Later, Clarence Campbell was asked what he would have done differently if he’d known a riot was in the offing. “I wasn’t frightened, if that’s what you mean,” was his response. “I think, in the interest of everybody, if I had known what was going to happen, the thing then to have done would have been to call the whole thing off.” As it was, let history show that on a Thursday of this date in 1955, Montreal’s game against the Detroit Red Wings went ahead a day after the NHL president suspended Canadiens’ superstar Maurice Richard for the end of the regular season and the playoffs to follow.

During the first period, unhappy Habs fans accosted Campbell in his Forum seat, yelling insults and bombarding him with (as Montreal GM Frank Selke remembered) According to Frank Selke: “bad fruit, eggs, and bags full of water.” Worse followed: Andre Robinson, 21, Rue St. Henri squeezed a tomato over Campbell’s head. (He was charged with assault.) Another young bravo held out his hand for a shake: when Campbell extended his hand, he got a slap in the face. At about that same time, someone tossed what Montreal police later described as “a U.S. Army type tear-gas bomb.” The Toronto Daily Star reported: “Campbell, after being punched in the face, was buried under an avalanche of rubbers, peanuts, programs, eggs, tomatoes, and pennies.” The Forum organist played “My Heart Cries For You.”

The game was called off soon after that, forfeited to Detroit, who’d been leading 4-1.

Recalling his service as a soldier with the Canadian Army in the Second World War, Campbell said, “I’ve seen lots of panics, but never anything like this.” Soon enough, of course, the riot spilled out into the streets of Montreal. Cars burned, looters sacked stores.

“Let us hope the outside world has been sufficiently distracted by the H-bomb and the Yalta papers, during the last couple of weeks,” the Star’s editorial page opined next day from Toronto, “to keep it from taking a close look at Canada. Otherwise the idea might have got abroad that this is a nation of hicks and hooligans.”