MOOSOMIN — What started as a chance visit to the Manitoba Antique Automobile Museum in Elkhorn launched an amazing journey, linking a string of communities through southeast Saskatchewan and southwest Manitoba. Darrell Hunter and Lisl Gunderman live in Seba Beach, Alta, but were spending time at their cottage at White Bear in the summer of 2022.
“We had always heard about this Elkhorn Museum, and its restored antique cars,” Gunderman, a recently retired teacher, recalled. “We decided that we would go to Elkhorn, to the museum, just for a day trip because I’d never been there and hadn’t seen it.”
Another reason for the couple to visit the museum was in their family history. Gunderman is the oldest grandchild of Dr. Gerry Galloway, who practised throughout the southeast, primarily in the Alameda and Oxbow areas. Dr. Galloway was also famous for using a snow plane in the late 1940s, and family history suggested that the machine had ended up in the Elkhorn Museum at some point.
“When we got there, I asked the summer staff if they had a snow plane there, if there had ever been a snow plane there,” Gunderman said, learning that one had been brought to the museum the previous year, but was in pieces.
“When I saw it, it was just a pile of rusted parts in a heap,” Gunderman said.
But one special piece linked the pile of parts to that historic snow plane. Dr. Galloway had painted an image of a stork on the snow plane, and upon closer inspection, Gunderman discovered what their family had believed to be long lost.
“When I looked around at the sides of it, I could see the bottom of the stork’s legs on the side,” she explained. “That was the stork emblem that I completely knew from all the time I was growing up. So that was a smoking gun for me.”
Gunderman and Hunter would later learn that the snow plane had been sent to a hot rod shop in Calgary to be restored.
“It stayed in Calgary for 15 years or more, and then that hot rod shop in Calgary closed down,” Gunderman said.
The people in charge of dispersing items from the shop had returned the pieces to the Manitoba Antique Automobile Museum in 2021, where it lay in wait.
“The other funny thing is once we were at the museum and saw the snow plane, we stayed around the museum afterwards because we were kind of in shock, so we just sort of hung around there for like an extra half hour,” Gunderman said. “But right on the wall in the Elkhorn Museum is a copy of the return quote letter to my grandpa from the Fudge Factory. On it was an answer letter for his request for a quote.”
According to the Dec. 1, 1947 quote, the Fudge Snow Sedan would cost Dr. Galloway $1,342 — roughly $20,700 in today’s dollars.
By all accounts, it was a top-of-the-line model for 1947, complete with a Chrysler T112 industrial motor, radiator, battery, and adjustable three-blade propeller. The shipping weight of the Fudge Snow Sedan was 1,150 lbs, and the model came in the standard silver finish.
We found it, now what?
Excited about the discovery of her grandfather’s snow plane, Gunderman wondered what the next steps might be. After all, it had been donated to a museum—it surely can’t be as simple as just asking for it back.
“You can’t just show up on the scene and say, ‘hey, we’re the family and we’d love to have this back’ or something, right? So we didn’t know what to do,” she said.
Gunderman decided to compose a heartfelt letter to the museum detailing their desire to return the piece to its former glory.
“We just put the offer out there, like we’d be really happy to go into a collaborative partnership with them on the restoration of it,” she said.
The museum committee was delighted by the offer, and what evolved was a five-year commitment between the couple and the museum.
“We would restore it at our own expense, and then it would go back to the museum in a five-year time frame,” Gunderman said. “But my husband is really energetic, he does not procrastinate, and it’s really close to being finished! Ultimately, it would be part of the Manitoba Antique Automobile Museum collection. We’re just very happy out of respect and love to have it be a piece that’s locked into history.”
During the restoration process, the museum board in Elkhorn wanted to see how things were going with the snow plane in Alberta, so Hunter turned to technology as a way of bridging the gap.
“Instead of sending them pictures and everybody not getting the same message, I started an Instagram account, and at their monthly meetings, they pull out the Instagram account and they share the pictures,” he explained.
Connecting communities
Dr. Galloway was born in Alameda, which is also where he started practising as a young doctor in 1947. Gerry and Hilda Galloway moved to Oxbow in 1951, where he would continue to work as a doctor until his death 40 years later. Gerry was actually the second Galloway to serve as a doctor in the region, as his father, Harry, was a practising physician from 1906 to 1938. Also, Harry’s father, William Galloway, settled the family on a homestead near Oxbow in 1882.
