This Book is Now Available On Amazon

Photo (2012): Grayson gazes out over the North Thompson River and the
mountains beyond:  “Grandpa, we need to go see what’s beyond those mountains.”
(Cover Photo Arrangement by Alysha McNeill)

Link to KDP Book (make sure you order on the January 4, 2025 edition)

Dear Reader,

The following chronicles were written during the magical summer of 2012 when five-year old Grayson Edward Walker, along with his Grandpa, Harold David McNeill, his brother, Jay Wesley McNeill and a close family friend, Bjorn Oscar Simonsen (Uncle Bjorn) completed an exploratory expedition through British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan. While the trip through British Columbia was relatively peaceful, once they hit the Alberta border, they entered a new and perilous world. After visiting family and friends across the Province they hit out for Saskatchewan to visit the places where Grandpa was born and where Uncle Bjorn and his family first landed when they emmigrated to Canada from Norway in the early 1950s. In this Province they would again be faced with many hurdles as they visited the many farms and historic sites that were part of the family history.

The 200 page book is filled with dozes of full colour photographs of family, friends, events and special places in the lives of the intrepid explorers. Dozens of Chapters are written from the perspective of Grayson.

Cheers,

Harold, Grayson, Jay, and Bjorn

Contact Harold at: lowerislandsoccer@shaw.ca

FOR MORE PHOTOS OF BEAVER BOARDWALK: LINK HERE

FOR MORE PHOTOS OF AUNT PAT’S BIRTHDAY: LINK HERE

COMMENTS ON THE STORY CAN BE MADE ON THE MCNEILL LIFE STORIES FACEBOOK PAGE 

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Photo (2014): Winter Storm Watch in Tofino, British Columbia
An avid West Coast and Prairie Explorer, there are few parts of Western Canada that
Harold has not touched by land, sea, or air. Many dozens of these adventures with
family, friends, work, and volunteerism, are chronicled on this blog and in hundreds of Facebook posts.
Most of the stories are now being rewritten, proofed, and published in book form (see Appendix A)

Harold was born in 1941 and started life on his parent’s homestead in Northwest Saskatchewan where he was surrounded by a wider family circle who immigrated to Canada from the United States in the early 1900s. In his early teens, the family settled in Cold Lake, Alberta, where Harold became interested in flying bush planes as they were still in regular use throughout the area and next door was the largest airforce training base in Canada, RCAF Station Cold Lake. During his High School years, along with his best friend, Aaron Pinsky, the boys worked part-time filleting fish at a packing plant owned by Aaron’s dad. As Aaron’s dad also leased a number of aircraft to haul fish from northern lakes, the boys picked up a lot of ad hoc flying time while assisting the regular pilots in loading and unloading airplanes as well as prepping the float or ski equipped aircraft for flight.

After Harold landed his first major job as a Crash Rescue Fireman with the United States Air Force Strategic Air Command based at Cold Lake, he also began flying training at the RCAF Station Flying Club were he was surrounded by the latest fighter jets and bombers that arrived from around the world for all-weather training. It was a crazy time when the world teetered at the edge of a nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War. After gaining his private pilots licence and float endorsement, he began flying as pilot in command on many of the aircraft on which he worked during his high school years. He later earned his Commercial Pilots Licence and one of the bush planes he flew, CF-AXL, holds special memories as it is now housed in the National Air and Space Museum in Ottawa.

Photo: This photo of an Oil Painting of CF-AXL graced the cover of the Canadian Aviation Historical Society’s 2000 Edition. Built in the 1930s, the aircraft was taken out of production in the early 1940s so the Fairchild Aircraft Company could concentrate on building bombers for World War II.

When the US Air Force closed their operations in Canada, Harold was transferred to Victoria where he spent a year and a half with the Dockyard Fire Department while serving at locations around the Lower Island (Dockyard, Naden, Belmont Park, and Victoria Airport). Finding work in a navy oriented system was not to his liking, he shopped around for flying jobs and opportunities that did arrive would take him back to remote communities in British Columbia. As he like living in a city after spending most all his life in the wilderness, he encouraged to join the police by a friend in the RCMP. After joining the Oak Bay Police in late 1964, he was among the first troop of recruits from Victoria, Oak Bay, and Esquimalt Departments, to attend the Vancouver Police Training Academy. As he thoroughly enjoyed police work, he decided to stay with Oak Bay  rather than head north continue flying. Flying then became a leisure time activity as he flew family and friends on site sight-seeing trips.

