“Oh, boy, I am glad I haven’t got a weak heart,” Major Frederic McLaughlin is supposed to have cried at the first hockey game he attended in person, a mere month before the Chicago Black Hawks, the team he launched into the NHL as owner and martinet-in-chief, made their debut in the winter of 1926. Scion of a coffee baron, McLaughlin was a crack polo player who was the second most famous member of his own (second) marriage, which was to Irene Castle, the ballroom dancer and movie star who was often revered in the early decades of the 20^th century as America’s best-dressed woman. The Black Hawks won a pair of Stanley Cup championships during McLaughlin’s tempestuous reign, which ended on a Sunday of this date in 1944, when he died at the age of 67. You can read more about him and his eccentric ways here, if you’re interested.

In February of 1935, when Black Hawks goaltender Lorne Chabot became the first hockey player to adorn the cover of Time magazine, the owner and his wife featured in the article accompanying inside.

A year after Chicago’s first Cup win, Time reported, fans in the Windy City were restive. “Chicago hockey crowds, impatient because the team has done most of its winning away from its home arena, have lately taken to tossing dead fish down from the gallery. Gestures of this sort and the fact that attendance is not so far ahead of last year’s as it should be in view of the team’s prowess, irritate its owner, Chicago’s Major Frederic McLaughlin, who attends Black Hawks’ games with his famed wife, Irene Castle McLaughlin.”

Time noted that on Lorne Chabot — “disdainful, lazy, and alert” — the flying fish had no effect. Chabot was only bothered by pucks passing him by, the magazine reported, though he could get very bothered indeed. “Last fortnight he clubbed a goal judge for daring to assert that his opponents had contrived to score a goal. He was amused by news that the goal judge was suing him for $10,000.”