Boston

cold comfort: on the pond in plaster rock, 2004

/ puckstruck

Same Time Next Year: Not enough ice means no 2024 World Pond Hockey Championships in Plaster Rock, New Brunswick.

The pond wouldn’t freeze: it’s as simple and dispiriting as that. Organizers of the World Pond Hockey Championships in Plaster Rock, New Brunswick, had no choice but to announce, earlier this month, that the tournament was a no-go for 2024. Co-founder Danny Braun made the call nobody wanted to hear: the winter had been too warm. Without a foot of “good blue ice,” it just wasn’t viable to be hosting 120 teams over four days on 20-odd rinks on Roulston Lake, and by early February, they just didn’t have it. And so the 22nd edition of these pond playoffs will have to wait until 2025, climate change permitting.

COVID-19 shut down the 2021 edition of the Championships, but other than that, the tournament has been going for 21 years. In 2004, when it was in its third year, I teamed with my friends Mike, Evan, and Nick to mount a Toronto challenge for the big wooden faux Stanley Cup that they award to the victors. We (spoiler alert) weren’t them, but it was a glorious adventure that I wrote about in my 2014 book Puckstruck. Here’s a version of that, in tribute to Danny Braun and the good people of Plaster Rock and the fun we had on their ice when it was good and blue and ice.

We flew to New Brunswick from Toronto, four of us, in a February freeze. Fred from the Tobique Lions Club was waiting for us with his big white van at the airport in Fredericton and once we’d collected our sticks and our gear, we were on the road north for the two-hour drive to Plaster Rock.

I’d heard the organizer of the World Pond Hockey Championships, Danny Braun, talking on the radio about what it was all about: “It’s carving skates, sticks and pucks and laughter,” he said. That sounded like fun, these World Pond Hockey Championships, so I’d signed us up, me and my friends Nick and Mike and Evan, paid the money, made arrangements. I ordered sweaters, red with black and white trim, and a big exclamation mark on the front, to intimidate people who are scared of punctuation. We were in our 30s, veterans all of many men’s-league campaigns in countless bad-smelling rinks across the years, who took the game just seriously enough but no more than that. Nick and Mike and Evan are all, I should say, better hockey players than me and, looking back, maybe I thought that was enough of a winning formula. As it turned out, we probably should have taken the time to practice together, maybe come up with a plan for how to play, some four-on-four strategies. But in the end, no, that’s not what we did.

There are pond-hockey tournaments everywhere now, but the one at Plaster Rock was one of the earliest to organize, and it’s still the most venerable. No-one, yet, has made the journey from Plaster Rock to the NHL. A thousand or so people live there, amid forests and ferns. The local sawmill is the biggest employer in town; the ferns are principally fiddleheads, which are celebrated at their own annual festival. If you didn’t know that Plaster Rock is the fiddlehead capital of Canada, you must have missed the giant fiddlehead statue that guards the town limits.

They dropped a puck out of a helicopter to get the tournament started. We missed that, but Fred got us to town and down to Roulston Lake in time to take the ice for the first of our Friday-night games. Snow was blowing down through the glare of big lights they’d trucked into that oasis in the boreal dark. They had 24 rinks cleared, and there were games underway on most of them when we skated out to face the team from the Moosehead brewery in Saint John’s. The whole lake was hockey, and if you closed your eyes to listen, you could hear it carefully quoting the work of hockey writers from Betsy Struthers (“the shush of skates”) to Peter Gzowski (“the thwock and clack of the puck”) to R.J. Childerhose (“the shoo-oonk! of skate blades as someone stops”).

I may have fallen into a reverie. From an early age, I’ve had a tendency to narrate the game as I’m playing it, a ponderous muttering habit that I’m sure inhibited my development as a player. To me, the need to describe what’s happening on the ice, to find the right words, has always seemed just as important — maybe more so? — as making it happen.

We were down quickly, 3-0. There were no goalies here. The nets were low and wide-mouthed, a mailbox for posting pucks. All this way we’d come without any real thought of how we wanted to play, or what the conditions might demand. We were slow and bunched-up: the word for us was glacial. We tried to learn from the beer-making boys as they were whomping us, but it was hard to learn lessons and be losing both at the same time. The game went fast. I was trying to think of the right word to describe Nick’s dogged checking when the game ended. Terrier … ish?

Lacking vocabulary and goals, we lost 15-6.

Team Punctuation: Mike and Evan and Nick line up on Plaster Rock ice.

