil his RCAF dream job and work as an flight engineer on DC-4 “North Star” aircraft. The DC-4s were the workhorses of the Canadian military in those days, hauling troops and supplies around the world to help Canada’s efforts during the Cold War.
While Harriman travelled to many places in this role, none were so potent in his memory as the mission his crew undertook to help with the relief effort during the 1960 Valdivia earthquake and tsunami, also known as the Great Chilean Earthquake.
On May 22, 1960, the largest earthquake ever recorded struck the Valdivia area south of Santiago, Chile. The quake measured 9.6 on the Richter Scale and killed as many as 6,000 people in the immediate aftermath. The earthquake also induced tsunamis that affected southern Chile, Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, China, eastern New Zealand, southeast Australia, and the Aleutian Islands.
Some localized tsunamis severely battered the Chilean coast, with waves up to 25 metres high. These devastating tsunamis killed people as far away as Hawaii and Japan.
Harriman was on the first relief flight into Chile just after the earthquake struck, bringing in Canadian supplies and Red Cross workers.
“We were the first aircraft to land in Santiago, and I think we had about 40 Red Cross people on board and a whole bunch of stuff like that,” Harriman remembered. “We were the first plane to arrive with help.”
As the first passenger lift aircraft on the scene, Harriman’s crew was tasked with flying the first critically injured survivors out of Valdivia to emergency medical aid in Santiago. The DC-4 had a rated carrying capacity of 48 passengers.
“We were bringing back 98 people and they were all injured really bad,” Harriman recalled somberly. “These weren’t minor injuries – they were really in bad shape.”
What Harriman remembers most was hosing out the cargo area of the aircraft after the last of the patients had been removed for triage. It drove home to him how devastating the Great Chilean Earthquake really was, more than any radio report ever could.
It was the only medi-evac flight he and his crew would be able to make as a tsunami swamped the only available runway in Valdivia shortly thereafter.
It is memories like these that continue to drive his passion for the Canadian military to this day, and his strong feeling about equipping current Canadian forces properly.
“We get secondhand F-18s from Australia rather than buy a new F-35,” he said. “We buy three or four submarines from the U.K. that never did work.
“The day (the politicians) realize how important it is when what is happening over in Ukraine now spills out of Ukraine. And then if it really spills out, you’ll have nothing to defend yourself with. You can’t produce airplanes overnight.”
Harriman got out of the service in 1962, and went on to hold jobs in various air maintenance, drafting, and sales-related jobs for the rest of his working life.
Now 88 years old, Harriman never gave up on his art – even while busy earning a living for his family.
But it was only when he finally retired from the rat race that his art came into stronger focus for him. He and wife Pat moved to Airdrie in 2006 to be closer to their children and grandchildren.
As he’s grown older, Harriman admits that his art has become more and more strongly influenced by his reverence for the soldiers who have died in service to Canada, with images of ghostly soldiers, white crosses, and red poppies bleeding into his work unexpectedly at times.
Harriman now spends some time daily reflecting on that sacrifice before he heads down to his studio to produce his latest work of art. Daily remembrance is important, he said.
“If (people) don’t remember, they won’t realize how lucky we are,” Harriman stated. “If they don’t realize how lucky we are, they won’t do anything to make sure it doesn’t happen (again).”
To view Bob Harriman’s art, visit www.bobh4art.com.
