The year my uncle got married was 1940 and the world was at war. My uncle's family lived in a small town in north-western Ontario. His fiancée was a farm-raised girl from Alberta. Because it was wartime, almost everything was rationed including alcoholic beverages. Families were allowed only one bottle of hard liquor per month. My uncle had to travel about twenty miles to a larger town where there was a government liquor outlet. About six months before the wedding he started making monthly trips to accumulate enough liquor for the small wedding reception. Not having a car, he travelled by taxi, the only one in town. A few days before the ceremony, family members and guests from Winnipeg and Alberta began to arrive.

Two nights before the wedding at about 9:00 p.m. there was a loud banging at the door. My grandfather and uncle opened the door, and standing there were two very tall and large men who, without invitation stepped into the house and claimed to be members of the OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) although they wore no uniforms and produced no identification.

They turned to my uncle and one of them said, "You have some liquor in the house." He said it as a statement not as a question, and his tone of voice was both accusatory and hostile. My uncle explained, "Yes, I have six bottles which I have collected over the past six months because I'm getting married in a couple of days and want to use it for the reception."

The other man exclaimed in an equally unfriendly tone, "Yeah, let's see it." My uncle led them to a bedroom and showed them the six bottles stored in a closet. Without so much as a "Sorry to have bothered you," the two gorillas prepared to leave. They seemed almost disappointed that the liquor was there intact and spoken for.

During this bizarre scenario, I as a teenager with a social conscience was doing a slow burn. I thought how ironical it was that while the allies were fighting a war to stop tyranny and oppression, we were witnessing a brand of fascism at our own doorstep. As the two goons approached the door I could not contain my anger and I blurted out, "What makes you guys think you can barge into a private home without a search warrant, without uniforms, and claiming to be police officers?" One of them turned to me and snarled, "Oh, a smart kid, eh?" I would have said a lot more except that my grandfather and uncle were hustling me out of the room and telling me to keep quiet.

They feared that these two men, sworn to uphold the law, might retaliate in some way. So I held my peace while the peace officers left without further incident. While I was writing this story, I reflected on how an incident like this couldn't happen today. Or could it?

The wedding ceremony and reception provided a lighter side to the grimness of the unceremonious and uncivil reception from the OPP. Indeed, we even experienced a humorous incident during the night following the reception. At about 3:00 a.m. everyone was fast asleep, everyone that is except the mother of the bride. The newlyweds occupied the bridal bedroom since there was no decent hotel in town and a honeymoon in wartime was a luxury that few people could afford. The bride's mother, lying awake, heard some moaning and suddenly became wide awake. She got up, walked toward the bridal bedroom and placed her ear against the door wondering what might have befallen her poor daughter. Hearing nothing she listened at the doors of the other bedrooms until she discovered that the moaning noise was coming from the bedroom occupied by my parents. What the poor distraught lady did not know was that sometimes, when my mother slept on her back, she would let loose this blood-curdling moan. This was explained next morning to everyone's merriment.

At breakfast we speculated about how the OPP could have known about the cache of liquor in the house. The only other person who knew about it was the taxi driver. Why would he want to report such an insignificant incident to the police? Then my uncle revealed that the taxi driver was also a bootlegger. This revelation opened up the discussion to even more speculation. Did he think that my uncle was setting up a bootlegging business in competition? Was he angry that the liquor wasn't purchased from him? Was he in some sort of nefarious partnership with the cops?

No one will ever know. All we know for sure is that that was some wedding!