Next game, we tried sending Mike forward on his own while the rest of us stayed back. That worked for a while: Mike poached some goals and we took the lead. Then we got tired, and maybe nervous — it was a hometown team we were up against, with lots of fans by the snowbank. New plan: one man back, everybody else to the attack. That worked to the extent that we only lost that game 14-6. We ate our suppers with our skates on, sitting on hay bales, in the big rinkside tent, where the beer was.

Firemen flooded the rinks with the town truck while we slept Friday night. Saturday morning we sat on our hastily made beds in the suite at the Settler’s Inn & Motel, taped our sticks, tied our skates, and when the time came we clomped through the snow into the woods to find the firemen were back out, giving the ice a final spritz with potato sprayers. It was, we were all agreed, fucking cold: there was a sense that just by showing up you were consenting to a cryogenic future.

In the brisk and the bright we played a team with a mixed Montreal/Cornerbrook lineage and managed to tie them, the Quebec Newfoundlanders, 19-19. Then we started to win. Squaloid might be the word for the way Nick was hunting the puck — it’s a good hockey word, anyway, right up there with temerarious, which describes Evan’s burst of enthusiasm in the final few minutes. Mike just scored, with swagger. I remained semi-glaciated, for my part, but with a nagging persistence in my checking that irked our rivals into making mistakes with a helpful consistency. We were finding our adjectives, now, and we used them to beat another Plaster Rock team, 14-6, followed by a faculty of teachers from Oakville 18-7.

Ice Capacious: Roulston Lake, in happier, icier Championship times.

At the tournament dance that night, at the high school, we didn’t dance so much as limp around the lockers-lined corridor nursing our Mooseheads until we were surprised by the news that we’d made the playoffs. It was hard-to-believe and happy news, though we were too sore to do more than nod before we took our aches back to the Settler’s Inn.

Sunday morning when we woke up it was minus-WTF in the woods outdoors: the thermometer made Saturday’s cold seem like a joke. We had to keep checking to see if our hands were still there in our hockey gloves, because we couldn’t feel them. The players on the team from Washington weren’t just young and just fast, they were serious (and young, and fast). The Frozen Four, they were called. No fooling around with these guys. They made our makeshift attack look like a game for clowns. They had different plans, at least four of them, all elegant and effective, which they switched up with subtle nods. A small dense mass of extra-cold had settled into the slot in front of our net, a micro-climate that we may have briefly hoped might re-inforce our defensive structure, but it didn’t faze the Americans. They were good guys, I have to say, even as they went on smoking us — 21-7 was the final score — and we were pleased for them.

Skates off, boots on, we stood by to watch them play in the semi-final later that polar afternoon, against an even younger, faster, quicker-nodding team from Boston called the Danglers, who edged them by a score of 18-17. In the final, the Danglers (all of whom were, in fact, Canadians) took on the Pepsi Vipers, locally favoured because their captain had once lived in Plaster Rock. Didn’t matter: it was the Danglers who zoomed to a 24-7 victory.

Boston Strong: In the aftermath of the 2004 final, the victorious Boston Danglers (white sweaters) lined up to receive their faux Stanley Cup.

I don’t know that we were as happy, heading for home, as those Danglers, but we were pretty happy. We’d travelled the land to skate on a big New Brunswick lake where, in a forest, blurred by snow, we were as cold as we’d ever been for three days of mostly losing and very little winning. We were still thawing on the flight home to Toronto, and still aching. If there were lessons we’d learned, what were they? It was hard to remember. But we’d been happy the whole time, laughing as we went, win or lose, feeling lucky. Maybe there are actual words for the joy you generate on skates, with a stick in your hand, while trying to corral a puck, among friends, but then again maybe it’s only a feeling you have to try to hold on to.

Embed from Getty Images

Pond Hockey Championship co-founder and tournament director Danny Braun in February of 2006.