In the police, he became a highly respected career police officer (now retired) and, over the course of his thirty year career, participated in dozens of high-profile cases in cooperation with police agencies across British Columbia and Western Canada. Mid-career, he earned a BSc at the University of Victoria, and later spent two years studying police administrative systems in Greater Victoria and across the Lower Mainland, as well as assisting in various studies related to policing activities (12-hour shift and other administrative, and operational systems). He wrote the first Operations Manual for the Oak Bay Police.

After retirement, he followed a volunteer path where he became deeply involved in the administration of sports at the local, provincial, national, and international level. Over a fifteen-year period he wrote Constitution and Bylaw documents for various organizations as well as Operational Manuals for Layritz Little League, Prospect Lake Soccer, Lower Island Soccer, British Columbia Soccer and other organizations. In a twist of fate, and along with others, he was instrumental in helping to merge the Lower Islands Boy’s Soccer with Lower Island Girls. With eleven clubs in the Lower Island (from Cowichan South), the new system worked almost exactly the same as the Capital Regional District system in Lower Island.

His contributions for outstanding service have been recognized with awards from the Greater Victoria Hospital Society (1994), the City of Victoria Mayor’s Commendation (2007), and the Rotary Club’s Certificate of Recognition (2008). In recognition of his contributions to the world of sport, he was a recipient of the BC Soccer Association’s (BCSA) Award of Merit (2004), the Lower Island Soccer Association Presidents Award for Excellence (2006), and was named Greater Victoria Sportsman of the Year Award (2005) by the Victoria Sports Council.

He and his team of volunteers were instrumental in securing many prestigious events for the region including Group C of the 2002 U19 Women’s World Championship, Group B of the 2002 CONCACAF Women’s Gold Cup, Group B of the 2003 CONCACAF Men’s U17 World Tournament, and Group F of the 2007 Men’s U20 World Cup. He served several terms as Secretary to the Lower Island Soccer Association, then terms as Director and First Vice-President with the BC Soccer Association (2005-2009). Together with his wife, Lynn, he helped to promote the 2009 BC Scotties Tournament of Hearts across BC, and, in the following year, the couple were Team Leaders while hosting in the Athletes Village at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Whistler.

Over the years, Harold continued in-depth study and writing on policing, politics, travel, and issues related to the amalgamation debate within the Capital Region and across Canada. He brings his extensive lived experience and broad perspective to dozens of stories written over the past thirty years, many of which are posted (in rough form). The following stories are currently being transformed to books.

BOOKS BY H. D. MCNEILL

 The Grayson Chronicles (Published January 4, 2025): Now available on Kindle Direct Publishing:

A five-year-old boy tells the story of a month-long camping trip with his grandfather as they visit the places of his grandfather’s youth in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Along the way, they meet dozens of relatives as they work their way past mosquitoes as large as dragonflies and listen and watch as giant thunder and lightning storms roll across the prairies, creating flash floods that wash out highways and byways. They meet killer trucks in Alberta that hate BC licence plates, and that try to give the older drivers who intrude upon their highways, a heart attack. In Saskatchewan, they meet buffalo the size of our trailer, and gigantic round bales of hay that, once set in motion by a tornado, could flatten a town. It was also a time of falling in love and the crushing hurt of being left behind for someone else.

The Amalgamation Debate in the Capital Region (With Perspectives from Across Canada) (Publish Spring 2026)

The information contained in this handbook was distilled from a substantial number of articles written over the past decade about amalgamation, a topic that has been circulating within our communities for the past 50 years. Some may not realize that, in the 1960s, the British Columbia Government under the leadership of W.A.C. Bennet, undertook the largest series of amalgamations in the history of Canada. These amalgamations had been years in the planning, as discussions took place in cities, towns, municipalities, and electoral areas across the Province. The Capital Regional District (CRD) comprising South Vancouver Island was the first off the mark to test the system in 1965. Over the following five years, 28 other districts were established.

