Alfie Moore

feeling for lorne

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Running Amok: New York goaltender Lorne Chabot does his best on the Tuesday night of January 26, 1937, in the midst of a 9-0 shellacking that the Chicago Black Hawks applied to his Americans at Madison Square Garden. It would be the last game of his illustrious NHL career. Chicago right wing Glenn Brydson is at left, wearing number 3; the players strewn to Chabot’s left are New York winger Baldy Cotton (on the ice); Chicago winger Pete Palangio; New York defender Joe Jerwa (numbered 2); and (guessing) his partner Allan Murray.

On a busy day of hockey-player birthdays, here’s to Lorne Chabot, born in Montreal on this date in 1900, a Friday. His eventful 11-year NHL career had him deflecting pucks for six teams. He was in on two Stanley Cup championships, with the New York Rangers in 1928 and the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1932, and won the Vézina Trophy with the Chicago Black Hawks in 1935.

Chabot was 36 in 1937, having all but retired from the NHL after the 1935-36 turn with Montreal’ Maroons to concentrate on a job with a Toronto dairy. It was in January of ’37 that he answered Red Dutton’s call to fill the Americans’ net after 36-year-old Roy Worters, the New York starter, suffered a season-ending hernia. Chabot played in six games that month, going 2-3-1 before Dutton decided that he’d seen enough. Pictured here is Chabot’s final game — his very last in the NHL — in which he and his teammates suffered a 9-0 plastering at Madison Square Garden at the hands of the Chicago Black Hawks.

Even before the goals started going in that January night, New York was sitting dead last in the eight-team NHL, two points behind the also-faltering Black Hawks.

Pep Kelly led the Hawks, netting a hattrick on the night, with Paul Thompson adding a pair for Chicago, with Earl Seibert, Wildor Larochelle, Pete Palangio, and Johnny Gottselig contributing a single goal each. This was the very week, it’s worth noting, that Chicago’s volatile owner, Major Frederic McLaughlin, had announced his plan to replace all the foreign-born players on his team— including all six of his team’s goalscorers against New York —with Americans.

“The score, of course, made Chabot look bad but the fault could not be called his entirely.” That was Joseph Nichols’ review in the New York Times next morning. John Lewy from the Brooklyn Times Union tended to agree, singling out the Americans’ sloppy defensive corps:

Forced to tend goal behind such a helter skelter performance as his mates were putting on, Lorne Chabot drew the jeers of the onlookers who, failing to put the finger on the real trouble with the club, singled him out as the obvious victim.

Hy Turkin from the Daily News wasn’t so forgiving: Chabot was “nonchalance personified as five goals whizzed past him in the first two periods”

Up in Montreal, the Gazette noted that (a) Chabot had surrendered 14 goals in his last two games and (b) word was that four of Chicago’s goals had beaten him from the blueline.

“Don’t blame Lorne Chabot,” Dutton said. “Point the finger at those high-priced stars who failed to give him any protection. Don’t overlook [Sweeney] Schriner, either. He was loafing and looking for points. He wasn’t backchecking.”

Still, Chabot was finished: Dutton called up 26-year-old Alex Wood for New York’s next game, from the IAHL Buffalo Bisons, which saw Wood lose his only NHL start by a score of 3-2 to the Montreal Canadiens. Alfie Moore, 31, took the New York net after that, going 7-11 to finish off the season and maintain the Americans’ last-place standing.

just add pads

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Born in Selkirk, Manitoba, in 1905 on a Saturday of this date, Paul Goodman was minding the nets for the AHA Wichita Skyhawks when the Chicago Black Hawks summoned him to Toronto in the spring of 1938 where they were battling the local Leafs for the Stanley Cup. With Chicago starter Mike Karakas out with an injury, the Black Hawks had made do in game one with emergency replacement Alfie Moore. Better yet, they’d won the game. That didn’t sit well with the Leafs, who refused to consent to Moore playing the second game, so in went 33-year-old Goodman. The Leafs won that one, but Karakas returned for the final two games to secure Chicago’s second championship in four years. Goodman got his chance at a more regular role with the Black Hawks two seasons after that playoff debut, taking over the starter’s job from Karakas, which is when this photograph dates to, January of 1940.  Goodman’s final NHL season was 1940-41. That year, he shared  the Chicago net with Sam LoPresti.

crowding the crease

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Dual Purpose: Mike Karakas (left) and Paul Goodman share a Chicago net in October of 1938. Note the script on their sticks: “Professional Goalie.” And if you zoom in on Goodman’s left mitt, you’ll see it’s inscribed with the name “Alex Connell.” Did Goodman borrow the leather, perhaps, from the august Ottawa goaler, whose career had come to an end in 1937, or maybe did he inherit it? Could be an autograph, I guess, or an invocation, Goodman’s reminder to himself of who he wanted to be emulating when the pucks started to fly.

