As a child, Joe Gallagher loved paging through the memory book his mother, Eva Wicker Gallagher, created of her reign as Aurora, Queen of the Snows of the 1957 St. Paul Winter Carnival.
“Every day on the front page of your paper, it was Queen Eva,” he recalls.
It was like a fairy tale; better than a fairy tale, actually.
“My first time I saw ‘Cinderella,’ I thought that it couldn’t compare to my mom, who was the true Cinderella,” he says.
Hers was a Cinderella story: Wicker, then 18, was plucked from her clerical job at the Pioneer Press/Dispatch and, sponsored by the newspaper, entered as a candidate and won the title of Queen of the Snows. Thousands attended her coronation; the publisher sent her a telegram of congratulations; the city celebrated her.
“It was unbelievable,” Gallagher said. “A blue-collar girl grew up to be the Queen of St. Paul.”
It really was a big deal back then: During her reign, she traveled as far away as Hawaii, where she walked the beach with Don Ho. She also appeared on “The Dinah Shore Show” during Winter Carnival, introducing the nation to our winter festival. And, in her role as queen, she stood next to an Edsel in a car campaign that was displayed on billboards across the United States.
Her son didn’t know the ending to her fairytale until years later, though.
“It was in late November or early December that she decided to step down,” he says.
That was front-page news, too:
“Oh, my heavens! What happened?” asked the new queen, Barbara Geiger, in Amy Birdsall’s report on Dec. 5, 1957.
