Rowdy

by Ariel Teal Toombs

  That said…he and Colt roughhoused constantly when Colt was small. Once he got Roddy in such a good sleeper hold that he couldn’t break it without doing something that might genuinely hurt his son—and hurting any of us was not an option. Fortunately, Colt had the good sense to let go. Roddy turned and took a deep breath. He looked his son in the eye and said, “When you turn eighteen, I’m going to light you up, just once.”

  Years passed. Roughhousing turned to real training. Colt sparred with Roddy often as he learned his way around a ring and an opponent. Then on the morning of his eighteenth birthday Colt came downstairs. He was nervous. Dad was waiting for him. He feinted in Colt’s direction, but laughed it off. This went on all day. It was terrifying—funny for the rest of us, but terrifying for Colt. Dad never did make good on that old threat, but you can bet he relished the torture. Welcome to a ribbing, son, wrestling style.

  About a year before Roddy died, Colt was working professionally as a fighter and Roddy was still pitching in to help him learn. Colt had trained at the Los Angeles dojo of Roddy’s old instructor and friend, “Judo” Gene LeBell. He was twenty-five, fit and very capable in the ring, where he had gone undefeated as an amateur MMA fighter. Roddy was sixty—with all the wear and tear the age implies. They got sparring and decided to go pretty hard.

  A son is supposed to challenge his father. From things like eating a bigger plate of dinner to being able to outmuscle him some day, this is just life’s natural order. But on the mat, Colt couldn’t beat him.

  As much as it broke our hearts to lose our father so soon, there’s no denying that it was likely a small mercy for him. He never had to endure his own inevitable infirmity. With all the punishment his body had taken, a future in a wheelchair was likely. That would have driven him crazy.

  Still, we know that when he died he felt both misunderstood and unknown to himself and to his family, and that he saw this book as a chance for the kind of self-reflection he’d never had time to indulge. That unfinished business weighed on us. But there was one more thing that drove us to pick up where he left off. We missed our father. So we decided to finish the job for him. We would tell the story of our father’s life.

  Working on this book has given us the chance to get close to him one more time. And close to many other people, too. We have interviewed dozens of his old friends to help round out the story—from his childhood through his introduction to wrestling as he worked his way through the regional territories to the WWF/WWE, then into movies and stepping away from the ring. Through the memories they’ve generously shared, we can keep our dad’s extraordinary life close to us, and pass it down through our family for future generations.

  Even when the stories were painful, the experience of compiling them was wonderful. People’s willingness to help has gone beyond obligation. Roddy was never a fairweather friend to anyone, and in the end his friends have helped us ride out the turmoil of his passing. We are grateful to them—and we are pretty sure he is, too.

  ARIEL TEAL TOOMBS, Los Angeles, CA

  COLT BAIRD TOOMBS, Portland, OR

  March 2016

  1

  A Very Active Child

  However you remember him, Roddy Piper began life as something a lot more ordinary. And he didn’t come from Glasgow.

  Roderick George Toombs was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on April 17, 1954. His parents already had two daughters, Marilyn and Cheryl, and had been hoping for a boy. For their father, a man without a male heir was missing something. If that sounds painfully traditional, it’s for good reason. Though both Saskatchewan born, Stanley Baird Toombs and his wife, Eileen Anderson, were fiercely loyal to the stiff Victorian ways of their British roots.

  So Roddy was Canadian, not Scottish. In fact, he never gave up his Canadian citizenship. But he did come by his Scottish wrestling gimmick honestly. His grandfather George Toombs brought his bride, Euphemia Baird, to Canada in the earliest years of the twentieth century. When she left behind the Hebrides in Northwest Scotland, she also left behind the Scottish Gaelic language she’d always spoken. She was a gentle woman who spoke softly to her children and sang quietly as she worked. She and George had two children, Jack and Frances, and then nearly a decade later, two more, Gracie and Stanley, Roddy’s father. But Euphemia struggled with English, motherhood and the unforgiving landscape. She grew depressed and was institutionalized in a “rest home,” as such places were called, as if a few good sleeps and a little break from responsibility were all she needed to get out of a slump. Stanley was eleven years old when Euphemia returned home from her rest. He quickly got bored of her same porridge, roast beef and bread, so he learned to cook and took over his mother’s kitchen. Stanley was fifteen when she was buried. Like many struggling to survive in Canada in the early twentieth century, the family lost touch with its roots, and Euphemia bore the brunt of that dislocation.

