This Father’s Day, on the 150th anniversary of Canada, we remember “Flying” Phil and Jen (née Sandin) Gaglardi.
Jen with her co-worker Laurene Schneider started the 80-year-old Christian Life Assembly megachurch in 1937 in Langley. Phil Gaglardi, who later became known as King of the Road as B.C. highways minister under premier W.A.C. Bennett, came to personal faith in Christ through Jennie’s earlier ministry in Mission.
Phil had been a hard-drinking logger and construction worker who would fight at the drop of a hat. Jen particularly appreciated Phil’s ability to both preach and fix their Model ‘A’ Ford.
She agreed to marry Phil on the condition that he became an ordained minister as well.
“My mother was the drive behind my father,” son Bob Gaglardi remembers. “It’s hard to understand that considering how strong a personality my Dad was. She was the boss at the end of the day, but she allowed my father to be at the forefront.”
Phil and Jennie Gaglardi went on in 1943 to pastor a booming congregation in Kamloops. Phil Gaglardi was elected as a Kamloops MLA in 1962, serving for 20 years as the minister of highways. He miraculously spent five days a week at the legislature while still leading a thriving congregation two days a week.
Phil established the B.C. Ferry System, Deas Island Tunnel, and Rogers Pass. Gaglardi Way, a major thoroughfare in Burnaby connecting Highway 1 to Simon Fraser University, is named for him. In his rushing back between Victoria and Kamloops by car and plane, he became known as Flying Phil, perhaps because of a number of speeding tickets.
Jennie had an amazing gift of ministering to children with a fleet of eleven buses to pick up 9,000 children, the largest Sunday School in Canada at the time. Phil poured more blacktop than any other politician in the world. He ironically said: “If there are two things I hate in life, it is a minister of the gospel and a politician, and I ended up being both.”
Whatever Phil did in church life or politics, he did it fast and got the job done. Flying Phil saw his duty to keep the highways “in such shape that motorists will avoid the language which would deny them access to the highway to heaven.”
Rev. Ed Hird has been the rector at St. Simon’s Church since 1987. stsimonschurch.ca
