Roger Caron - Biography

Biography

Roger Caron was born to extremely poor parents Donat and Yvonne in Cornwall, Ontario, Canada in 1938. During his first weeks of infancy Caron could not keep food down and was constantly gasping for breath, which subsequently led him to being rushed to the local hospital on a few occasions. Though no definitive diagnosis was given for his breathlessness, Caron grew up "very edgy about anything affecting breathing." He could not swim or hold his head under a shower for too long because of it. Caron was a quiet and secretive child who liked to keep to himself and pass the time by taking apart clocks.

His sister Suzanne was born in 1939 and younger brother Gaston followed in 1944. His father Donat, being twenty years older than Yvonne, had children from a previous marriage, Caron's half-brothers and -sisters, who by this time were off fighting in World War II. The family lived in an old run-down converted barn that would vibrate when a nearby train passed, rattling dishes and moving beds while the family slept. Caron's mother, Yvonne, was compulsively clean and kept the antique furniture in the house shining.

Caron was "spooked" easily as a young child. With their house full of religious articles and the dishes rattling and bed shaking caused by the train, Caron felt ghosts were haunting him. Up until the age of eight, he was plagued by horrifying nightmares that would leave him physically ill. He would imagine shadowy apparitions coming through the bars of his bed to choke him or large waves that would crash over him making it impossible to breathe. Later, a parish priest was able to help Caron fend off his nightmares. He (Caron) told the priest he had accidentally broken the hand off a large Saint Joseph statue in his house while playing, thinking Saint Joseph's vengful spirit was choking him in the night. The priest had him pray to the life-size Saint Joseph statue at the church where the Father explained to the saint that the boy was only young and did not know better. He gave Caron a silver medallion to wear around his neck and said Saint Joseph would be his protector from now on. Caron's nightmares disappeared and he continued to wear the medallion through adulthood.

During the final years of World War II, Caron's father found it difficult to feed the family and turned to bootlegging as a source for income. In the beginning it was a small-scale operation, but it soon grew to a level at which Donat would have to rent parking for his customers and find hiding places for the surplus booze. The family's house was raided numerous times by the local police until Caron's father struck a deal with a local officer who would warn them when a raid was coming for twenty-five dollars a week. When a tip was phoned in, the family would rush outside and hide all the bottles in the empty field next to their house and the police were left empty-handed. Donat would chuckle at having outwitted the law once again all while young Caron sat by observing everything, wondering what was "right" and what was "wrong."

Around age eleven, Caron began having altercations with his father's drunken "customers." In one instance, a man killed his pet rooster claiming it was an accident. Caron flew into a rage and he had to be physically pulled off the man. His father beat him severely. Beatings from his alcoholic father and fighting between his parents became more common as the bootlegging business continued to grow. Donat would later give up drinking and bootlegging after realizing the damage that was being done to the family.

Caron cites this as the time when he began feeling as if he was a bad seed. He felt a tremendous drive to do something shocking. People in the community would cast scorn on Caron but, not wanting them to see they were emotionally scarring him, he would laugh it off and run away and do something bad. His older stepbrothers would hold him down while his father mercilessly whipped Caron when he got into trouble. The whippings had little effect on Caron and he would find other ways to punish himself like punching a shed door until his knuckles bled.

Caron's first brush with the law came at age twelve. He and a gang of youths broke into a boxcar with the intention of stealing canned goods. The police arrived and Caron made a daring escape, darting between an arresting officer's legs. One of the other youths gave up Caron's name and a motorcycle officer arrived at his school and arrested him in front of his class. The class waved goodbye as he rode away, a passenger in the motorcycle's sidecar, remarking how he "felt like Dillinger". At the court appearance, Caron was let off with probation and a stern lecture by the judge.

By age fourteen Caron had become more of a loner and had a hair-trigger temper that would get him into trouble regularly. He would appear quiet and easygoing on the surface but would launch into a full-blown rage if pushed. At fifteen, Caron had built a lengthy arrest record topped off by stealing the town's cache of Dominion Day fireworks and three kegs of gunpowder with two other boys. At age sixteen on September 8, 1954, Caron tripped the alarm at a sporting goods store. The police caught him after he hit his head on a beam in an alley and fell while escaping. On October 17 Caron was driven to the Ontario Reformatory in Guelph, Ontario with other future inmates on a bus dubbed the "Black Maria." His memoir Go-Boy! documents the next twenty-three years of his life.

Roger Caron's nephew, son of his brother Ray Caron, Jay Caron was shot dead in the back by Cornwall Police. Jay's younger brother Raymond named his son after his brother. A common mistake is that his son was shot. Roger does not have any children because he has spent much of his life incarcerated.