Christmas At Queen Street School in Spruce Grove:

Excerpt from the Memoirs Of C. Stuart Ibsen -Selected by Johanna Ibsen and Edited by David Ibsen

“He [Stuart’s principal] used to kid me [Stuart] about being a teetotaller and one Christmas staff party gave me a whisky bottle full of tea all beautifully Christmas wrapped. We had a good staff and a good morale and generally got along well. That year we wrote a radio play about Sir John A. MacDonald and his wife riding through the Rockies on the first train across Canada in 1886. Lady McDonald rode part way on the cowcatcher of the train. We adapted the story from the grade six-reader story called "The Lady on the Cowcatcher". In case our readers may not know what a cowcatcher is I'll explain. The cowcatcher was a sort of V shaped metal platform on the front of the train. It's purpose was to throw any stray animal off the track so that the train wouldn't be derailed. We made an audiotape of the play. The kids used stones in a box to simulate the noise of a train starting up. One of the boys used a recorder for the whistle. There was also the sound of an avalanche made by tumbling rocks in a box. We sent the tape in and waited in anticipation for the next month's broadcast. Imagine our surprise when the radio program came on to hear the announcement that broadcast that day was to be lengthened to put on the full play. The class got a real boost in their enthusiasm for creative writing. Later we adapted it to a stage play and put it on in the Christmas concert. We built a cardboard engine about six feet high with a couple of cars behind it. This filled the stage. It was a big hit. One of the parents was a teacher at the Glenrose Hospital School. He asked us to put the play on at their school so we packed the whole thing up and performed again at Glenrose. It was a highlight of that school year…”