I was the Accounting Officer at RCAF Station Parent between June 1957 and August 1959. Our second child was born at Parent in the military hospital, F/L G Haworth, Medical Officer officiating.
Parent was a carbon copy of Senneterre for Pinetree purposes, but was different in several ways, the most obvious being lack of road access. It was theoretically possible to get there in a vehicle on logging roads with logging company permission, but such bush roads only got enough maintenance to permit cutting and transportation of timber. When those operations were completed, roads were abandoned. I only remember one person, a member of my staff, who drove a car in – but his family arrived by train. He had to drive a very circuitous route and when he left, his car went out on a railway flatcar. A few families took cars in by rail but since there was nowhere to drive in any case, it was rather pointless.
Another difference was that the operational radar site was some distance from the RCAF domestic site. I think I was at the operational site perhaps a total of five times in two years. Security was important and I had no need to be there to do my job. Most of the NCO’s in the picture were operationally employed and although I knew each person (after all, I paid them), I never worked with them. The names I remember were the relatively few who worked at the domestic site – Accounts, Administration, Mess Halls etc.
Personally, my job was altered somewhat by the lack of a local bank. I was the town banker whether I liked it or not. We had a complicated arrangement with the bank in Senneterre and the CN Express, to deliver funds for pay days; periodically I went to Senneterre to do both RCAF and private (unofficial) transactions that couldn’t be done very well through the mail. I was entrusted with many tasks that were not illegal but certainly not done "according to the book". My superiors at Air Defence Command HQ understood the Parent situation and left me pretty much alone.
From Parent I went to AFHQ Ottawa and never again served in any branch of ADC. As at Senneterre and other Pinetree sites, many personnel never served anywhere other than Pinetree locations, and that, no doubt, continued until the system was shut down.
We returned to Parent in October 1997 mainly because my son was born there and he wanted to see it. We drove from Ottawa and made the return journey on the same day. We would, however, recommend a stop-over in Mont Laurier.
The operational site was gone. The old PMQ’s were still there in various stages of repair, mostly owned I understand by people from Montreal who use them as hunting and fishing camps. All of the other buildings such as the Recreation Hall, schools, hospital, Administration building etc. had been demolished. The gravel road starts about 40 km north of Mont Laurier and it is about 200 km into Parent. The road was quite passable, but no facilities existed.
The old village of Parent wasn’t much. The EB Eddy Company has ceased operations there. Whereas the town was once a CNR divisional point, it was only a siding and the departure of the RCAF must have been the final blow. I suppose that was true of countless places that were also closed because frequently there was no other industry.
This article was written by G. Stewart Simpson in August 1998 for use on the Pinetree Line web site.