Written by Olivia Rose
When the Reher Center decided to enter this year’s Soapbox Derby, Board Member Nancy Donskoj’s last year as the lead facilitator of such a wonderful community event, we knew we couldn’t just build any car. It had to be something that spoke to our roots, our bakery, and the immigrant stories we celebrate. The answer rose quickly: a large challah loaf on wheels.
Braided Thunder was born out of a playful idea—what if we took the braided bread that once came out of the Reher family oven and sent it rolling down Broadway? What started as a laugh turned into a weeks-long project that combined boundless creativity, community spirit, and a lot of glue.
The Recipe for Design
We began with a wagon base, sturdy enough to roll but open at the top so a driver could still fit inside. The wagon itself I found on Facebook Marketplace, listed at only $10. It was a steal. Within ten minutes of first seeing the listing, I was off to Hurley. The seller of the wagon was named Helen. She was cleaning out the house that belonged to her late parents, who had immigrated to New York. She took me on a tour of the house and showed me all the items they had brought with them; a hundred year old lamp, intricately painted tin garbage cans, light switch covers with beautiful motifs, just to name a few. I ended up going back the next day to help her move some things out of the house as she had a tight deadline to clean out the whole house before she needed to head back to Vermont. We hugged goodbye and she thanked me with one of those intricately painted garbage cans.
At that moment, the wagon wasn’t just a bargain find, it was already carrying its own story of family, migration, and memory. Meeting Helen and hearing about her parents’ lives reminded me why projects like this matter. At its core, the Soapbox Derby is about community. The challah car would eventually take shape with pool noodles and paint, but it really began with that encounter — with the reminder that every object, every person, holds a thread in the larger tapestry of our shared story.
All of this is to say it was now time for the real challenge–transforming the wagon into a challah. After a few sketches, lots of brainstorming, and several battles between materials (chicken wire vs installation spray foam, gesso vs paper mache, zip ties vs hot glue) I had a game plan. I decided to braid the “dough” out of pool noodles, curve them along the sides, and layer them just like bread strands woven together. I secured the pool noodles to the frame of the wagon with zip ties and cut down the sharp edges of each end of the pool noodle to give it a more organic shape.
The gap between the pool noodles was not “doughy” enough for my taste. For the next step, I sprayed insulation spray foam in between the gaps to give myself a rounder surface to paper mache on.
Yes, I am still cleaning up spray foam debris from my yard, but the challah was looking fuller and paper macheeing a 4 foot long challah sculpture was seeming more and more doable.
I recruited some help for paper macheing, as it was a daunting task. Slowly but surely, the layers built up and evidence of the pastel pool noodle structure was diminishing.
Technical Difficulties
While the paper macheed challah structure set to dry. I had a few bumps to smooth out when it came to the structural integrity of the wagon base. One side of the back axle of the wagon was detached from the bottom, causing one of the wheels to remain stationary. I knew fixing a problem like this was not in my wheelhouse. Kira and I decided we should leave it to the experts, so I took the base of the wagon to the Hudson Valley Repair Cafe in Rhinebeck. The Repair Café is a volunteer-run program where people bring in broken household items and volunteers do their best to fix them, for free. Instead of tossing things away, you get to breathe new life into them.
The axle turned out to need welding, and three different volunteers helped me tackle the repairs: one to assess what needed to be done, one to stabilize the wooden structure, and one to weld the axle securely back into place. I was struck by how determined and helpful all of the volunteers were. As I was waiting for the welding to finish, a woman came up to me, curious about the wagon. She told me her grandfather had worked for a carpentry company that once made wagons just like the one I had. Suddenly, we realized there was a good chance my soapbox wagon had actually been built by her grandfather. A week later, she even showed up at the derby to cheer us on, another reminder that this project kept circling back to community.
Community Storytime and Craft
It was important to us to involve our community in the creation of our soapbox. Once the structure of the challah car was finally standing on its own, I took it back to Reher Center’s gallery for a storytime and craft event.
I read a children’s book about artist Ai Weiwei, his journey to America by boat, and his monumental artwork made of millions of hand-sculpted porcelain sunflower seeds. Together, families, kids, and neighbors joined in hand-rolling tiny “sesame seeds” out of air dry clay. These would eventually be attached to the challah derby car. Each seed carried the fingerprint of someone in our community, woven into the surface of the bread. The process felt both playful and deeply connected to our history. By the end of the afternoon, we had a tray full of seeds ready to be “baked” onto the challah car.
The Big Reveal
When the Challah Wagon finally rolled out, it looked like a bakery miracle — a glossy, oversized loaf cruising through the streets. Reactions from the crowd made it clear: everyone recognized the challah instantly, and smiles spread just as quickly as the scent of bread once did from 101 Broadway. At its heart, this project was about more than a race. It was about bringing history and heritage into the present in a way that sparks joy. A loaf of bread became a rolling symbol of nourishment, tradition, and togetherness. Just as the Reher family’s bakery once fed a neighborhood, the Challah Wagon carried their story into a new chapter — one that’s playful, creative, and very much alive.
Click here to watch Braided Thunder in action!