  Her husband, Roddy’s grandfather George Toombs, was a strict Presbyterian, driven by a relentless work ethic, who eventually held a senior position with the Great West Life Assurance Company. His grandchildren were on strict orders for best behaviour when they visited George’s rooms at The Bessborough, a distinguished hotel built in Saskatoon by the Canadian National Railway. A butterscotch candy from the stash he kept in a desk drawer hung in the balance.

  George is remembered by his grandchildren as a man with little time for weakness, such as his wife’s mental illness or pursuits he regarded as dalliances. His eldest son, Jack, was doing well pursuing a career as an artist in New York City. George told him it was time to come home to Saskatoon and take a job with the insurance company, effectively the family business. Jack did.

  —

  Then there are the Andersons. The family tree lightens up here, a little, on Roddy’s mother’s side. Roddy’s grandmother, Charlotte Anderson, came from Chehalis, Washington, and grew up around Tacoma. Remembered by family as a generous, saintly character, Charlotte cooked for lumber camps and schools, and was well loved by everyone who knew her.

  The Andersons were all remembered as sweet, fun people. But Roddy and his sisters all recalled one exception: their maternal grandfather.

  Charlotte was married to Ernie Anderson, who grew up in Washington as well. At age eighteen he set out with his twin sisters and parents, following the promise of cheap land in Saskatchewan. A few years later, he met Charlotte, his future bride, while looking for work in tiny Nordegg, Alberta. She was working as a hotel housekeeper in the nearby town of Rocky Mountain House. They married and had six children—Stan (not to be confused with Roddy’s father, Stanley Toombs), Eileen (Roddy’s mother), Glen, Barbara, Gordon, each a year apart, and then twelve years later, Bob. In the Depression years, the desperate search for work dragged families across the mountains and prairies of the Canadian west. When Eileen was only eight years old, Ernie snuck himself on a westbound train. He left Biggar (named after a Scottish town near Edinburgh) and joined the hobos. He found a forestry job in Prince George, British Columbia. Once he’d settled, Charlotte packed up the kids and followed, but stopped halfway there, in Rocky Mountain House. Whooping cough was making its way through the children, and she got them off the train to recover with relatives before packing them up again and joining her husband in BC.

  Ernie Anderson became a heavy-equipment driver and had set up a logging firm, which kept him in the bush for much of the year. The way Roddy and his sisters tell it, his absence was a mercy for the grandchildren. He made the kids uncomfortable, and had an unhealthy taste for liquor and a knack for hurting feelings with a few well-chosen words.

  That lethal tongue found its way down the family tree to Roddy, as did the inclination to drink hard. But the Andersons might have graced him with another familiar quality. When one of his uncles tired of an old boat he’d picked up somewhere, he buried it in his backyard. If the simplest solution to a problem was also jaw-droppingly unconventional, so much the better. From coconuts to fire extinguishers, witty T-shirts to mules with Mexican head
gear, Roddy’s future admirers would become well acquainted with the family’s creative streak.

  —

  Roddy’s father, Stanley Toombs, grew into a blend of his mother’s sensitivity and his father’s inflexible ways. He also portended his son’s capacity for violence.

  “Dad was tough,” says Cheryl, “never communicated, no talking. But he loved us dearly. He wasn’t heartless.” His reticence fit with his stiff Victorian upbringing.