An Ancestral Journey: The McNeills, Wheelers & Descendants (Two Volumes – To publish September 2025)

Volume 1. Sails And Trails West (1500 – 1800+)

In this volume, we take up the first part of our direct family history from the late 1500s while family members were living in England and Northern Ireland. We seek to place these family histories within the context of the major events (political, economic, and religious)  that defined each century in which they lived – first in the old world and then in the new. After migrating to North America, we follow the families through the immense challenges they faced as they scratched out a hand-to-mouth existence on raw land – the Wheelers in Massachusetts and Canada, and the McNeills and Elliots in Virginia, territories in the South, Dakota territory, and Canada.

Within each decade, we also trace the fate of the indigenous peoples as they sought to resist being overwhelmed by the influx of Europeans. We see the vast difference between what the future held for the indigenous peoples of the United States vs. those of the Northern Territories in a nation that came to be called Canada. Throughout the centuries, we follow the fate of the African slaves whose history parallels the dreadful path along which the indigenous peoples were propelled. Within those paths, we see the threads of historic events that lead Canada to become very different country socially, politically and religiously, from that of the United States.

Volume 2. Trails North And West (1824 – 2024) (To publish Sept/Oct 2025)

This more recent history provides greater firsthand detail of the Wheelers, McNeills, Elliots, and related family lines, based on an abundance of firsthand writings and photos that traced their lives from Michigan (Wheelers) and South Dakota (McNeills) to Canada in the late 1800s. The path followed by the Elliots is less clear as there were fewer firsthand accounts; however, information discovered about other parts of the Elliot clan could easily apply to our own, based on inference of location origins in Northern Ireland and the United States.

After the three family groups moved to Western Canada in 1910, a wealth of available information has allowed the author to follow each family through the first sixty years of the 1900s – a family history that mirrored that of thousands of migrants who settled, then re-settled, in Western Canada. The final pages are dedicated to a snapshot biography of each of the 21 children of our grandparents, including the names of their children.

Flying, Fire, and Police: The Career Stories of Harold David McNeill (1960 – 1994) (Publish December 2025)

From the bush planes of the far north to the warplanes of the Cold War, author Harold David McNeill lived the dream of many young men. He had the good fortune of coming of age following World War II and graduated from Cold Lake High School, Alberta, in 1960. After completing a stint as a Crash Rescue Fireman at the US Air Force Base near CFB Cold Lake and earning his private pilot’s licence, he flew float- and ski-equipped aircraft while hauling fish from remote lakes in northeast Alberta. Later, after being transferred to the Dockyard Fire Department in Esquimalt, BC, he completed basic training at the Vancouver Police Academy and subsequently joined the Oak Bay Police Department. During his early police career he also gained his commercial pilot’s licence at the Victoria Flying Club.

While life as a Detective Sergeant with Oak Bay Police involved considerable community service, criminal matters often occupied days, weeks and months in methodical and often complex investigations; several of these cases attained national and international coverage and remain in the news to this day (e.g. the Telesford Case). On the community side, Oak Bay provided a unique opportunity to become deeply involved in school and community programs where a “no call too small” philosophy made policing satisfying in many ways. This book contains dozens of case studies, notes and evidence lists from initial investigation to arrest, trial and conviction. Among the cases are many colourful characters whose antics made a lasting impression on the investigating officers.

Police, Politics, and Religion (Publish Fall 2026)
In this book, an ongoing series of discussions about matters of local, provincial, and national interest is used to pinpoint the need for all organizations and police officers to direct their duty toward the common good rather than self-interest. But one example, is an editorial on why police are often responsible for restrictions being placed on their investigative methods, and why police bias against many victims can lead to tragic outcomes.

The World Cup Years (1996 – 2009) (Publish Winter 2027)

Even though soccer is the most popular sport in terms of numbers among Canadian youth, it still lags in the professional field. Within Canada, we have the National Women’s Team to thank for putting Canada in the international spotlight in a manner that has propelled the sport into a new era of popularity around the world. Over a period of fifteen years, the author became deeply involved in the administration of soccer as well as the presentation of competitions at the local, provincial, national, and international levels.

World Travel Stories (1995 – 2020) (Publish Spring 2027)

Only in retirement, at age 53, did national and world travel become a regular feature of life for the author. Out of these trips came dozens of stories about life in other parts of the world and why we should be thankful to live in Canada. It was also a time of learning, as each story is backed by research into the history and current issues of the countries visited.

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Kari’s Birthday Celebration

Kari’s Birthday Slideshow

Photos

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