ROXBURY – By day or night, Jim Theriault can be found handling wrecks and investigating crime, or helping to extinguish fires in the River Valley area.
Mexico’s police chief of 13 years, Theriault, 57, of Roxbury, became known locally as “Jimmy Two Chiefs” in December when Roxbury selectmen appointed him chief of the town’s fire department also.
He and his wife of 36 years, Mary, live at and run Silver Lake Campground at Roxbury Pond. They bought it in 1998.
“It’s our little getaway,” she said recently of the place. Years back, it was a summer boys’ camp called Tent City, which her husband and his six brothers attended as children for $1 a week.
When Theriault’s not working at either chief job, he unwinds by playing Xbox games, feeding deer and wild turkeys, doing carpentry work at the campground, or playing three-on-three half-court basketball at the Mexico Recreation Center.
He also snowmobiles in the winter, goes four-wheeling in the summer, hunts deer, fishes, does karaoke and is president of the Mexico Lions Club.
But what he’d really like to do is travel back in time to the Old West.
A cowboy wannabe
“I have no desire to go to Florida if I retire. But I would love to be a cowboy back in the 1880s,” Theriault said during a recent interview at his home.
An avid horse rider, he watches lots of old westerns, because, he joked, “I want to be Quick Draw McGraw.”
Mary Theriault said they’re saving money to visit a dude ranch in Montana so he can experience these cowboy aspirations.
Reminiscing, Jim Theriault said he had a great childhood.
His father worked at the Rumford paper mill and drove trucks for his grandfather; his mom worked locally as a waitress. So their kids pretty much did what they wanted.
“We’d play hide-and-go-seek at night until the streetlights came on, or camp in the woods during the summer, and sleep up there sometimes during the winter, just grab a tent and go out in the woods,” Theriault said.
In third grade, he began playing team basketball. Mary was a cheerleader for an opposing team, back when there were 10,000 people in Rumford and six grade-school hoops’ teams.
Car escapade
Raised in Rumford, the couple didn’t begin dating until nearly running into Mary one day.
She was 19, had just learned how to drive and had three girls in the car with her.
Jim, who joined the Navy after graduating from high school, was home on leave from the Reserves and with a male friend.
They were traveling behind Mary’s car back to Rumford from a party in Roxbury.
“She tried to pass a car, so she toots her horn, puts her blinker on, flashes her headlights, and steps on the brake! We come about that far from hitting her,” Jim Theriault said, showing the distance with his fingers.
“So we followed her, and when they stopped, we got out and started screaming and yelling at her, in a joking way,” he added.
Shortly before Mother’s Day 1969, he asked her out.
However, tragedy struck that week when he learned on Mother’s Day that a cousin with whom he’d shared a close bond – Harry Theriault – was killed in combat in South Vietnam.
Mary recalls helping him through the grief on that first date. They married seven months later, in December 1969.
Today they have a son, three daughters and six grandchildren, all of whom live in Maine.
“He’s a good dad and a good grampy,” Mary said of her husband.
He also hasn’t lost his sense of humor.
At a family reunion with a Hawaiian theme two years ago at their campground, Theriault won third place in a Best Legs contest after Mary talked him into dressing in a hula skirt and coconut bra. That accounts for his prized hula dancer trophy.
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