Chicago Black Hawks goaltender Mike Karakas fractured a toe on the eve of the 1938 Stanley Cup finals, and for a while there that April it looked liked the Hawks would open the championship series against the hometown Toronto Maple Leafs with New York Rangers’ borrowed backstop Dave Kerr fighting their corner. There was a whole kerfuffle over that, featuring fistfights among coaches. As it ended up, the man featuring in the Black Hawks net was Alfie Moore, who’d played a little previously for the New York Americans, and happened to be on hand. In search of a more permanent solution, Chicago also rushed out and bought Paul Goodman from the AHA Wichita Skyhawks, though when the 33-year-old Moore helped Chicago beat the Leafs by a score of 3-1, they thought maybe he’d do fine.

But the NHL wouldn’t let them keep Moore, so it was Goodman — also 33, born in Selkirk, Manitoba — who got the start in game two.

The Leafs roared back with a 5-1 win, which can’t have done much for Goodman’s confidence, let alone Chicago’s. Karakas, 26, was back in for games three and four, sporting a customized shoe and toe-splint, and Chicago won both those games, which won them the Cup.

Initially, Chicago’s patchwork goaling trio all had their names engraved on the Cup with the rest of their teammates. They stayed there for 20 years, until the Cup was redesigned 1957, at which point five Hawk players whose names should, by rights, be etched into hockey history (including Moore’s and Goodman’s), were, by wrongs, left off.

Paul Goodman was back with the Hawks in the fall of ’38; the photograph here dates to that pre-seasonal October. Toe-healthy, Karakas wasn’t quite ready yet to cede the goal on anything like a full-time basis, and so Goodman returned to Wichita for the duration of the 1938-39 season.

The year after that, Chicago had three goaltenders at camp, adding a young Frank McCool to the mix. He eventually returned to university in Spokane, while Goodman was assigned to the IAHL Providence Reds; Karakas kept his net. But only for a month or so: with the Black Hawks faltering in December, coach Paul Thompson decided a switch was in order. So Goodman finished the season as Chicago’s first-choice puck-parryist.

Karakas played a bit for Providence before he decided he didn’t want to be in the minors. Suspended, he, too, ended up as an emergency replacement before the season was out, appearing for the Montreal Canadiens in stead of the injured Wilf Cude and Claude Bourque. Karakas did eventually make it back to the Black Hawks’ crease, but it took a while: he had two more seasons in the minors ahead of him before he made his return.

Paul Goodman would keep Chicago’s 1940-41 net, but only temporarily. He got hurt not long after Christmas, and the Hawks called up 23-year-old Sam LoPresti — a son, like Karakas, of Eveleth, Minnesota. About to turn 36, Goodman decided he’d had enough, announcing his retirement before January was over.

 

in new york, on this night in 1937: the mother and the father of a rage

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Enlivened By A Free-For-All: This scene at Madison Square Garden on this night in 1937. While the Leafs’ Turk Broda watches from the comfort of his crease, policemen try to quell the second-period uprising. That’s Sweeney Schriner with a patrolman at lower left, as New York goaltender Alfie Moore looks on, with referee Mickey Ion nearby. The Amerks’ Roger Jenkins, wearing 10 in white, does his best to restrain a Leaf who’s swinging at Hap Emms, 15. Joe Lamb is 14 in the foreground; I don’t know that I can see Red Horner.

Charlie Conacher broke his wrist in the fall of 1936, in an exhibition game the Toronto Maple Leafs played against the Detroit Red Wings. Turk Broda and Syl Apps both made their Leafs debut that night, and Conn Smythe was pleased with what he saw from them. Of Apps he said, glowingly if unkindly, “He’s a better player than Joe Primeau ever thought of being.”

But the Conacher news was bad. As it turned out, he’d still be recovering come late February of 1937 when the Leafs welcomed the New York Americans to Maple Leaf Gardens. Rivals in the NHL’s four-team Canadian Division, they were battling for the last playoff spot. This was a Saturday night, and the Leafs won 4-3, which put them nine points ahead of Red Dutton’s team. Catching a train after the game, the two teams headed for a return date in New York the following night — 81 years ago tonight.

Conacher wouldn’t be ready to return for a few more games, but he was travelling with the team. In his spare time, he was putting his name to a newspaper column for The Globe and Mail, which is how we know that the Leafs wandered down to the docks in New York, to look at the Queen Mary. Conacher’s take? “What a ship! It certainly is one of the modern seven wonders of the world.”

At Madison Square Garden, the Leafs went down with “all the honours of war.” That was George Currie’s view, expressed on newsprint next morning in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Other dispatches described “a torrid match,” (the Associated Press), “climaxed by fisticuffs,” and (from the United Press) a second period “enlivened by a free-for-all.”

