Please bear in mind that the following was written in the wee hours of the morning, under stress. As witness to that, the spelling and grammar are not typical of any Owens I know. There may be some inaccuracies and that is understandable. Overall, it's a pretty good account, albeit SO brief from my knowledge of far more of Chic's life. Jimmy was told he had three, four minutes tops and he pushed it past five whilst the funeral director waved that it was time to wind up. He had to cut out a lot of the text below.

I saw the movie and it was a lot better than the book.

Eulogy of Charles Thomas Owens
Dec 19 1921 – Sept 29 2012:
(By James F.P. Owens (son))

It is very fitting that Charlie Owens should end his journey right here at St Bernard's, for this is where it all began. He was born on Dec 19 1921 on Wesley St which runs right behind this Church in a house his family rented. He was baptized right here at St Bernard's not long after that and he attended mass and went to school here throughout his childhood. He came from a loving family of 5 girls and 3 boys. He was a middle child just like me, but not mixed up at all.

Charlie's parents were John (Jack) Owens and Jesse Anne Paschal and they moved to Moncton about one hundred years ago in 1912. They were from Salmon River and North Forks on the Immigrant Rd near Chipman NB. They were very kind and loving people. Their family was of Irish descent and had a very strong cultutral identity. They were true Characters and they loved to laugh and tell stories and mimic people.

Grampy Jack was essentially an orphan. His father had been killed in the woods while Grampy was in his mother's womb. Grampy's mother re-married and then sent Grampy and his brother away to live with their uncle Uncle Jimmy Owens and later their uncle Alec Knox as they were unwanted by their step-father. Grampy never forgot the kindness of his uncles and he passed the importance of serving others on to my Father Charlie both by example.   

Grampy Jack and Gramma Jesse provided a great example fro my father of self-sacrifice for their family and selfless service and kindness to others. The importance of looking out for the little guy and supporting the underdog was deeply engrained in my father Charlie by his father and mother.

My Father's childhood spanned both the Roaring 1920's which followed WWI as well as the dire depression of the 1930's. Times were tough but my grandfather Jack worked at Willet fruit company in Moncton and so the Owens always had lots of fresh food. Grampy and Grammy Owens took in destitute nieces and nephews and looked after them when their parents could not or would not take care of them. In spite of the tough times, my grand parents provided a wonderful childhood for my father. They kept him free of worry and care except for the odd bout of severe double lung pneumonia which nearly killed him.

After that brush with death, his parents let him run free in Moncton. He played endless hours of hockey on the marshes and rinks in the winter. He fished all the local streams in the spring as well as many others in Kent county near Beersville and Claireville. He played baseball throughout the summer and hopped the train to Point De Chene where he spent hot summer days at the beach. In the fall he hunted with his father friends and brother Bill. His parents also took him and his brothers and sisters to Kent county and Salmon River where they worked on farms and learned a deep love of the woods and streams where my father hunted and fished with his cousins.

My Dad Charlie liked school but he had to quit when he was in grade eight as there were "irreconcilable differences" with a couple of nuns and a mean shop teacher. He had his reading writing and arithmetic anyway as he told me. He was ready to work and start adventuring. He and his best buddies 'Dark Cloud Leger" and Leo "Dupe" Dupuis began train hopping adventures on the numerous rail lines which emanated from Moncton on the Inter Colonial Railways. You might say he became a Hobo at the ripe old age of 14. These young rascals hopped trains free of charge to Halifax, Truro, Rimouski, St John, Fredericton, Trois Riviere, Riviere de Loup ……and all points between.

His days of adventure were soon to take on a whole new scale. War broke out in 1939 and my father rushed down to sign up at 17 years old. He was quickly turned down because he barely looked fourteen let alone 18. The next spring he ran down to the Post Office to sign up with the Carlton York regiment. This time he was 18 but he was almost 10 pounds under the weight requirement. The doctor knew how badly Charlie wanted to join. He winked at my dad and firmly pressed on his shoulders until the scale read 160 pounds. He trained with the infantry but soon volunteered to be a motor cycle dispatch ryder. Many people did not and do not realize how dangerous it was for my father. In reality he was traveling to various command posts not far from enemy lines. At one point there were 29 out of 32 of the original dispatch riders in my father's unit who were either killed or seriously injured and in the hospital.

Within a year, "Chick" as his friends called him was off on a troop ship from Halifax ship changing course every 7 minutes dodging U-Boat torpedoes for seven long weeks in a high seas adventure. My father was laying his life down for the service of his country. He chose to look at it as an opportunity for adventure. That was his optimistic and selfless attitude in the service of others.

Upon arrival in Bristol England he had shore leave with some buddies and they toured a few Ale Houses before going back to the ship to sleep in their hammocks. They slept quite sound, so much so that they missed the fire works generated by the German Dive Bombers that targeted their ship throughout that night as they snoozed away. Several ships had been hit in the port that night…this was yet just another brush with death. It appeared that someone was looking out for young Charlie.   

