I’m not old enough to have memories of Fleming Mackell’s career on ice, but I’ve looked him up, so I can tell you that his hockey adjectives include hustling (left winger), husky (kid), stocky (youngster), black-haired (Bruin centre), high-scoring (ditto), aggressive little (ditto), flying (Fleming Mackell), and starry (veteran).

Those all date back to the 1950s, Mackell’s heyday as a player. Born in Montreal in 1929, he skated for the Toronto Maple Leafs before a trade took him to the Bruins. He was in Conn Smythe’s doghouse is what you’re going to see written, if you dig into that. He was 86 when he died last week, on October 19, in Hawkesbury, Ontario. Dave Stubbs has a tribute worth a while at The Gazette, over this way.

Otherwise, what I can tell you is that Mackell was poison to Montreal in the 1957 Stanley Cup Finals (scored a lot of goals on them); that The Flame was a nickname he went by, or at least one that newspapermen used; that Johnny Peirson and Ed Sandford were his linemates in Boston in 1953. Later (1958) he centred Jerry Toppazzini and Real Chevrefils.

Here’s a view of a goal he scored in 1953 on what Tom Fitzgerald from Boston’s Daily Globe deemed a “smart play” in a game in which the Bruins socked the defending Stanley Cup champion Detroit Red Wings in the semi-finals:

Taking a relay from Sandford in the Boston end, Fleming set sail down the left Peirson far over on the other side as a decoy. When he weaved into a spot about 40 feet from the goal, the shifty little center made a kind of fake, then whistled a wristy shot that sent the puck knee high past Sawchuk into the far side.

His father was Jack Mackell, who played on the wing for the Ottawa Senators in the 1920s, which makes the Mackells two of a scarce breed, father-and-son combinations to have played in the NHL. Not only that: they both won Stanley Cups: Jack in 1920 and 1921, Fleming as a Leaf in 1949 and 1951. Why aren’t their surnames ever spelled the same, when you look them up? That’s a longstanding error, worth addressing in a separate post; stay tuned.

“I never saw him play,” is something the son said about his father; it’s in Brian McFalone’s Over The Glass & Into The Crowd (1997). “I never knew he played hockey. He had a job and he worked hard, so he didn’t interfere at all.”

Fleming was playing in the Quebec Junior Hockey League by the time he was 15. He took a scholarship to St. Michael’s College in Toronto, and from there graduated to the Leafs in 1948.

About life in the NHL as a man standing 5’8” and weighing in at 175 pounds, Mackell said, “There was a lot of intimidation if you weren’t big.” This is Heroes, Frank Pagnucco’s 1985 compendium of short NHLer biographies. “If you weren’t a rough, tough player, you could never show that you didn’t like the rough stuff or they would run you out of the league. I don’t know. Guys tell me that when I played the game I was chippy, too.”

Eight-and-a-half years he played for the Bruins before they decided he didn’t fit their plans any more. They wanted to trade him, he said he wouldn’t go: that’s how he ended up as a playing coach for the Quebec Aces in the American Hockey League. That didn’t really work out — “a big mistake,” Mackell called it — and after several more seasons in senior hockey, he stashed his skates away for good. Canadian newspapers picked up the American news, as you’d expect they might, when Mackell was shot by a woman in his car in Miami while on vacation, but the story faded away while Mackell was recovering, satisfactorily, in hospital, without explaining the argument or whether or not anybody went to jail.

Brian McFalone tells us that he owned a Texaco gas station in Montreal after he retired, and from there went on to selling Buicks and Pontiacs in Dorval (“I was a Grandmaster Salesman five times!”). He did that for 27 years, before retiring in 1992 to Knowlton, Quebec, in 1992, where he enjoyed “riding long distances on his twelve-speed bike and playing tennis.”

Frank Pagnucco asked him what he would have done differently as a hockey player. Maybe he would have looked after himself better, he said. “I could have been a little more intense, maybe a little more cooperative. … I wasn’t cooperative with management, when you look at it now from a different perspective.”

“Whether we realize it or not, indirectly you took it home with you. Everything was winning or losing. You look back, it wasn’t as important as we thought.”