to the destruction of heritage buildings in the area, such as the historic housebarn destroyed by A.D. Penner, residents in the 1960s saw the need to preserve and remember the Mennonite history of the region. In 1967, the Mennonite Heritage Village museum in Steinbach was opened. In 1966, infamous gold thief Ken Leishman escaped from Headingly Jail and stole an airplane from Steinbach, solidifying his nickname as the "Flying Bandit". In 1970, the year of Manitoba's centennial, Steinbach was visited by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles. A crowd of 10,000 waited along the streets of Steinbach as the royals visited, coming from the east along Highway 52 after their visit to La Brouqerie. The Carillon described the visit saying, "it was the most memorable and exciting moment in the history of the Southeast. For the first time since the earliest European settlers arrived in the 1860s and 1870s, a member of the British royal family paid a personal visit to the communities of La Broquerie, Steinbach, Sarto, Grunthal and St. Pierre. For these communities and their people the visit by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles on the eve of Manitoba's 100th birthday highlighted a century of economic and cultural development." In 1972, Jake Epp, a former local high school teacher, was elected Member of Parliament in the region, the first Mennonite in the area to do so. Epp was also the first Mennonite to serve as a federal cabinet minister and was MP until 1993. In May 1980, Steinbach's first shopping mall, Clearspring Centre, opened on the north end of the community. The mall was named after the historic English and Scottish settlement in the area. In fall of 1982, Steinbach drew considerable attention after the school board cancelled a scheduled rock concert in the local high school by Queen City Kids. Hundreds of students staged a protest as a result of the cancellation. The incident was alluded to years later in the work of novelist Miriam Toews. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Aussiedler Mennonites, who had remained in the Soviet Union (particularly Siberia and Kazakhstan) throughout much of the 20th century, or who had resettled in Germany during the 1970s, began to immigrate to the area and continued to do so through the nineties and early 2000s. Some of these people had converted to the Baptist church during the decades in the Soviet Union.