Before he was King Ralph, before he was premier, even before he was mayor, he was just Ralph Baak Baak to us. Uncle Ralph.

He was a regular customer at my parents’ grocery store in northwest Calgary, where he would stop in almost every day. I was 6 when I began selling Uncle Ralph cigarettes.

It was the late ’70s and Ralph Klein was a reporter covering the municipal beat. Our grocery store was on his way to Calgary’s city hall.

When Uncle Ralph came into the store, we had the brand of cigarettes he smoked waiting on the counter. Some days he was a little shaky, a little tired, his eyes a little too bloodshot. On those days my father had us substitute the light brand for his regular brand and put them on the counter instead.

We liked him, my siblings and I. He always had something funny to tell us, joked with us, teased us. There was a familiarity about him that we, as newly arrived immigrants, didn’t have with many people. I assumed my mother was shocked the first time he hugged her. No man outside her family had ever put his arm around her. But it was me who was shocked when I saw her give him a pat back.

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She fed him and Klein liked that. He bought junk food at the store but my mother would often bring him a bowl of our own dinner that night or leftovers from the day before. He knew where to find the chopsticks and would sit with my father in the back room. After reading the Calgary Herald or the Calgary Sun together, they would talk.

My father’s friendship with Klein was one of the first friendships he ever had with someone not Chinese. I don’t know exactly what they talked about, but these were the most intense conversations my father had with any of his customers. One time Klein helped my father out with some issue he was having at city hall. I don’t know the details; my father doesn’t remember now.

My father always told us that if we ever needed help or got in trouble we could depend on Ralph Baak Baak. Back then, the highest praise for anyone who didn’t look like us was that he was a friend of the Chinese people.

Within the Chinese community there was a small subset of us who were fiercely loyal to Klein. We were a voting bloc for him, the Chinese grocery store families. In the social pecking order of immigrants, we were below those who owned restaurants and franchises, who in turn were below the more established immigrants who had earned degrees and worked where someone paid them regular paycheques.

This was our version of being on the wrong side of the tracks. If your family ate meals together, you had moved up in society. But we couldn’t because someone had to be behind the counter at all times — we had to eat in shifts.

Klein told my father he had worked at a neighbourhood grocery store owned by a Chinese family. His home life was turbulent; his folks had split up when he was young. This Chinese family informally adopted Klein and after that he always considered Chinese immigrant families as his own.

Later my father and Klein were colleagues when my father began to cover city hall part-time for the local Chinese-language paper. Ross Alger was the mayor, and my father remembers one of the other reporters suggesting to Klein one night: “Why don’t you run for mayor?”

Klein did, and he won. We were at the Silver Dragon restaurant in Calgary’s Chinatown when we heard the news. Everyone there, including the kitchen staff, began to cheer.

His campaign had so little money that he couldn’t afford a victory dinner. One of the Chinatown restaurant owners opened up his restaurant that night and fed Klein and his campaign volunteers, something Klein never forgot.

When he was mayor, Klein would get stopped as he walked down the street. He remembered names and he remembered, more importantly for us Chinese, titles. My paternal grandmother he knew to call amah; other grandmothers he knew to address as po po because they were from the maternal side. Amah’s first question after she got robbed one night on her way home to her apartment was whether Ralph Baak Baak could help her get her purse back.

Had Klein ended his career as the mayor after one term, his reputation would have remained intact, as a man of the people. But politics and ambition changes even those who remember those who were their friends.

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The last time I saw Klein — a former premier and no longer Ralph Baak Baak — we were sitting next to each other five years ago in an Air Canada lounge waiting for a flight to Vancouver.

I knew he no longer remembered me as the child behind the counter sliding over his pack of cigarettes. The flight attendant came up and asked him, Mr. Klein, whether he needed help boarding the plane. No one turned to see who he was.

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