ursing student never made it home for Christmas

By Laurent d’Entremont



It was just a few days before Christmas 1948 and 20-year-old Germaine d’Entremont was coming home to our neighbourhood from university. She was studying to be a nurse at a hospital called “Hotel-Dieu� in Edmunston, N.B.

Germaine, who had two sisters and four brothers, had lost her father, Albert J. d’Entremont, to illness earlier in the year and one can be sure that her mother, Mercedes, was looking forward to spending some quality time during the holidays with her eldest daughter.

Sadly, this was not to be. In those days, the usual way for students to come home for the holidays would have been either by automobile, train or bus. Few would have even considered air travel, except for the fact that a doctor at the hospital where the nursing student was studying had a small private plane, which he loaned out to a local pilot named Irenee Tramblay. Tramblay offered to take Germaine and others home. The flight plan followed from Edmunston to Moncton then to Greenwood airport and on to Yarmouth, N.S.

Storm clouds threatened when the party boarded the four-seater early in the morning. Besides Germaine and the pilot there were fellow student Ms. Stella Gallant, and Mrs. Enoid Robichaud and her two-year-old child.

The first leg of the flight was uneventful and they landed at the Moncton airport to drop off Gallant. At that point, Gallant, a friend of Germaine, considered flying all the way to Yarmouth with her friend but changed her mind at the last minute.

At 10:30 that morning, there was a cloudy, snowy-type mist, but the pilot felt confident he could reach Greenwood Air Base in the Annapolis Valley, and perhaps make it all the way to Yarmouth where Germaine’s family would be waiting for her.

And wait they did. Germaine’s brother Eric was at Jordan Bay Shelburne Co. with his friend Simon Belliveau buying lobsters for the family business when he received the news that the small private plane was missing over the Bay of Fundy.

What happened exactly will likely never be known, but somewhere between Moncton and Greenwood poor visibility deteriorated to zero, or close to it. The pilot, who had no navigational equipment such as exists today, probably could not find the Valley airport.

It was reported later that two men at Morden near Greenwood had heard a plane-circling overhead for a long time in ever-widening circles. Because of weather conditions they could not see the aircraft nor could they identify it. Only the hum of a single motor would tell them that it was a small plane and likely lost in the snow and mist. Eventually, these men thought they heard a noise as if the plane had crashed in the water.

Eventually, a ground and sea search was conducted. Search and rescue planes from Greenwood flew over the Bay of Fundy, but because of the intensifying snowstorm they could not see or find anything. A sea search was also conducted with fishing boats with the same disappointing results and a land search proved fruitless, too.

No debris was ever found, although among a number of rumours was one which claimed a shoe from the two-year-old had been discovered.

My own theory is that as the plane kept circling it went farther from shore until it finally ran out of fuel. The pilot had no choice but to land where he was, and likely hit the water very fast at an angle because he could not see where he was going. In a matter of seconds it was all over, debris vanishing with the strong currents of the Bay of Fundy.

Germaine’s mother, Mercedes d’Entremont, received the nursing diploma at the end of the school year when her daughter would normally have graduated. According to her daughter-in-law Phyllis, Mercedes felt that she had never received full closure over the whole tragic episode. She died in 1987 at the age of 86.