He spent the next 3-4 years training in schemes and giant convoys throughout Great Britain for the inevitable Normandy Invasions. He slept most nights with his back on the seat of his motor cycle with his feet on the handle bars and an oily tarp flung over himself to block out the relentless rain, sleep, wind & wet snow. You may often hear young adults say they are going to Europe on an adventure to find themselves. Charlie was in Europe on an adventure but often wished he could find himself in Canada.

Finally the big push came and the Canadian army joined the largest Armada of ships in the history of the world. They were forming the largest land invasion force ever seen since the beginning of time. Charlie landed on D-Day +2 at Juno beach and quickly dug in to support the amassing of a giant beach head. He was soon off on various missions to carry war plans, maps, orders and dispatches to various command posts for the various fronts.

For the most part he managed to avoid dive bombers, high altitude bombers, V1 Pulse jet Bombs, V2 Ballistic Missile attacks, sniper and motor fire, booby traps and of course, the rabid roving wild dogs that loved to chase his motor cycles. One night upon returning from a dispatch he was sent flying from a jeep through the darkness. To this day no one knows if it was due to a mine, a bomb or perhaps the road just suddenly ended at the edge of a massive bomb crater in the road. He was reported Missing-In-Action (MIA) in a telegram to his parents. A few days later he woke up on the Frozen French ground and realized that he was still alive. He had a broken collar bone and shoulder blade, cracked vertebrae and herniated disks in his neck. He was in a patient staging area next to a United States Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) unit. The Americans had picked him up at the scene and rescued him from a slow death of hypothermia and internal injuries. The Americans soon sent word to the Canadian army of my Father's condition once he could communicate with them.

Roughly 10 days later, the Canadian army sent another dispatch to his parents informing them that he was ok. Somehow through some act of Grace, the second telegram arrived before the first one which saved his mother and father and siblings untold anguish. Once again he survived another brush with death.

A couple of months later he was riding again and back in full swing. He along with the Canadian army moved into Antwerp Belgium. The enemy had declared that they would make Antwerp it a city without a port or a port without a city. Antwerp was under relentless attacks both day and night from V1 pulse jet rockets and V2 ballistic missiles. One day when my father was in heavy traffic, he maneuvered his way up to the front of one of the main intersections in Belgium, La Mer and Leopold Blvd. There was a stern British MP directing traffic there and he noticed my father's French Grey arm band. The MP was required to send Pops through, as he had precedence over all other traffic since he was a vital component of military communications.

The MP stopped all traffic in all directions and pointed directly at my father and briskly waved him through.   My father wasted no time and gave full throttle to his trusty Harley Davidson. Within 10 seconds, he was well down the road and rounding a corner. Suddenly the earth began to shake and then the windows to quake. All around him glass shattered and a tremendous wind overtook him as a sonic boom passed over Charlie. A Mach 10 V2 Ballistic Missile with a 4 thousand pound war head ad just hit dead center at the intersection he had just left, killing over 250 men women and children instantly and wounding countless others. It was one of the single most deadliest V2 rocket attacks of the second world war.

Charlie was getting first hand experience with the test program for missile trajectory that was later used by the great German rocket engineer Werner Von Braum to put the Neil Armstrong on the Moon.   My father scraped past this attack, and it seemed that he was being looked out for. No doubt his family were here at St Bernards in Moncton through many nights praying for him.

Charlie had many other scrapes during the war as he moved on to Holland and Germany. Somehow, he managed to survive and come home. Many of his Childhood friends were not so lucky including Leopold Dupuis (Dupe) whole left a fiancé and an unborn baby girl in England. My fathers name and those of his brother Bill and sister Lillian are scribed on banner of honour on the wall of honour here at St Bernards Church. All told there were 5 Owens children enlisted in the Canadian forces during the war, the other two being Esther who was a WAVE and Jimmy who was enlisted in the army. Neither saw action over seas.

We often asked Pops how high of a rank he achieved in the Canadian Army. He told us with a twinkle in his eye that he once made it above private to Lance-Jack Corporal but was soon busted back down where he belonged for being AWOL at an Ale house with his friends.

When he returned to Canada after the war he roamed around on more adventure in the United States working various jobs but he longed for Canada. It wasn't long before he decided to re-enlist and get an education in the Royal Canadian Corp of signals as a radio technician and weather observer as part of the largest wireless communication net on the planet, The NWT & Y fixed wireless radio. You might say it was a prelude to the wireless internet system. In fact much of the acronyms that kids use today while texting were first pioneered by Pops and his buddies throughout the arctic in the 1950s as they passed messages in Morse code on short wave radio.