  Stanley met Eileen one summer when he was with the military in Prince George. Eileen had just finished high school and found a job as a waitress. The Second World War was raging, and it was common for rail bridges to be guarded closely. Stanley’s job included supervising the young guards. “He had bridge guards,” Eileen recalled. “So he said to me, one Sunday afternoon, ‘Would you like to walk down to the bridge guards?’ He wanted to check on them, to see if they needed anything. I said yes. Then the next day he said, ‘Would you like to go for another walk today?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. So we knew each other just three months and we got married.” Stanley had aspired to university and a career as an architect. He was a clever man, with a penchant for precise thinking, in math and chemistry in particular. His intellect, ambition and willingness to work should have made success easier to achieve. But his early marriage and the responsibilities of family life were stumbling blocks.

  The newlyweds settled in Saskatoon, where Stanley continued with the military. Marilyn was born there in 1943, and the endless supply of military work proved finite in a couple of years. While it remained, though, Stanley showed a bit of his son’s flair for playful trouble—and luck. “My dad trained the pilots that were going to the front lines,” explained Marilyn. “He would [fly] his squadron over the house and make Mother very angry. They’d tip their wings to say hello and then fly back to wherever he was training them. She would say, ‘Stop that! You keep waking up the baby.’”

  As an adult, bewildered at how he’d survived yet another flirtation with his own doom, Roddy would often lower his head and murmur, “Angels…” In 1945, those angels saved his father from history itself. Stanley was ordered to travel with his trainees overseas to the front lines. Training was finished and it was time to join the fight in Europe. On the way there, they were told to turn around and go home. Germany had surrendered.

  With the war over, Eileen kept busy as a Red Cross volunteer (at the age of ninety-two, when Roddy last saw her, she was still volunteering with disabled senior citizens, many of them a decade younger than she was). Stanley found work with the CN Police Service, a private police force that kept the trains and other properties of the Canadian National Railway secure—no small responsibility in the remote towns and villages of the Canadian west, some accessible only by rail.

  Cheryl was born a few years later. Roderick followed in 1954, when the world had settled down enough to get back to work. It was a complicated time for men like Stanley Toombs. His youngest daughter, Cheryl, reflected, “The men gave their lives for the old ways then came home and everything changed: civil rights, feminism. They had been just getting used to women wearing pants.” Beaten up by the war—or at least coached in its rigid ways—men like Stanley pushed back hard when their children pushed tradition’s boundaries.

  An ambitious man could dream, though. Stanley led his young family across several thousand kilometres of Canadian landscape chasing one career opportunity after another, a difficult life that meant calling no place home.

  —

  Roddy’s nomadic life didn’t begin until he was six, in 1960. Before then, as far as he was concerned, the world at 1802 Victoria Avenue in Saskatoon was idyllic. Cheryl was smitten with her baby brother. Pushing him in his pram too close to the road, she was warned by their Grandmother Anderson to stay in the garden. Cheryl turned the pram on Charlotte and chased her around the flowers and vegetables. Roderick squealed with delight.

  Cheryl described the reality of those years in a prairie city succinctly: “There were so many rules, and there were no rules.” The Victorian rulebook kept morals in check but did little for the safety of curious children. Between meals, the kids roamed freely and fended for themselves. Their mother taught the children a song to remember their address, a simple jingle that even the most frightened little person would never forget: “We live at 1802 / Victoria Avenue / My phone number’s 923-4962.” She put them through another drill if they left home and didn’t tell her where they were going. She would make them sit and listen to a record of songs meant to teach children to be safe: “Be sure Mommy knows where you go…”

  Roderick didn’t have to go far to find trouble, and for a time he was safer outside the house than in it. “In those days, the snowsuits were very heavy and wool,” began Marilyn. “Mother was doing the laundry in a huge old washing machine with a ringer. You would swing the ringer over a bathtub full of water to rinse the clothing. She had to run outside to hang one last item, and she said to [a snowsuit-clad] Rod, ‘Do not go in the bathroom,’ which is just asking for it.” When Eileen raced back into the house only moments later, Roderick was nowhere to be seen. She ran to the tub and yanked her son out of the rinse water. The snowsuit had absorbed so much water he’d sunk to the bottom and couldn’t move. “He was always doing something like that,” sighed Marilyn.

