An Alberta couple is restoring a piece of prairie history that has ties to their family’s past in the 1940s.
Lisl Gunderman from Seba Beach, Alta., and her husband Darrell Hunter came across a snowplane that belonged to Gunderman’s grandfather, Dr. Gerry Galloway, when they were visiting the Antique Automobile Museum in Manitoba a few years ago.
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“My grandpa was a doctor in southeast Saskatchewan in the communities of Alameda (and) Oxbow … from 1947 until 1991 when he passed away,” Gunderman told CTV News Edmonton. “His work would be primarily going out to people’s places to do house calls, delivering babies and going out to people’s farms.”
“He painted a stork carrying a baby bundle on it, and he called it ‘the delivery wagon.’ My grandma had told me that it was a way for people to manage the age old question of, ‘Where do babies come from?‘” she added.
Galloway purchased the snowplane in 1947 as a form of winter transportation to tend to his patients.
The snowplane was the doctor’s preferred method of travel as roads weren’t built in the area. His snowplane used a propeller and four skis to travel over snowy terrain.
“He used the snowplane for probably 10 years. After that roads came to be better built and transportation got easier, so it just came to be a thing that was no longer needed,” said Gunderman.
She said her grandfather’s plane would be something that was always around the yard when she was growing up that was not often used and was only started up on occasion.
“I actually did have a chance to sit in the back of it when it was running and it (was) extremely loud … I remember being frightened of how loud it was and crying, basically wanting to get out of the back of it,” she said.
After Galloway’s passing in 1991, the plane and some of the doctor’s belongings were dispersed without a trace.
In 2022, the couple had a hunch about the plane’s whereabouts and headed to a Manitoba museum where Gunderman thought her grandfather had a connection to and asked about any snowplanes in their inventory.
“The girl working said that there had been parts of one dropped off the previous summer in 2021 and she told us to take a look around the museum,” said Gunderman.
“When we finished our tour looking at the amazing cars that are at the museum, she said … the snowplane that had been dropped off was still out there,” she said. “When I saw the rusted pile of parts sitting in a heap, I could see the legs of the stork that I recognized from when I was a kid.”
Darrell Hunter, Gunderman’s husband and a heavy duty mechanic by trade, offered his services to restore the aging plane.
“I said to Lisl, ‘You know what? … I’m gonna fix that thing and I’m gonna take you for a ride (in) it,‘” Hunter said. “It might be 10 feet, but she’s going to get a ride in it.”
The couple and the museum agreed that they could keep the snowplane for five years and restore it so long as they give it back when it’s finished.
“When I first (saw) it, it was very rusty and just a pile of parts … I wasn’t scared of it at all. So we loaded it up and away we went,” said Hunter.
“It’s a huge sense of accomplishment … I built and worked on a lot of stuff, but nothing as satisfying as this,” he added.
The mechanic was able to build new parts for the snowplane and left some of the “bumps and bruises” left from Galloway’s days to keep the plane’s stories alive.
“It’s not just a family history story. It’s a story of history, about health history … It’s an innovation and technology story of the incredible know-how and engineering of people on the prairies to figure out how to manufacture something that would make transportation better and improve the lives of people,” Gunderman said.
The snowplane will be fully restored by the fall and will eventually make its return to the Manitoba museum.
With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Miriam Valdes-Carletti
