The Steve Fonyo monument on Highway 3A

Alongside Highway 3A, a few kilometers west of Nelson, a white pillar stands atop a rock bluff. Hundreds of cars whiz by it daily, yet most people don’t know what it is. And some of what has been written about it is wrong.

It was created by a fellow named Lloyd Beaudry, who was born in 1950 in the town of Cut Knife, northwest of Saskatoon. At 15, he left school and spent a year as a carpenter in North Battleford. He then worked in the oil industry until 1973, when he lost his right leg in an industrial accident, although I don’t know the details.

The following year, after being fitted with an artificial leg, Beaudry started a landscaping business in Fort St. John and met a local potter named Bob Young, which seems to have sparked something in him, though it’s not clear how much he explored it at that time.

He returned to Saskatchean to farm with his father-in-law, but when his marriage ended, he went to North Battleford to finish Grade 9 and 10, then back to the oil patch briefly. Afterward, he made an exceptionally bad decision. Beaudry robbed a bank.  

I don’t know where or when it happened, whether he did it alone, what motivated him, or how quickly he was caught. But in September 1977, he was sentenced to six years in prison.

Behind bars, he seemed determined to turn his life around. He completed his high school diploma and studied pottery. In 1981, while incarcerated at the medium-security Bowden Institution in Alberta, he joined a sort of Toastmasters group called the Highwaymen Gavel Cub.

He also participated in a walk to raise money for a little girl with a skin disease. Six prisoners received permission to march 43 kilometers to Red Deer. After close to 12 hours, they raised $822 in donations, to which they added $300 collected from other inmates.

Beaudry was paroled in June 1982 and accepted into the bachelor of fine arts program at Nelson’s David Thompson University. While Beaudry made no secret of the fact that he had been in prison, I’m not sure how well known it was locally.

As part of his program, he spent a summer with Saskatchewan potter Myrna Harris, who wrote about Beaudry in a newsletter called The Craft Factor, from which I have extracted many of the details above. She said he turned up on her doorstep one day, with clay, glazes, and tools in his truck, offering to be her apprentice.

“I really didn’t think the situation through, being carried away by his enthusiasm,” she said. “Lloyd worked in my basement … making two piece goblets and drying them outside before putting them together. The stairs were difficult for him, our radios (mine on CBC, his on anything but!) were in conflict, and the clay was getting all over the house!”

Later he rented another potter’s wheel and set up a studio in her garage, which had better drying facilities and no stairs. She felt Beaudry made good progress, thanks in part to his single-minded focus: he sometimes spent 12 hours a day making mugs. Beaudry’s father would sometimes visit and help repair blowers or make new ones.

At the time, Beaudry said he planned to complete his bachelor’s degree and set up his own studio.

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At last, we get to the artwork in question. Nelson Daily News photographer Steve Thornton took photos of the unveiling on April 25, 1984. Most of what we know about it comes from the caption:

The torch is lit and sculptor Lloyd Beaudry stands with a fistful of fire as Nelson Mayor Louis Maglio and Legion Branch 51 color party members Michael Kelly, Bob Smith, Jean Gregoire and Al Kempin look on. The sculpture, donated by Beaudry, is to honour one-legged Steven Fonyo’s cross-Canada run, inspired by Terry Fox, and similarly a fund-raiser for cancer research.

Nelson Daily News, April 26, 1984

Aha! It’s a torch. And a monument to Steve Fonyo and his Journey for Lives, which had kicked off in eastern Canada a few weeks earlier. (The caption didn’t note that, like Fonyo, Beaudry had lost a leg.) Fonyo completed his run on May 29, 1985, and raised $14 million, but his route didn’t take him through Nelson. The closest he came was Revelstoke.

Nelson realtor Chuck Bennett helped Beaudry install the monument. Beaudry was a volunteer with a Catholic youth group that Bennett was part of. “He was a nice guy,” Bennett says. “Quirky, but really nice.” He recalls helping Beaudry lug the sculpture onto the bluff, but not much else about it.

The October 1989 edition of The Kootenay Review related a few more details: it said the sculpture had been an assignment in Beaudry’s university program, and that he had been “aided by two or three others,” who weren’t named. However, the Review erred by saying the sculpture was designed in the memory of Terry Fox. I made the same mistake when I wrote about it in the Nelson Star in September 2010.

Several questions remain unanswered: how was that spot chosen for the torch? Was it only lit that one day in 1984? Who were the others involved? What did the Legion have to do with it?

When the Review wrote about it, they were following up on a monthly “Where Is This?” quiz, where they published a photo and you had to guess the location. That particular installment drew an “overwhelming” response. Most people correctly identified the where, but were at a loss to explain the what. Considering this was little more than five years after its creation, the response suggests that beyond the front page photo in the Nelson Daily News, the torch probably didn’t receive much attention.

P’nina Shames told the Review the torch was once crowned by a dove, but that it didn’t last long. The photo in the Review showed the cauldron was still in place as of 1989, but by 2000, the first time I took a picture of it, it was gone. The Review also said it learned the Legion owned the torch and that it sat on Ministry of Highways property.

As for Beaudry, I’m not sure how much longer he stayed in Nelson, but by the time of the Review story he was living in Wadsworth, Ohio. As of 2004, he was in Unity, Sask. One morning in August of that year, he was in a truck going down a gravel road about 65 kilometers west of North Battleford. For some reason, the truck rolled. Beaudy, 55, was killed. He’s buried at Cut Knife.

The roadside monument is still in place, now both a memorial to Steve Fonyo, who died in 2022, and to Beaudry, the artist who created it.