Franklin Farrell was the third of his name, following after his father and his grandfather, but he was alone (I’m almost certain) in the family in taking up as a hockey goaltender. The original FF was a Connecticut iron tycoon whose son followed him into the business, just as his son would do, eventually, too. Both of the younger FFs attended Yale University, which is where the man we’re interested in here played made the varsity hockey team in the late 1920s and into the ’30s. Because he wore glasses off the ice and on, he was (of course) nicknamed Specs. Post-grad, as a 25-year-old, he would go on to backstop the U.S. Olympic team that played host at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York.

This was February of 1932, and it was there and then (as previously mentioned) that Specs Farrell seems to have become the first of his position to don a mask at an Olympic tournament. The idea of goaltenders protecting their faces from hurtling pucks wasn’t new, of course — just two years had passed since Clint Benedict had tried his on while defending the nets for the Montreal Maroons.

That’s Farrell’s protection we’re seeing here, in the two images above, if not all that straight-on or clearly. What’s evident is that his was expressly intended to protect his eyewear rather than offer any kind of comprehensive defence against facial injury. Four years later, Japan’s Olympic goaltender Teiji Honma would sport a full mask of a sort that a baseball catcher might be satisfied to wear (below); Farrell’s tackle left his nose and mouth and chin painfully exposed.

Farrell’s half-mask does seem to have caught on, at least in collegiate circles: later in the 1930s, George Mahoney (here below) had a similar set-up while guarding goals for Harvard.

At Lake Placid, Farrell’s U.S. team came as close as they ever had in the Olympics to toppling the repeatedly dominant Canadians. In the tournament’s opening game, it took two overtimes for the Canadians to beat their North American rivals, 2-1. Nine days later, the teams played three overtimes without the breaking their 2-2 deadlock. That was enough for Canada to take the gold, leaving the U.S. with silver.

Regarding Farrell’s half-mask, one more note might be worth a mention. Ahead of the Olympics, in January, Farrell would seem to have been the first masked goaltender since Clint Benedict to face NHL opposition on NHL ice.

It was only an exhibition game. A few days after naming the line-up he’d be taking to Lake Placid, U.S. Olympic coach Ralph Winsor took his team into the Boston Garden to meet the NHL Bruins in a Friday-night friendly that also featured a second game, between the minor-league Boston Cubs and Poland’s Olympic team. Fans did not “turn out to see a whizz bang contest,” the Boston Globe’s account of the evening observed; for the crowd, this was more about “being on hand as an expression of well-wishing for the sojourn in the Adirondacks.”

On the Tuesday of that week, Boston had lost at home to Chicago by a score of 3-2. Saturday, they’d go down 2-0 to the visiting Detroit Falcons. Friday night, Bruins’ coach Art Ross didn’t roll out his full line-up. Goaltender Tiny Thompson was excused, replaced by his sometime back-up, Percy Jackson; regulars Dit Clapper, Cooney Weiland, and Lionel Hitchman were likewise given a rest.

But Eddie Shore played, and so did Bruins’ captain George Owen, along with front-line forwards Marty Barry and Art Chapman. The latter scored four goals in a 5-1 Bruins’ win, with Frank Jerwa adding another. Ty Anderson scored the only goal for the Olympians in the second of the game’s three 15-minute periods — it was “the only really difficult shot Percy Jackson had to handle,” according to the Globe.

Farrell shared the net with back-up Ted Frazier, “both getting considerable experience in killing off hard drives.”