 

show and tell with nels stewart

/ puckstruck

Have Stick, Will Travel: Hall-of-Fame centreman Nels Stewart was born in Montreal on this date, another Friday, in 1899. He was a Montreal Maroon in the 1920s, and a dominant one, leading the NHL in scoring in 1926, as his team surged to  a Stanley Cup championship. He won the Hart Trophy that year, too, as league MVP, adding a second Hart to his quiver in 1930. After seven years in Montreal, his contract was sold in 1932 to the Boston Bruins, for whom he played in parts of four seasons, serving as team captain in 1934-35. He’s pictured here in ’34 among fans and friends at a Boston community hockey clinic. Nels Stewart finished out his NHL career with the New York Americans before calling it a career in 1940. (Image: Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

there will be bears: a short history of bruin mascots

/ puckstruck / 1 Comment

Bear With It: The Bruins’ distinctly mouse-looking mascot roams Boston Garden on the Thursday night of April 9, 1970, as the home team beat the New York Rangers 5-3 in a Stanley Cup quarter-final match-up. (Image: Frank O’Brien/Boston Globe via Getty Images)

A black cat followed Art Ross into his hotel room one Halloween but no, the coach and manager of the Boston Bruins wasn’t concerned that his luck was on the wane. Ross doesn’t seem have been even slightly spooked. In fact, he was all for claiming the cat for the Bruins cause, as a mascot.

This was in Saint John, New Brunswick, in October of 1934, when the Bruins were in town for the pre-season training camp. The hotel was the Admiral Beatty. The Ottawa Journal reported that the Bruins were trying to find the cat’s owner to secure permission to ship it back to Boston. That was a courtesy, really: the team fully intended on taking it. “Anyone proving ownership will have all his expenses paid to Boston to see the Bruins perform in the National Hockey league playdowns,” the Journal said, “if they reach that stage with the help of their new mascot.”

The Bruins had a great year, as it turned out, though whether it was cat-inspired or not is hard to confirm. At the end of the regular season, Boston finished first in the NHL’s four-team American Division standings, earning a bye into the playoff semi-finals. There they ran into the Toronto Maple Leafs, who’d topped the Canadian Division. (They topped the Bruins, too, to get to the Stanley Cup finals, where the Montreal Maroons topped them.)

I don’t know what happened to the cat from the Maritimes; Boston’s 1934 mascot sank out of sight before reaching Boston, if reach it he did.

What were the Bruins doing dabbling in felines? Shouldn’t a team that wears the bear and has, from its start in 1924, embraced a grizzly spirit, have been looking to ursine options to fill the role of mascot?

Boston Brown: The original Bruin, as it appeared on the team’s first sweater in 1924.

Short answer: the cat was anomalous, a one-off. Throughout Boston’s history, when it comes to mascots, the Bruins have mostly stayed true to their own, even if only the earliest of their bears was an authentic (as in live) animal. Over the course of their 99 NHL years, most of the bears the Bruins have trotted out to represent themselves have been either dead or faux.

Just a year before the cat caught Ross’ eye in New Brunswick, Boston had a bear on staff — or, at least, on site, at Boston Garden. This would seem to have been their first, arriving on the scene almost a decade after the team made its debut in the NHL. It was December of 1933, newspapers noted that a young bear, seven months old, had made his way south from Nashua, just up over the New Hampshire line. Not on his own. He’d been caught there, I guess, by someone named Robert Moore, who donated him to the Bruins. A black bear, apparently; it’s not entirely clear whether he (or she) was male or female.

Years later, in 1954, Art Ross remembered this, though I think he mixed up his dates: he thought it was 1928 that the bear arrived, the year the Boston Garden opened. “Somebody gave us a bear cub,” he told a Boston Herald reporter, “and Billy Banks used to show him off on a big chain but the bear grew nasty after a year or two and we gave him to a zoo.”

Threadworn: This hard-living bruin appeared on the cover of a team yearbook published for the 1927-28 season.

I haven’t seen any such nastiness otherwise documented. Lucky B does seem to have liked to roam, and that may have been a factor in his/her retirement. She — let’s go with that — made her NHL debut on a Tuesday night around this time of year at the Garden as the Bruins hosted the Montreal Canadiens.

It was an auspicious night in the United States: December 5, 1933 was also the night that Prohibition was repealed after 13 dry American years. I don’t think they’ve serving spirits at the Garden, but Lucky Bruin did make her debut, “cavorting on the ice unmindful of the crowd of 12,000.” NHL President Frank Calder was on hand, and it’s possible that he could have been involved in the pre-game ceremony during which Robert Moore handed over Lucky Bruin to Bruins’ captain Marty Barry with (as the Boston Globe said) “due formalities.”

Boston won that game, 5-2. Their bear went quiet for a bit, or at least unreported. It was the end of the month before he was back in the papers, featured as “feeling frisky” during a 2-2 tie that Boston and the Toronto Maple Leafs shared in on Tuesday, December 27.

Lucky Him/Her: That’s Bruins’ manager and coach Art Ross, I’m afraid, with the team’s poor, chained mascot in December of 1933. Garden attendant and bear wrangler Billy Banks is in the background.

