Autumn’s in the air, and on the calendar, which means, in Canada and other ice-minded jurisdictions, pucks are dropping across the land along with all the leaves. NHL teams this week started their stretching and scrimmaging; tomorrow the league’s exhibition schedule gets underway. NHL training camps of eras past have featured regularly here (and here) at Puckstruck; today, a visit with Les Canadiennes of the Montreal and District Ladies Hockey League as they do their pre-season limbering-up with a trainer at a Montreal gym in November of 1937.

There were four teams in that loop that season, Maroons, Royal, and North End Athletic taking the ice with and against Les Canadiennes, whose coach and GM was a man by the name of Arthur Perreault. I don’t have much more information to offer than that — for one thing, the images above and below come out of the archives without captions to identify the players by, I’m sorry to say. Some of them surely feature in the last image included here, which dates to 1940, and shows Perreault in back: goaltender Germaine Blais, for instance, who served as team captain for the ’37-38 season. A year later, Les Canadiennes did drop (after seven seasons) its affiliation with Montreal’s famous NHL Canadiens, as well as their bleu-blanc-et-rouge colour scheme in favour of a new name, 7 Up, paying tribute to a mighty American soft-drink. The new sponsor featured in the logo on the team’s sweaters, you’ll note, as well as in a new colour scheme, green-and-white.