The Leafs got the first goal, from Gordie Drillon, assisted by their leading scorer, Syl Apps. Also featuring in the first: New York’s Nels Stewart earned a a ten-minute misconduct for insulting referee Mickey Ion. “It seems that Stewart was pretty saucy to Irons and hurt that worthy’s feelings pretty badly,” was how George Currie wrote it, muddling the referee’s name. “So into the dungeon he was cast.”

Most of the fuss, some of which is depicted here, came later, when Ion whistled for a penalty shot after the Leafs’ Jimmy Fowler tripped Hap Emms. As that was unfolding, Toronto defenceman Red Horner parleyed with New York forward Joe Lamb. Horner had the NHL’s leading collection of penalty minutes at this time, so talking was never going to settle it. He later said that Lamb had high-sticked him. “I told him to keep that stick down and he said he’d shove it down my throat,” he explained. “So I let him have it.”

With his stick, Horner meant, about the head, as Lamb was turned to talk to Ions. “The blow landed on Joe from behind,” George Currie wrote, “and he flew into the mother and the father of a rage. He raised his stick and if Horner hadn’t ducked, there might have been a serious carnage. As it was the blade landed on Horner’s heavily padded shoulder. The issue was joined and the air was filled with flying fists.”

“Hockey,” wrote Joseph Nichols of The New York Times, “was forgotten.”

George Currie:

With a glad whoop, the crowd egged them on. Americans streamed on to the ice, a silent but bland Dutton holding the dasher door wide open, lest his janissaries be delayed even a split second. Connie Smythe, the mercurial Leaf pilot, ran out on the ice, thereby making himself very illegal though not felonious. It developed that Connie for once was not bent upon leading his cohorts into a battle-royal. He simply wanted to coax the angry Horner off the ice before his team in the Polyclinic Hospital or the W. 47th St. police station.

Policemen, as you can see, did intervene. Fifteen minutes the affray went on, with everybody but goaltenders Broda and New York’s Alfie Moore joining in. “Amerks and Leafs paired off,” Currie reported, “and looked with an elegant bellicosity at each other but swapped only menacing gestures and tall words” before something like peace was restored.

It didn’t last. As he skated to the penalty box, Horner went after Lamb again, who raised his stick. Horner was stickless, so he stopped, whereon his teammate Busher Jackson stepped in. They fenced, Nichols wrote, “while somebody held the huge Horner.”

Aftermath: Headline from the sports pages of a St. Louis newspaper, February 23, 1937.

When it came to doling out penalties, Mickey Ion went with the simplest math he could muster: Horner and Lamb each got 20 minutes and a game, meaning they were banished and the teams had to play four-on-four for the duration of a period. Everybody else was forgiven their sins. And, I guess, simmered down: Ion called no more penalties for the rest of the night.

Emms scored on his penalty shot, and teammates Eddie Wiseman and Sweeney Schriner later followed his lead, giving the home team a 3-1 win. The Americans didn’t make it into the playoffs that year, and while the Leafs did, they were gone in two games, losing to the New York Rangers.

Charlie Conacher returned to the line-up a couple of nights after the fracas in New York. In the meantime, he wrote it up, cheerfully, for his Globe column:

Although Joe Lamb put plenty of weight behind his stick when he walloped “Red” Horner Sunday night, Horner doesn’t look a bit the worse for it. “Red” always could take it. The Leafs say the only thing wrong with the crack “Red” took at Lamb was that it wasn’t half hard enough. Lamb doesn’t rate very highly in their popularity league.

 

chicago’s brief cardinals were even briefer americans

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Left on the outside looking in when the National Hockey League formed in November of 1917, Toronto sportsman and impresario Eddie Livingstone would resurface in 1926 as the owner of the minor-league American Hockey Association’s short-lived Chicago Cardinals. It didn’t end any better, this time, for Livingstone. He was and always would be a pariah so far as the NHL was concerned, and any league associated with him was, President Frank Calder declared, an outlaw outfit. Livingstone would be forced to sell the team before the season was over; later, he’d sue the AHA, NHL, and Chicago owner Major Frederic McLaughlin, charging that they’d conspired to wreck his business.

Before any of that, back in the quiet of Toronto’s Mutual Street Arena, Livingstone’s upstarts gathered under coach Nip Dwan to gear up for their first and only season. This was November of ’26; pictured, that’s goaltender Winston (a.k.a. Bud) Fisher above and, below, (possibly) Ralph Taylor. As his sweater shows, the team had a brief non-avian identity. That would have been another irritant to the NHL, given that they already their own Americans playing in New York. The line-up featured a passel of future NHLers in Taylor, Cy Wentworth, Gordie Brydson, Teddy Graham, along with the man who’d take over the nets from Fisher, midway through the season, Alfie Moore.

