He remembers “listening to the older fellows saying ‘look, Sandy, if you want to make anything of yourself, you’re not going to do it around here.’ I said ‘but this is home.’ They said ‘well, it may well be, but…what is here for you?...I said ‘all these old guys can’t be wrong.’ I was a young whippersnapper, but I had enough common sense to realize they can’t all be wrong.”
Christie was working at Bonda Textiles at the time and he acknowledges he might have done OK had he stayed there, but he opted to leave.
Doucette had planned on going with him, but he hurt his knee and so his departure was delayed. Doucette laughs at the memory of Christie leaving anyway. “He took off without me. He left me.”
Christie chuckles when asked why he didn’t stick around for Doucette’s leg to heal, saying, “I didn’t know how long it was going to take.”
Christie applied for the navy’s combat engineers and ended up on the ground in Vietnam with the Marines. He did two tours and was wounded both times.
Doucette – who recalls working at Owen Nickerson’s meat market on John Street – says his reasons for leaving the area were similar to Christie’s. He left Yarmouth a couple of years after his friend and made it to California, where he had a brother.
“I got over there, I guess I was about 19…worked all over the place,” he said. “I decided ‘this is not for me’…I figured I’d join the army. I got in the engineers, operating engineers, and I stayed in Texas and they shipped me to Vietnam for a year.”
He eventually returned to California, which remains his home.
The two former Yarmouthians – who still have family here – say they have thought about moving back to Nova Scotia but instead have stayed in the U.S. This subject too prompts some light laughter, Christie recalling an occasion when his wife, a southerner, was here for a cold-weather visit.
“I brought her up here one time in the winter,” he said. “She said ‘if you ever do that to me again, I’ll divorce you.’”
Christie and Doucette note that Yarmouth has changed a great deal since the days they lived here. They mention Starrs Road as a good example.
“We used to go out there and play hockey on Broad Brook,” Christie said. “There was nothing but a pond and a little brook through there. That was it…We didn’t go up there in the summertime, there was no reason to.”
The changes on Water Street have struck them too, Christie calling the improvements there “amazing.”
Getting back to his reunion with Doucette, Christie was asked about the best part of seeing his old friend again after all these years.
“Just being able to go over and talk about the good times we used to have and just seeing him, being around him, remembering how much fun we had,” he said.
