Avenue Magazine Edmonton

Edmonton’s history is so brief that almost anything more than 100 years old can qualify as a museum exhibit — or the historical building to put the exhibits in.

We have several little museums celebrating our first settlers. John Walter’s old spread at the south end of the High Level Bridge that ruined his ferry business in 1913 is a historical site open for tours every Sunday. Edmonton has two railway museums, three if you count the working steam engine in Fort Edmonton Park. The Edmonton Public Schools Archives and Museum in the century-old McKay Avenue School is chock full of history. It was the site of the first session of the first Alberta legislative assembly. On the same property sits Edmonton’s original 1881 one-room schoolhouse, whose first teacher was reputed to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

These are just the museums open to the public. Only people who know where to find the mythical Bodnar Collection south of Edmonton can see what is described as a “collection of collections.” The private collection that may someday be considered a museum is said to include an entire service station, soda shop and general store from Edmonton’s past, plus automobiles, contraptions, knick-knacks and artifacts so numerous that the count was lost long ago.

Keepers of the past have simple reasons. “I love collecting things,” says 65-year-old Ron Bodnar. “I have a passion for preserving things that we remember.”

And there we have the true spirit of the museum. All museums start as collections, and the collectors who founded these Edmonton treasure houses are often old enough to have lived through the Second World War, when times were scarce and having things was a big deal. By far the most fascinating attractions in the “mini-museums” of Edmonton are the people who create and run them. Their stories are far more valuable than any object within. 

Rutherford House

Provincial Historic Site

Apparently Mrs. Rutherford had a secret electro-magnetic switch under the carpet in the dining room so she could summon the help discreetly when guests were over. It’s one feature of upper-middle-class life in the 1910s, when, thanks to coal money, Edmonton was becoming a marvel of modernity. This large brick house at the north end of the University of Alberta campus is the second residence of Alberta’s first premier, Alexander Cameron Rutherford, who also founded the university. It was the Delta Upsilon Fraternity from 1941-69. (Not at all like the Delta house depicted in Animal House; its roster included surnames like Winspear and Lougheed.) The place opened as a museum in 1974 and was designated as a provincial historic resource five years later. The staff run tea and garden parties, host weddings and school tours, and show off treasured items such as a growing Christmas cactus descended from Mrs. R’s original plant. You can even plink her piano. I run into someone I know from the Folk Fest: Louise McKay, now the lead historical interpreter of the museum. She obviously loves her job and does her best to bring the past to life, wearing a dress from that time period and speaking of the Rutherford family in the present tense: “Mrs. Rutherford is an avid gardener.” Is she ever — the peonies and ferns McKay speculates were tended by Mrs. R almost 100 years ago still thrive today.

Alberta Aviation Museum

Make sure you don’t whang your head on a wing as you navigate your way back to the restoration room of this very large mini-museum celebrating — what else? — aviation in Alberta. There you will find guys like 92-year-old Chuck MacLaren. He’s been fixing airplanes since 1939. “I’m an expert in nothing,” he says, “but I can fix anything to do with airplanes.” He tells stories of repairing float planes tangled in Arctic swamps in horrible weather and other impossible missions. Chuck is currently rebuilding an entire B-25 bomber, and is part of a corps of dedicated volunteers responsible for some of the museum’s prime exhibits — antique bush planes, fighter jets, cargo aircraft, interactive engine displays, you name the aeronautical contraption. You may also run into Cedric Mah, one of the famed “Flying Tigers” of the Second World War. To meet a real war hero in an airplane museum is a lot cooler than crashing an F-16 in a Microsoft flight simulator. However, you can do both here.

Michif Cultural and Resource Institute

After five minutes in the Musée Héritage Museum of St. Albert history — where I learn that St. Albert, not Edmonton, was once considered a major centre in Alberta — I am directed to the Juno House. The white home, over a famous little bridge (a replica of the first Canadian bridge west of Winnipeg), is the oldest house standing in St. Albert. Inside I find a rifle from the Frog Lake Resistance (or “Massacre” depending on your history book). I find a gift shop festooned with sashes, moccasins, beadwork, typical Métis garb and photos of people wearing it. I accost an elderly woman sitting at a kitchen table. “Do you live here?” She looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Does it look like I live here?” Turns out I’ve blundered into the office of Dr. Thelma Chalifoux, the 80-year-old former senator who founded the Michif in 2003. It is “much more than a museum,” Chalifoux tells me. It is a library, gallery, genealogy archive and resource centre dedicated to preserving area Métis history — and Thelma Chalifoux was there for a lot of it.

