edmonton, Alberta

Part One:
Edmonton,
Alberta
1950 – 1969
R
andolph Holton Holmes came into life near the Bay of Fundy during the
early years of the Second World War. His father, Cecil Randolph Mac
Donald Holmes, was an artillery instructor stationed in Truro, Nova Scotia, when
his fourth son was born to his second wife on February 22, 1942. “Mac” already
had three boys from his first marriage to Dorothy Richards but began a new family
with his young bride, Mabel Kathleen Holton.
After the war, they relocated back to Edmonton, Alberta, bought a little house
in the Sherbrook neighborhood, planted fruit trees and a garden in the back yard,
and settled down for a piece of that post-war prosperity everyone was talking
about. After another son, Derrick Sirett, was born, Kathleen was diagnosed with
Multiple Sclerosis, which in those days was incurable, untreatable, and debilitating. Over time, she became unable to walk or move, and since Mac was on the
road a lot selling annuities and insurance, a housekeeper was hired to care for Mrs.
Holmes and the boys.
There wasn’t a lot of parental supervision in his life, so Rand learned to find
his own way in his world. He taught himself to read, write, draw, and many other
things on his own — how to tame birds, carve model train sets, shoot pistols, and
play the banjo. He grew into a teenage rebel who identified with the past, not the
future; a loner whose pain was expressed in the cartoons and caricatures that filled
his sketchbooks. He had visions of a better life.
The wind-swept landscape of Edmonton, Alberta was the stage where his
formative years played out. His home territory was a high plateau, bordered
by the Rockies, far below the horizon to the west, and sloping down to the
Canadian prairies in the east; wheat farming to the south, and oil exploration
in the north — a town where a teenager complaining that there’s nothing to do
would be correct. Holmes was further distracted by an imagination populated
with comic characters, hot rodders, and mountain men with black powder rifles.
Sometimes he thought he was born 100 years too late, or maybe reincarnated from
9.
Students enjoy a smoke break at Ross
Sheppard High School around 1960 when
hot rods like the Ford V-8 T-Bucket were
the ultimate teen status symbol. Young
Rand Holmes sports a beard and a beret
in the background, while Four Eyes down
front carries a sketchbook with Rand’s
name on it, along with a copy of CARtoons, for which Holmes later did work.
His trademark sandals are worn by Mr.
Switchblade with a Girlfriend on the right.
someone in that period. He never figured out which.
He just knew in his heart that real adventure lay beyond
the Continental Divide, out west, where the sun set on
the Pacific Ocean, but that dream took twenty years to
become reality.
Barry McColl met Rand Holmes when they both
started grade five at Prince Charles Elementary and they
quickly became friends. “When I met Randy, we were
just little kids,” said McColl. “He moved in only a block
and a half from me. His father was a great gardener.
The whole back yard was full of trees, and vines, and
flowers and it was just amazing. We built a little fort in
the back yard out of a refrigerator crate. Then we found
another refrigerator crate and we put it on top, so we
had a kind of a two-story fort.” They also rescued and
nurtured many fledgling birds — hawks and owls and
magpies. “We raised them to a point where they could
fend for themselves, and eventually they would fly off
to join their wild cousins. The Edmonton Journal wrote
a story on Randy and me about a three-legged sparrow
we took from a nest. The bird eventually ended up at a
research department at the University of Alberta.”
One time, in grade six, Rand told a dirty joke
in class while the teacher was out of the room, said
McColl. “It was really juvenile. ‘In 1492 Columbus
sailed the ocean blue. He climbed a mast and tickled his
ass and he shit all over the crew.’ One of the girls told
the principal. The principal hauled out Randy and I,
because I was part of it. He was a good principal but he
let us know what was going on. He said, ‘What did you
say?’ And Randy said, ‘In 1492 Columbus sailed the
ocean blue. He climbed a mast and tickled his bum and
then he crapped on the crew.’ The principal said ‘Okay,
fine, I’m going to give you the strap,’ and he strapped
both of us. Another time we visited Randy’s grandfather who lived in Edmonton. Randy knew he had a
gun collection. We took his pistols, four or five of them
and we’d shoot them. We’d shoot at bullfrogs at the lake
and stuff like that. The guns eventually disappeared. I
think Randy took them back. So we weren’t angels.”
