By Mandy Martin

COLBORNE — A tapestry of life and love is woven around a father, Dick Newman, and son, Steven Roach. An important thread of this adventure belongs to the Canadian Armed Forces. Both men have literally and figuratively flown because of their military service.

Dick Newman grew up in Montreal. In 1937, at the age of 17, he enrolled in the Royal Montreal Regiment as a machine gunner. He really wanted to be flying but was too young to enlist in the air force without his mother’s signature. Keep in mind, at the time you couldn’t obtain a driver’s licence in Quebec if you were under 21 years of age without a parental signature. Dick’s mother wasn’t signing anything!

When Newman turned 18, he applied to join the air force. He was accepted sohe quit the army at 19 to begin training as as a bomber pilot. It was a 10-year stint. He earned his airline pilot’s licence and “threw it in a dresser drawer” before demobbing as a Flight Lieutenant, busy flying dignitaries across Canada

Now a civvie for work to support a family, that pilot’s licence came in handy. Maritime Central Airways accepted him as a captain. He piloted the first plane into Site 42 on the DEW line in northern Canada, the radar defense line now obsolete with the emergence of satellites and technology. In addition to those Iqaluit and north drop-offs, he took on passenger routes for Maritime in New Brunswick, PEI, Nova Scotia and Quebec. He spent eight years and 4,000 hours flying a DC3 carrying personnel and materials to the arctic, plus logging another 1,00 hours on all sorts of other aircraft.  There were lots of challenges: landing on eskers, limited technology by today’s standards, mountains, sand beaches — and the cold! And the long hours away from home took its toll on his first marriage which ended.

Dick next hired on with Litton in Toronto to work on the inertial guidance computing system which could pin-point motion of objects in space. He retired, but Litton Systems called one day tasking him to return to work — at Lahr, Germany. What was to have been a two-year gig grew to five years.  Now remarried, Dick had a new son, Steven. The charmed the neighborhood and fellow holidayers with his gregarious personality and curiosity. When that marriage ended, Newman returned to Canada and Steven remained in Germany with his mother.

Newman returned to Canada, bought a “hobby” farm — twice — worked another 10 years for Ontario Hydro, remarried his first wife, Fran, became an innovative businessman, and ultimately settled near Colborne, about 20 minutes’ drive from the Trenton air base, to be  near his married adult daughters.

Life has a way of interweaving dropped threads.

In the intervening years, Steven Roach’s new life included two brothers, a new surname, settling in Calgary, Alberta and, while serving in the armed forces, a move to Trenton, Ontario.

In  the summer of 1987, at the age of 17, Roach was a member of the King’s Own Calgary Regiment as a reservist. In 1988, he volunteered for a peacekeeping mission in Cyprus, Operation Snowgoose, as a member of  Lord Strathcona’s Horse (Royal Canadians). The members were comprised of reservists from across Canada. When it was announced in 1988 that the Nobel Peace Prize was being awarded to all peacekeepers, Steven, as a recipient, was 18 years old. Today, he proudly includes the medal honor on his uniform regalia.

Halfway through Roach’s tour in Cyprus, half the Lord Strathcona’s were asked to go to Lahr, Germany, his former home, to resurface the runway.  He spent six months working with the Five Air Movements Unit, loading and reloading planes.

When he returned home in 1989, Steven was two years older. He resumed his schooling but felt the age and experience gap with his classroom peers. In 1990, he joined the regular Canadian Armed Forces with the Armoured Corps.

After training at Gagetown, New Brunswick, Roach, was posted to Petawawa, Ontario, in 1991. For the next 10-11 years, he served primarily in reconnaissance with the Royal Canadian Dragoons. There were tours to Somalia in 1993, Bosnia  1994-95 with a second up to Bosnia in 1996.

In 2001, Roach applied to the Selection Board for a new trade. He remustered as a traffic technician with the air force. His wife at the time was also a traffic technician. They were posted to Winnipeg with Mobile Air Movements Section. During the four years there, Roach was deployed all over the world on missions of two days’ to two months’ duration including three tours to Camp Mirage in the Middle East in support of Canada’s Afghanistan mission.

In 2005, he was posted to 436 Squadron on Trenton as a loadmaster of CC130 Hercules. The connection between father and son grew tighter. Half-way through a tour in Afghanistan, Roach was asked if he would consider the post of loadmaster of a C17, the Globemaster, the  super-tanker of the air. “It’s a privilege, not a job,” Roach says of the opportunity.  Of the 24 loadmasters based at Trenton, only four are assigned to the two Canadian Globemasters.

Fall 2007, Roach travelled to Altus, Oklahoma for 2.5 months of highly individualized Globemaster training. In 2008, he returned, fully qualified, to Trenton, ready to assume duties on the second Globemaster when it arrived at Trenton. With the arrival of the Globemasters, in June 2008, 429 Trenton became 436 Trenton, another significant moment in time where Roach was a participant.

One of his first missions was to pick up a rented equipment for loading aircraft. He was on a post-hurricane mission to Jamaica carrying 40 engineers and equipment. He was on a humanitarian post-tsunami to Burma.  After Hurricane Gustave hit New Orleans, he was loadmaster for a flight taking hospital patients to Little Rock, Arkansas. He was in Haiti post-earthquake, too. The bulk of the flying, though, was on sustainment runs to Afghanistan an average of one every three months.

In total, Roach flew on 91 missions to Afghanistan, Sometimes the crew was deployed to Cyprus or Camp Mirage, flying every other day to Afghanistan carrying people and materials in and out. The C17, given its size, is usually the airplane called in for major troop relocations, carrying up to 150 people at a time.

Now, at 41 years of age, Roach is on to new experiences based at Esquimalt at Victoria, B.C.. He is tackling shipping and receiving logistics for the navy, still with the Mobile Air Movements Section. He’ll also be closer to his two young sons, Zachary and Calieb.

“I feel very fortunate,” Roach says quietly. “Flying is something I’ve always wanted to do.”

Before Roach deployed to B.C. in September 2011, he and Newman met for a brief photo op at the Trenton Air Museum. The duo had hoped to have two photos taken: one by a DC3 like those flown by father Newman, the other with a Globemaster on which Roach has served. The Globemasters were unavailable, on missions elsewhere in the world, but the DC3 on permanent display at the museum was ready and waiting.  Father and son mustered.

Love, life and adventure: the tapestry’s weave continues.