Close Call: Charlie Gardiner poses for the camera in February of 1934, two months before he led his Chicago Black hawks to a Stanley Cup championship. Two months after that, he died, at 30, of a brain hemorrhage. (Image: SDN-075893, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection, Chicago History Museum)

“The supreme showman of the sport,” the Montreal Star called him, “the grinning curly-head who was both a successful clown and the game’s greatest goaltender.” Charlie Gardiner was 30 in June of 1934, and the toast of the hockey world, having just won his second Vézina Trophy while captaining  the Chicago Black Hawks to the team’s first Stanley Cup. His health, sad to say, had been failing all the while and on a Wednesday of this date, Gardiner died in Winnipeg from a brain hemorrhage brought on by uraemic convulsions. “He was a sportsman from his head to his heels,” NHL President Frank Calder said, “as well as one of the greatest goaltenders the game ever produced. His loss is irreparable.”