Din And Bear It: Duncan Macpherson’s “Hockey game in Chicago,” ink, wash, and textured card glued on board. (Image: © McCord Museum)

Famous for the din of their allegiance to their beloved Black Hawks, fans who used to frequent Chicago’s old Stadium also, occasionally, got the team into trouble.

In April of 1944, for instance, when Chicago was vying with the Montreal Canadiens for the Stanley Cup. With Canadiens having won the opening game of the finals at the Forum, they took their show on the road, riding a Maurice Richard hat trick to secure a 3-1 game-two win in Chicago.

It wasn’t pretty. “It was an unruly crowd that held up the game for almost a quarter of an hour after Richard scored his final goal in the third period,” the Montreal Gazette reported the next morning. “It heaved everything — papers, pennies, compacts, decks of cards, and vegetables — down on the ice to show its displeasure over Referee Bill Chadwick’s refusal to call a penalty against Elmer Lach. It blew automobile horns and beat tin pans that it brought with it into the big rink. There were 16,003 fans in the crowd and they made a lot of noise.”

One of the quieter members of the audience was baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, sitting in the good seats and thereby, in the line of line. “It’s an unusual contest at the Stadium when hockey fans do not shower the rink with pennies, paper, hats, fruit, and other objects that endanger the safety of contestants,” Arch Ward noted in his Chicago Tribune column. On this night, he continued, a chair came sailing out of the upper balcony, narrowly missing Landis, “who promptly decided there were more enjoyable ways of spending an evening than watching a hockey game.”  

For his part, NHL President Red Dutton was not best pleased by Chicago’s game-two enthusiasm. His statement ahead of game three went like this:

In response to a telegraphic vote which I requested from the board of governors of the National Hockey League resulting from a 20-minute delay in the third period in the Stanley Cup game in Chicago on Thursday, while the ice was being cleared of debris thrown by fans, I have been empowered to forfeit any future game to the visiting club if a repetition of this kind occurs in any of the forthcoming games, and I definitely intend to exercise my authority.

Game three hit the ice on a Sunday of this date. Fans arriving at the Stadium was subjected to searches. The Gazette:

The big throng of 17,694 spectators were frisked for missiles on the way in, particularly those who had seats in the top gallery, and the following is an inventory of articles collected: coat-hangers, nuts, steel bolts, smoked fish, bags of rice, bags of flour, lemons, oranges, limes, boxes of soap flakes, rolls of toilet paper, megaphones, candy, peanuts, beer and pop bottles, large and small bells, playing cards, pieces of steel, cartons, pennies in 25c rolls, 1,000 paper scooters, and several folding chairs.

Paper scooters, anyone? Airplanes is my guess. The good news, for Red Dutton and lovers of public order:

The denuded onlookers had nothing left to throw and there was no debris hurled on the ice.

Montreal won that game 3-2, with Phil Watson notching the deciding goal. They wrapped up the series in Montreal four nights later with a 5-4 overtime win (Toe Blake scored the winner), sweeping up their first Stanley Cup since 1931.

None of this implicates the two cacophonous Black Hawk fans depicted here: there’s no evidence that Mrs. Georgia De Larne (top) or Irving Birnbaum (below) ever partook in any missile-launching. Seen here in Chicago Stadium’s upper balcony during a Black Hawks game in 1941, these two seem to have been more committed to making a racket than a bad example. A contemporary newspaper described Mrs. De Larne as “one of the many noisemakers present in the galley.”