  Our father never mentioned the tub incident. But Eileen was outside the house another day when her four-year-old son’s curiosity got the better of him, and this episode, also involving laundry, he would remember—vividly. Determined to help, Roderick approached the electric wringer washer, which was in the basement. He stuck his hands in the wringer, somehow turned it on, and it pulled his right arm through the rollers right up to the shoulder. What exactly happened next is lost to time. Marilyn figured Rod must have pressed the kill switch. He remembered the machine being plugged into a dangling outlet that he could reach and that he unplugged it. Either way, he showed remarkable presence of mind. Terrified, he yanked out his arm and scraped off a long strip of skin.

  He set out for his aunt Barb’s house, a few blocks down Victoria Avenue. Once there, he fell into a rocking chair and started rocking, trying to blank out the pain while his aunt tried to figure out what her nephew had done to himself. That day Roderick Toombs began a lifelong acquaintance with hospital emergency departments. He spent two weeks in the hospital with his arm suspended.

  Remembering the incident many years later, Roddy’s mother asked him if the accident had left any scars.

  “No, nothing,” he answered, looking down the length of his right arm. “As a matter of fact, some people say it’s the most beautiful arm they’ve ever seen.”

  —

  Roderick started school in Saskatoon. When Eileen dropped him off at kindergarten, he seemed happy enough. By the time she got home he was waiting at the back door. He had decided that he didn’t like school and run home through the back streets to declare himself not interested.

  Stanley arrived at Buena Vista Public School one day to deal with his son’s unwillingness to stay in class. He looked down at a disconsolate Roderick crying to go home. The boy wrapped his arms around his father’s leg and refused to let go, and was dragged along the floor when Stanley tried to walk away. “I think I’ll just take the lad home,” he told the teachers.

  Disappointing your father when you’re beginning grade school is one thing. The disappointments would continue, though, and a distance would grow between father and son no matter how hard either tried to hold on.

  —

  One of the first athletes Roderick ever met was the neighbourhood milkman. Nobody could remember what sport he was training for, but at the front door every day he ran on the spot while taking payment for his delivery. To maintain his pace, he didn’t stop the horse pulling his delivery wagon at each address, and had to race after it to keep up. Roderick and Cheryl would sneak out to the street with carrots to tempt the horse to stop. “You little mites,” he’d yell at them. “Get those carrots away from that hors
e’s mouth.” Thanks to the running milkman, Roderick thought milk came from horses.

  He didn’t see many athletes but he saw plenty of animals, and he liked them a lot. Eileen would check his pants pockets routinely before washing them and often come out with a handful of worms. “She kept saying, ‘Rod, stop putting the worms in your pocket,’” recalled Marilyn. “‘I’m not going to tell you again!’ Finally, it took about two weeks of harping on it, it stopped suddenly. She thought, This is great. About a month later, we’re doing spring cleaning and we had some very expensive rugs lying on the hardwood. She could smell something as she was vacuuming and she lifted up the corner of the carpet and there were hundreds of worms squashed from everybody walking on them. That’s where he was putting the worms.”

  Despite their mother’s constant attention and care, Roderick felt an acute absence of affection at home. Cheryl called the family “Victorian and undemonstrative.” Looking back, Roddy wondered at his mother’s reluctance to give him a simple hug. What felt like indifference from his father caused him agonies, too. “I needed a man to snatch me up and say get your homework done, put me on the right path,” he said.

  As Roderick got bigger, his father would try to box with him. A little fame in the fight game had entered the family already. An uncle of Stanley’s on his father’s side, Charles Tupper Toombs, was a boxer and coach. “One Cup Tup” managed the YMCA Soo Boxing Club in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, training a number of fighters in the very accomplished little club until he retired in 1959. (Eileen, upon first laying eyes on her baby Roderick, had declared, “He’s got shoulders like a boxer!”)