“In 1947, when he was starting out, all of his work would have primarily been going out to do house calls—delivering babies and helping people who were in trouble,” Gunderman said. “So transportation was really necessary, and in 1947, there had been really bad winter snowstorms. It made transportation on the roads really difficult because the roads were just being established, and in the wintertime, it was really hard to get out to people’s places. So he bought a snow plane from the Fudge Factory in Moosomin.”
March 1947 was memorable for many communities in the south as a sudden storm buried trains in snow, halting rail service for over a week. Even the CPR snowplow was not immune, trapped under a snowbank just west of Oxbow for three days before the mainline plow could rescue it.
“It was over top of the power poles, and that’s why Doc Galloway decided he was going to buy a snow plane,” said Hunter. The Snow Sedans made by Robert Fudge had the same ski width as the horse-drawn log cutters commonly used, allowing the machines to use the same tracks.
Dr. Galloway used the snow plane for about 10 years, and the ability to travel became easier.
“It just came to be no longer needed, so it just came to be kind of a derelict vehicle that was sitting in the yard,” Gunderman said. “I was born in 1970, so by the time I was on the scene and growing up, it was just a contraption that was sitting in the yard with the rest of my grandpa’s old vehicles that he enjoyed restoring.”
There was a particular reason for Dr. Galloway to paint a stork on the sides of the snow plane as well.
“He had a funny sense of humour,” Gunderman said. “He painted an emblem on the sides of it of a stork holding a baby bundle, and he called it the ‘Delivery Wagon!’ When my grandma talked to me about it and explained that, she said it was for the purposes of answering the age-old question of ‘where do babies come from?’ because they would be going out to somebody’s farm, and there could be siblings already in a family.”
Gunderson has fond memories of spending time with her grandparents during school breaks and summer holidays, so restoring Grandpa Galloway’s snow plane has been a real labour of love.
“We talked to a lady that’s over 90 now, and she said that when she was a kid riding her horse home from town, she came across my grandpa; he was coming up and he slowed right down and shut his machine off,” recounted Gunderman. “He said he shut it off because he didn’t want to scare her horse. There’s just so many neat stories about it. And my grandpa, of course, I’m so proud to be a doctor in a community from 1947 to 1991, and he was working right up until he passed away at age 71. To keep a good reputation in that vocation, essentially, over that many decades. I think it’s just incredible.”
Restoration
Hunter is a mechanic by trade with a full shop at his disposal, but he’s never worked on a snow plane before, so he enlisted the guidance of someone who has—Moosomin’s Dean Godon.
“He’s been my mentor for this; he rebuilt the one that’s at the museum,” Hunter explained, noting how having access to a similar machine in Moosomin greatly aided the restoration project. “I would go to the museum the last couple summers, I would take that machine partly apart, and I would measure stuff. It’s built after the one in the Moosomin Museum, that’s where I got all my diagrams, and I got everything to be able to build this one. Then I started building, basically built it from the ground up.”
After fabricating all those parts from diagrams based on the Moosomin Museum model, Hunter got in contact with someone with ‘a whole pile of’ spare parts that originated from the Fudge factory.
“About six or eight months after I built all the parts by hand, by diagrams that I got from the Moosomin Museum, I got all those leftover parts, so I actually didn’t use any of those parts—I’d had them all built already,” Hunter said. “But with the guidance of Dean and with the guidance of the machine in the Moosomin Museum, it’s back to factory.”
Not bad, considering the frame—or ‘fuselage’ as Hunter refers to it—was sitting outdoors in the elements for 67 years.
“That snow plane was a key piece of transportation history in the Oxbow area, and so many people know Doc Galloway from him and his father being doctors in that area for 80-plus years,” Hunter said.
After a fruitful winter of many long hours in the shop piecing the Delivery Wagon together again, Hunter says the restoration is nearly complete.
“I’ve got to wire it and put the windows in,” he said of the final touches.
Once all the final touches have been completed, the next journey will be to take the Snow Sedan back to Elkhorn, but Gunderman couldn’t help but reflect on what a wonderful journey it has been
“It’s been pretty magical, like we did not go looking for anything, it just came our way,” Gunderman said. “What’s the chances of finding it? What’s the chances of having a husband who has the mechanical know-how to do a restoration? And what’s the chances of a person having a husband who would care so much about something that I’m sentimental about?
“It’s really been sort of a Hobbit’s journey where we’ve met people over it that we never would have met, and they’re the most amazing, knowledgeable and interesting people.”