Their boldness and curiosity sometimes invited
trouble, he admitted. “There was a huge grain elevator in Edmonton, about eight stories high. You could just walk into a door on
a weekend and only a watchman would be available to cover this huge complex.
Randy and I would wander around this place, all this huge machinery. Well, the
watchman caught us one time in there and here Randy and I are on one of these
10.
one-man elevators. He shut the electricity off and he said, ‘Now I’ve got you,
you little bastards, and when I catch you I’m going to kill you.’ He was mad
and we didn’t want to meet up with this guy, but what were we going to do? He
was going to phone the cops or something. So we got off the elevator and slid
down the greasy rails it ran on and here we were with this black grease on our
clothes and our parents were going to kill us and this guy was furious that we
could get down off this thing. He got onto the floor and he was chasing us and
we were going down staircases and we were running like hell, and meanwhile
Randy is hollering insults back at this guy and infuriating him. The guy’s going
‘I’m going to kill you little bastards.’ So Randy and
I got out the door and we got about twenty-five feet
away and he’s charging out the door. Randy grabbed
me and we turned around together. He made me turn
around and he hollers out at this guy, ‘Hey mister, fuck
you and your bag of snakes.’ I swear the guy gained
another five miles an hour chasing us. I thought he was
going to catch us and beat the hell out of us. It was so
damn funny that I was laughing so hard I was falling
behind and I had to keep grabbing Randy’s arm so he
could tow me when we were running because I couldn’t
stop laughing at how mad this guy was about what
Randy had said to him. Here we were just covered in
grease and this guy kept chasing us. Well, obviously we
were two young kids, so we finally outran him, but if he
would have caught us I’m sure he would have strangled
us. So we had a lot of wonderful fun. We were very
good friends.”
McColl spent enough time at the Holmes home to
know that his friend’s family life was difficult. “I think
Randy was very upset because his mother was crippled.
The only thing she could do was go, ‘Randy, have you
got your coat on? Have you got your hat on? Are you
dressed properly for the cold weather?’ After a while, as
much as Randy loved his mother, all that nagging got
to him. The last thing she could do was exhibit care
for her children, without being able to do anything for
them. Randy would turn around and go, ‘Yes mother,
I have my goddam coat on.’ And then he would feel so
bad about it because she was so sick. Mac, his father,
hired a live-in lady to take care of Randy’s mother and
her name was Mrs. Anderson. She was a huge woman.
Randy and [his younger brother] Rett used to make
fun of her, which was a little cruel. Randy called Mrs.
Anderson the Mountain of Flesh. When I used to come
to the door, he would say, ‘Turn right at the Mountain
of Flesh.’”
11.
Below: School photo from Prince Charles
Elementary, circa 1956. Bottom: Rhett and
Randy circa 1950.
Clockwise from top-left: Mable Kathleen
Holmes with her two sons, Randolph
Holton Holmes and Derrick Sirett Holmes
in the back yard of their post-war Edmonton home. Mabel Kathleen Holton and
Cecil Randolph MacDonald Holmes met
and married in Truro, Nova Scotia during
World War II. Baby Randolph and his
mom circa 1943, Truro, Nova Scotia.
Cecil Randolph MacDonald Holmes.
Another buddy of theirs was Gordon Campbell. “We all grew up in the same
neighborhood, and we all hung out with sort of the same crowd,” said Campbell.