Telephone Historical Centre

“Telus doesn’t want us,” grumbles executive director Bert Yeudall on why his telephone museum won’t be moving back to Old Strathcona. And so the Prince of Wales Armouries is now the headquarters of the history of telephones in Edmonton — a history that basically ends when Telus bought Edmonton Telephones (Ed-Tel) in 1995. Each exhibit comes with a tale. There is a replica of Alberta’s first telephone — a birdhouse with wires. It was owned by local telegraph operator Alex Taylor, who, in 1885, brought a pair of the new-fangled contraptions from England. He took one telephone to a bishop’s house in St. Albert, strung a telegraph line all the way there, hoofed it back to Edmonton, put the other phone in his telegraph office, hooked it up, cranked up the electro-magneto, placed the call, waited for the other party to pick up and wished him a “Happy New Year.” Alberta’s telephonic age had begun! Bert knows the story well. He worked for 36 years at Ed-Tel — whose formation is a story in itself — and has been running the centre since it opened in 1987. He’s especially proud of a film screened in the centre’s comfortable 20-seat theatre. The emcee is a giant robot named Xeldon. It’s for kids, because field trips (and seniors groups) are the bread and butter of these places. I was the only visitor here on the day I went. (Actually, I was the only visitor at most of the museums I visited.)

Canadian Militaria Preservation Society

“What’s wrong with this picture?” asks 70-year-old Allan Kerr during a private tour of his Canadian military history museum, which is upstairs from his gun shop, MilArm Co. Ltd. (Deadly gift shop.) Kerr is pointing to a ’40s-era photo of nurses bundling an infant into a gas mask. He gives me a clue: “Think of women’s vanity.” Yes, the answer is that the comely nurses were not themselves wearing gas masks, so they couldn’t possibly have been able to help the baby. In a real gas attack, they’d all be dead. And did you know there was once a women’s service group in 1939 called the Canadian Beavers? Kerr has one of the original uniforms — part of a vast collection of military memorabilia that began in 1962 when his wife gave him an antique rifle for Christmas. By 1999, Kerr had opened exhibits spanning at least five wars, stocked with firearms, posters, uniforms, maps, medals and a good deal of space for women of the military. The most valuable piece is a Boer War tea cloth signed at a party by Lord Herbert Kitchener, Robert Baden-Powell, John McCrae and other luminaries. Must’ve been quite the bash.

Lillo’s School of Modern Music

Here we come to a fuzzy line between museum and gift shop. Music store owner Vic Lillo, 70, is a colourful fixture on the local music scene. He says, “Fer sure! Fer sure!” a lot, deploys a crushing salesman’s handshake and is always ready to “do the deal!” Vic has saved everything he hasn’t sold or traded since he opened in 1963 — catalogues, posters, magazines and a dusty, musty, mind-boggling clutter of musical instruments and accessories. Even he is unsure of everything he has. “I always thought we should set up a museum,” Lillo says, and if he ever has the time, he just might. For now he’s proud to show off the display case that dominates the store. Within the case are old violins, old drums, old accordions and a rack of antique electric guitars, including a 1956 Gibson “Les Paul Black Beauty” that Vic claims is worth $120,000. Visitors may also be directed to the “Wall of Fame” of local band photos from the ’60s and ’70s. Do you remember Honey Throat, Rite Direction and Band of Sound? Me neither.

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Enjoy these little museums while you can. MilArm’s Allan Kerr says his sons won’t be carrying on his passion, so all his lethal mementoes will eventually be at the Royal Alberta Museum — literally lock, stock and barrel. Chuck MacLaren of Alberta Aviation laments, “We are running out of fixers.” And when asked, “If not you, then who?,” Bert Yeudall of the telephone museum just shrugs. These people have dedicated their lives to preserving things from the past. It’s hard to imagine such commitment to historic material when today so much
is plastic and destined for the junkyard.