(Images: Top, City of Toronto Archives, Globe and Mail fonds, Fonds 1266, Item 9309; Bottom, City of Toronto Archives, Globe and Mail fonds, Fonds 1266, Item 9311)

 

hockey players in hospital beds: most of the 1938 chicago black hawks

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chi abed 1

1. Maybe there’s a more impressively populated photograph of hockey players abed in hospital, but I doubt it. The patients, from left, are Cully Dahlstrom, Mush March, Louie Trudel, Doc Romnes, Carl Voss, Johnny Gottselig, and Art Wiebe, members all of the 1937-38 Chicago Black Hawks. Their injuries, respectively, were to the: leg, groin, scalp, nose, leg, leg, and forehead.

2. Blame Red Horner.

3. That’s what Chicago did. Not that he did all the damage, just a lot of it, especially to Doc Romnes, who vowed revenge (apparently) and (verifiably) took it. April of ’38 this was, when the Leafs and Black Hawks were in the Finals, playing for the Stanley Cup.

4. The first two games were in Toronto. The Leafs, who’d swept by the Boston Bruins in the semi-finals, had finished 20 points ahead of Chicago in the season standings. Chicago had surprised Montreal and the New York Americans in the playoffs: they were being called “the Cinderella boys.” The Chicago Tribune said that the entire club radiated confidence.

5. There was a goalie kerfuffle that I’m not really going to get into here. Suffice to say Chicago’s regular goaltender was injured and a man whom the Black Hawks didn’t want guarding their net was kind of forced on them, and then when he won the first game, that was the end of it, the NHL wouldn’t let him play for them again. Alfie Moore. The score was 2-1.

6. The second game Toronto won, 5-1. A drubbing, The Winnipeg Tribune called it; local newspapers were pleased. In action that night, Chicago had a different goaltender, Paul Goodman, due to the continuing situation that you’ll have to look up elsewhere. What’s important to say here is that several Hawks were hurt in this game, including Art Wiebe (cut in the head by a teammate’s stick while trying to dodge a flying puck as he sat on the bench), Johnny Gottselig (slashed on the foot), and (cut in the head by high sticks) Louis Trudel (six stitches) Roger Jenkins (two), and Alex Levinsky (two). Mush Marsh’s pre-existing aching groin kept him out of the game altogether, joining Hawk goalie Mike Karakas, whose toe was fractured, causing the whole goaltender of which we’ll continue not to speak.

7. According to the Chicago papers, Toronto captain Red Horner was the high-sticker-in-chief; he also broke Doc Romnes’ nose.

8. George Strickler from The Chicago Tribune wrote that bitter feelings were engendered by (1) the goaltender hubbub that probably would have been worth explaining; (2) lax officiating (looking at you, Ag Smith and Bert McCaffrey) as well as (3):

It was evident from the opening faceoff that the favored Leafs, aroused by the publicity resulting from Tuesday’s unexpected defeat were intent on making the beating physical as well as official. They checked viciously and needlessly and completely mastered the Hawks until the latter began retaliating in kind.

9. In 1962, The Chicago Sunday Tribune recalled the brutality of the game. Here’s what Ted Damata wrote about Romnes, who had, it’s true, won the Lady Byng Trophy in 1936 in recognition of his gentlemanly peacefulness:

Elwyn Romnes, who looked and acted so much like a meek professor that the players nicknamed him Doc.

10. Contemporary accounts don’t dwell too much on what Horner did to Romnes. Mostly what they say is that the former broke the latter’s nose, and this forced Romnes from the game in the second period. Subsequent reports multiply the damage: the nose was apparently broken in three places.

11. Stan and Shirley Fischler, in Who’s Who In Hockey (2003): Horner rapped Romnes across the face. A contemporary report from the Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) Telegraph (presumably an AP report) attributes the damage to a Horner body check. Whereas Mark Stewart, in The Chicago Blackhawks (2009) seems to suggest the wound was self-inflicted: Romnes broke his nose.

That echoes the blamelessness that Charles Coleman enshrined in The Trail of the Stanley Cup (1969): Romnes emerged from a fracas with a broken nose.

Andrew Podnieks, in Players: The Ultimate A—Z Guide To Everyone Who Has Ever Played in the NHL (2003): his nose was smashed by a punch from Red Horner.

Kevin Allen tells us that it was a Horner butt-end that did the damage. This is in ‪“Then Wayne Said to Mario. . .”: The Best Stanley Cup Stories Ever Told (2009).

12. Horner wasn’t penalized for whatever it was he did, though he did take tripping minor in the second. Still, according to Globe and Mail Sports Editor Tommy Munns, the referees were “stricter than any other pair in any other playoff game.” NHL President Frank Calder had met with Smith and McCaffrey before the game, telling them (Munns speculated) “to get away from the practice of letting almost everything go.” Continue reading →