“His mother was bedridden at the time that I met Randy. His father I met only
a few times. His father was like an English gentleman. He was very sophisticated
and he wore a cravat. Very British. Randy was raised essentially by a housekeeper,
Mrs. Anderson. Mrs. Anderson could literally lift Mrs. Holmes and carry her
about, bathe her and feed her. She had to be fed through straws. The upbringing
wasn’t very good, unfortunately. The father wasn’t home a lot and the mother
couldn’t do anything really.”
But even perfect parents would have been put to the test with a pair of
energetic boys like Randy and Rett, admitted Campbell. “To be honest with you,
it would have been tough to have those two as kids. It would have been really
tough. They were very hard on the housekeeper, Mrs. Anderson. I used to go over
and I’d feel kind of sorry for her because we used to make fun of her. She was a
heavy lady but she did her best. You know what kids are like — how mean you can
be. That’s just the way it is. I was not mean to her, but I kind of sided with Randy
and laughed and snickered when he told her to fuck off and stuff like that. Later
I thought, gee that was an awful thing to do, but I didn’t live there and they did.
What happens is I think that you grow to resent somebody who’s looking after
your mother, and your mother is a mess and the whole life. It stunk and they never
saw their dad. Their whole life was kind of shitty for them. They weren’t raised by
a parent, really.”
When their father wasn’t traveling, he sometimes took his boys hunting with
him in the country. Both boys learned to shoot at a young age, and this transfer
12.
of the manly arts to a new generation nearly became
Mac’s demise. All three were packing shotguns and
wading through dense brush on a bird hunt when Rett
mistook his father for a fowl and fired into a rustling
hedge, hitting him in the upper torso. The boys quickly
hauled their bleeding father back to their car and rushed
him to a hospital.
“They were hunting upland game,” said McColl,
using 20 gauge shotgun shells with small lead pellets.
“Rett shot him right in the chest but his Dad had also
raised his gun up so his arm and the gunstock were
covering his vital organs, lungs and heart. His arms
and the gun took the brunt of the shot. The morning
after, Randy came and called on me at my home. He
was really upset that his father had been shot and he
was in a lot of pain. I asked him what was wrong and
he said to me, it was exactly these words, ‘Clever Rett
shot Dad.’ I’ll never forget those words. He was being
facetious, like that asshole Rett shot Dad, like what
a dumb move. I was shocked. I immediately thought
maybe his father had died from the wounds but then
he told me that he was in the hospital. So we hung out
that day. Randy was so afraid that his father was going
to die. He said there was a death rattle when he was
choking on his own blood. I’d never heard that expression before. He said it was a sound that came from the
throat when a person was dying. That’s why he was so
afraid.” Mac recovered from his wounds, but periodically a shotgun pellet would
rise up to the skin of his arms and had to be cut out.
In 1958 Holmes and McColl and Campbell entered Ross Sheppard
Composite High School as sophomores, and tried to adjust to their new surroundings. One thing that made Randy stand out in school was his sense of humor and
an amazing ability to draw, said Campbell, who watched his friend spend many
happy hours drawing in sketchbooks instead of doing homework. “I would go
over to his home quite often. Rand would be sitting there and I would be studying because I had to study because I wasn’t very smart in school. While I studied
he did caricatures. I used to look at them and wonder, how can somebody be so
talented? He always had a cartoon-like mind. He was a follower of Mad magazine
and things like that, and he would just start doing illustrations from his mind and
creating characters and cars. He was involved with the hot rod guys big time. That
was all very cool to all of us. We all admired him because of his talent. He had this
marvelous sense of humor and people were attracted to him through that. He’d
say things to you that would break you up, right off the hip. He’d let you have
one, and you’d like him right away. He wasn’t a stand-up comedian but he was
extremely smart. People that are super intelligent, and he was super intelligent,
usually see humor in everything.”
13.
“And Here He Is … The Artist Himself,” Fog City Comics #3, 1979
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Harold Hedd in Hitler’s Cocaine #1, 1984
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