Pops spent the next 10 years of his life in the high arctic contemplating his life and its purpose while he was stationed at numerous radio stations of the distant early warning line. He was assigned to numerous outposts with perhaps 6-8 other complete strangers went for up to 18 months at a time with no leave and the odd mail plane every month or two if you were lucky.    It made a posting at ALERT seem like a Caribbean vacation. The high arctic isn't unlike a desert, there is rarely precipitation due to the extreme cold and the wind blows the dry snow and ice crystals relentlessly in drifts the grains of sand in a biblical desert. It wasn't much of an existence but it was the main defence for Canada and the USA against Nuclear attack by potential long range Russian bombers. He served in various outposts including Fort Providence, Hay River, Great Bear Lake, Great Slave Lake, Baffin Island, Enneday Lake.

My father was always looking out for the little guy. As an example, there was a tribe of natives that had been decimated by starvation and their ranks had dwindled from several hundred down to less than a hundred in just 6 months. You may have heard tell of the story called "The people of the Deer. By Farley Mowat, also known ad Hardly Know-it. The caribou did not come through their normal migration routes that year and these natives depended on them for survival. My father had tried to help the tribe with food and rations from his radio station outpost.
On one occasion he noticed two little orphans who were being mistreated by the chief. A few days later, when the tribe was passing the station he noticed that tye were missing. He confronted the chief who just shrugged his shoulders. My father set out on the trail and found the two little boys huddled and shivering, on the verge of freezing to death. They looked like concentration camp victims and were essentially walking skeletons. He brought them back to the station and fed them off of his own rations. He kept them at the station for many months and gave them little jobs and purpose in life. He sent many telegrams to Canadian army headquarters and was responsible for having high ranking officers visit the area to see for themselves the tragedy taking place. He helped arrange to have what remained of the tribe evacuated by Air lift.   

When he emerged from that frozen desert wasteland he returned to Moncton full of purpose. He had given over a quarter of his life to serving Canada and his life was now half over. He was just over 40 and many people didn't count him as having any real chance of having a family. But there were other plans for Charlie. One day he spotted soon spotted a beautiful young university educated woman who worked at a local pharmacy where he used to go eat. It took him six months to to get the nerve to speak to her. He was 40 and she was 24. He Allegedly told her that he was 39 and that seemed to make all the difference in the world. They were soon married and had 4 boys in just over 4 years. This was the next chapter of Charlie's life. A life of dedication ad service to his family and the community. He volunteered as both a hockey coach and a hockey coordinator in Moncton Minor hockey association. He took his children on countless fishing trips, hunting trips and on camping adventures.

He had various jobs at Imperial automotive and Jumbo transport but soon started a company with help from his sister Esther and David Paradis in New York. He grew the business in Moncton which it eventually became know as ABCON industrial supply and many fishermen, lumberjacks, pavers etc. came to depend on his company to keep them moving. He ran the business for 25 years and it paid for lots of hockey gear, trucks trailers, houses, motor bikes, fishing rods, riffles, shotguns and camping trips, camps and cottages.

He was always there to encourage us and be a strong example of a loving dedicated father and husband. He gave up drinking when I was born and smoking a few years later. He never looked back. As always, he did it for his family. You never heard him say that he needed time to himself like you hear on many of the talk shows. He had no sense of entitlement, only a sense of giving to others and a strong sympathy for the underdog. Many of my younger uncles and older cousins have told me that my father was like a second father to many of them as many of them had lost their dads at a fairly young age.

He had struggles with alcohol as did many of the veterans of the second world war due to the horrors that they had witnessed. However, Charlie, with his faith, managed to eradicate this from his life. He also helped many others to do the same through his involvement in the Clarke Club which was a branch of AA.

He had no time for putting on airs and could not stand arrogance, selfish pride, phony behaviour. His unit was inspected by princess (later Queen) Elizabeth overseas but he wasn't phased in the least. He looked at everyone as individuals and of equal value, just with a different job to do. He always looked for the silver lining and saw at the bright side and gave his children pearls of wisdom about life that were very comforting. He had a very strong joie de vivre. He was learning to play golf in his early 80's and keeping up with those who had played their whole life.

But the years eventually would catch up with Charlie, and as he would say he was living on borrowed time anyway. Near the end of my father's he suffered terribly with metastasized cancer in his skin and lymph nodes. He was acquainted with infirmity. He was blameless, yet afflicted. He remained silent and brave and did not burden anyone with knowledge of his suffering. He fought the good fight for over three years with three operations and two bouts of radiation. He was brave until the end when he commended his spirit into the hands of the creator. We pray that he may rest in peace with God.

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Thanks to everyone for all the posts, PMs, emails and phone calls.

Lest we forget.

Thanks for everything, Uncle Chic.

Fuck, fight and hold the light. I'll see ya when I get there. I love you.