Happy ending to a snowy ordeal

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This article was published 04/03/2011 (5418 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When the blizzard struck, it struck with an intensity few anticipated —- and launched an adventure one father won’t forget.

It was March 4, 1966. The city was buried, the ambulances were stuck, and snow wrapped houses to the rooftops. Regent Avenue was deluged by snow, transformed overnight into a “tunnel without a roof,” recalled iconic former Winnipeg councillor Bernie Wolfe.

“It was a challenge to cope with,” said Wolfe, now 88. “It was just incredible. It was normal to expect a storm to come, but nothing of the consequence and impact that that one had.”

Across Winnipeg, cars were stuck and people crowded into department stores. Helmut Herbstreit wasn’t one of them: somehow, Herbstreit managed to plow his car through the drifts to make it to work downtown.

That’s when he got the call that shot fear through his spine. “My sister-in-law called me and told me to get home, because my wife was (in labour),” he said.

All’s well that ends well; by the time their blizzard ordeal was over, Siebella had given birth to a healthy baby, nicknamed the “storm boy” in one Winnipeg newspaper.

But the tense hours before Glenn Herbstreit made his entry into the world are ones that father Helmut, 78, will never forget. “I was scared stiff,” Helmut said, sitting in the living room of his East Kildonan home.

After learning his wife was in labour, Helmut plowed his 1953 Mercury Meteor through the drifts. His luck ran out one block away from his home on Lansdowne Avenue, and the car sputtered to a stop. So Helmut plunged out into the drifts instead.

Once he reached the house, Helmut called ambulances, doctors and anyone he thought could help deliver his son. All were stuck fast in the snow — the drifts around one doctor’s house were 18 feet high.

But when three police officers heard Helmut’s urgency, they went to work, rounded up two front-end loaders, and started braving the remains of the storm to get to Siebella’s side.

Even helped by the front-end loader, it took constables Bob Mills, Ian Martin and Joe Mowatt almost 90 minutes to push through the soaring white banks. When they arrived, at 7 p.m., Helmut was frantically shovelling snow in front of the house, trying to clear a path for help to arrive. “It was quite an experience,” Helmut chuckled. “I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”

Thirty minutes later, Glenn was born into the officers’ hands. With that inauspicious birth came a modicum of fame: in 1976, a photographer from the Winnipeg Tribune captured the family reunited with the three police officers.

In 1981, on the 25th anniversary of the blizzard, Glenn and Helmut shared their story on CJOB radio.

Even now, 45 years after the storm that buried the city, some Winnipeggers still remember. “I talk about it all the time,” Glenn said with a laugh. “People go, ‘Oh, you’re that kid?’ I am that kid!”

And the officers remembered, too: Mowatt became a family friend, who regularly sent birthday cards and gifts as Glenn was growing up. In 2006, when Siebella died, Mowatt —- who Helmut said now lives in B.C. — wrote words of condolence.

And while the experience was terrifying, Helmut said, he’s also a little proud of being the father of the storm boy. “He loved telling people, ‘That’s my son! The storm baby!'” Glenn laughed. “Every time he’d introduce me to someone.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca