By Michelle Forbes

At the Kimberley City Bakery this year, with the help of the local media and RCMP, we pulled off the biggest April Fools joke of the year.

Wherever we go, people are still discussing the validity of the story and whether or not it was real or an April Fools Joke. We thought your readers might like to know the real story.

The Kimberley City Bakery has been a bakery in the same building for 93 years. Over time it has absorbed two adjacent buildings, one to the back, which was the lumberyard, and another adjacent building, which had been everything from a women’s clothing store to a grocery store.

The bakery has stood on the same spot for longer than any other building in Kimberley. The history around it and beneath it are great, although what actually lies beneath it is buried with the secrets of time and history lost. No major renovations have been done in the time that it has stood there, and every ‘update’ seems to have included laying another layer of flooring over the one beneath it.

Each owner of the Bakery put its own stamp on the bakery, and owned it for a very long time. The previous owners were there for about 30 years, until the passing of Bruno Marti caused his wife, Veronica Pauuw to put the bakery up for sale.

Eric and Michelle Forbes moved from Calgary on July 29 to take over the bakery. Eric had apprenticed under Bruno Marti years ago, and they wanted to both honour his memory and bring the bakery into the 21st Century.

Since taking over, they have given the bakery a facelift and breathed new life into it. Keeping the Swiss feel, they added new products, and have allowed their bakers space to explore new ideas and products. Having spent a year in France together, as well as other time in Europe before meeting, they decided to bring a true European bakery feel into the once Bavarian City of the Rockies.

Other than introducing new products, they also brought a new machine in from Italy, which will allow them to make their own liquid yeast and create true European style breads. This machine arrived in Kimberley at the bakery on Monday, March 31, and was uncrated and brought in through the bakery’s front door, while the electricians were busy updating the wiring and lighting inside.

With the help of the electricians, it was discovered that there was, indeed, a hollow area beneath at least one part of the floor in the bakery, and that there were nine inches of floor stacked on top of each other over the years. The floor at the front of the bakery is hollow. One can hear the difference where some sort of room must exist.

Kimberley was a rum running town during the age of Prohibition. In the 1970s the Kimberley Hotel (the building next to the bakery, most recently ‘The Edge’ bar) burnt down. In the basement, which was unknown to the owners at the time, there were stills discovered. The photo that exists of these remnants of Kimberley’s past was used in the making of the Bakery’s photo of their basement. Over the years tunnels or remnants of tunnels have been found beneath Kimberley’s Platzl area. What remains unknown is whether these connect up with the bakery and what might lie beneath its floor.

The edge of the bakery stands over the old sidewalk that used to be the edge of Kimberley’s downtown, before the building that is now the Bean Tree was built. Some sort of history may also lie in the hollow area beneath the Bakery’s floorboards, but for now, Michelle and Eric Forbes have yet to explore it. They have let their imaginations run wild with a lot of history and some flights of fancy this past April 1 to explore what might be down there.

With the help of the local police and media they ignited the curiosity and fascination of the current residents of Kimberley and Cranbrook to what might have been the long forgotten history of the Platzl.

The story garnered so much attention that people are still debating the validity of the story. Using real history and real events, The Kimberley City Bakery has created a huge buzz around what might be the most believable April Fools Joke Kimberley has seen in a long time.

The presence of the police and the radio station leant an air of validity to the story of the room discovered beneath the bakery, the entrance to an old tunnel, and the possibility of bones of some forgotten past. The question is; were you taken in? And does it make you wonder about the real past buried beneath the Platzl of downtown Kimberley?

So next time you take a walk, perhaps you, too, will let your imagination wander as you think about Kimberley’s buried history.

The radio story can be found at: http://www.thedrivefm.ca/show-news.php?newsID=9369

Lead image: Michelle and Eric Forbes with baby Izzy and Cpl. Chris Newel April 1.

Eric Forbes created/doctored the photos

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