Let loose on the ice in the intermission between first and second periods, “he romped around the length of the rink twice and then attempted fence climbing,” the Globe observed. “He did get over the fence once but was put back on the ice by a Garden attendant.”

In January, Lucky Bruin made what seems to have been her showing at a game that Boston lost 0-1 to the visiting Montreal Maroons. Still not clear on the bear’s gender, the Globe seems to have opted for inclusivity, switching it around within a single paragraph, a progressive choice, surely, for the day — unless it was unintended:

During the intermission between the second and third period, after making his usual tour of the rink, the bear stopped near the Bruin bench, hesitated a minute and then quick as a flash climbed over the low fence. The Bruins’ dentist from his seat in the front row was watching her every move, however, and just as Lucky Bruin landed on the other side of the fence, he grabbed the bear’s chain and held her until an attendant reached there.

He’s not named in the Globe game report but I think this would have been Dr. Charles W. Crowley. The attendant, I guess, was Billy Banks. Is this what Art Ross was thinking of as nastiness? Anyway, I haven’t found any further mention in the Boston papers of Lucky after that, so maybe she took her retirement mid-season.

Maine Event: The Governor of Maine presented this former bear to the Bruins in 1954.

In 1954, the Bruins were taking no chances on in-rink nastiness: the black bear they took delivery of that February was well and truly dead. I don’t know that this one had a name, but it was seven-feet tall, weighing 450 pounds. Someone had shot it near Millinocket, Maine, apparently, and taxidermied it.

Maine Governor Burton M. Cross presented it to Bruins’ owner Walter Brown ahead of a game against the Detroit Red Wings.

“I hope the bear will help to bring the Bruins luck,” said the Governor.

“I hope that luck goes to work tonight,” Brown said. The Bruins had lost seven in a row. With the bear encased in glass in the Garden lobby, they managed a 1-1 tie.

I don’t know how long the Maine bear kept his place; I’d like to imagine that he was still around in 1970 when Boston won another Stanley Cup, their first since 1941. Does anyone know?

The team did have a roaming bear by then, which is to say someone roaming the aisles of the old Garden in unnerving bear suit, as seen at the top of this post.

Winnie The Bruin: Hall Gill and the Bruins wore these bearish alternate sweaters in 1999-2000. The team’s ReverseRetro sweaters revived this bear in 2020. (Image: Classic Auctions)

The Bruins got a new rink in 1995, what’s now known as the TD Garden, and some point it gained a big bronze bear statue. The team says on its website that it has commissioned another one, too, to honour its alumni, with details of when it will be unveiled to follow. “The statue, which is in the shape of a Bruins bear, is being sculpted by Harry Weber, the same artist who previously sculpted and created the famous Bobby Orr statue that sits in front of TD Garden.”

Since 2000, the Bruins have had an official guy-in-a-fake-bear-suit mascot, the cartoonish Blades. The team held a contest to name him: Spokey, Bruiser, and Stanley Cub was some of the finalist. “A soft, furry guy with big teeth,” the Globe described him on his debut, at which time the Bruins, via community relations coordinator Heather Wright, made abundantly clear that Blades was strictly an off-ice member of staff and wouldn’t be donning skates to perform gimmicks, no way.

“Our game is very focussed on the game of hockey,” Wright told the Globe. “Blades is an addition to that. We added him to create a fun, more complete experience for our fans, particularly families. We expect he’ll be doing a lot of head-patting, handshaking, and hugging.”

Embed from Getty Images

 

In 2009, the Boston advertising agency Mullen crafted a popular and, shall we say, grittier multimedia campaign for the Bruins featuring yet another simulated bear. (You can view a compilation of the Mullen spots here.)

“The Bruins have their swagger back,” Greg Almeida, the copywriter on the file, told the Boston Globe, “and we wanted to come up with something that really brought that forth.”

“We actually modified the look of the bear a little bit,” said Jesse Blatz, the art director. “We furrowed his brown a little bit to make him look nasty. If you want, you can spend over $100,000 to rent a bear suit fort a commercial shoot. But the bear that we got, he’s not overly fancy. He’s a working man’s bear.”

 

(Image of Blades on ice flying his flag shows the aftermath of a Bruins victory over the New Jersey Devils at TD Garden on October 12, 2019. Image: Kathryn Riley/Getty Images)

rocket richard riots, 1955: the view from boston

/ puckstruck

March 13 fell on a Sunday in 1955 and as the NHL season wound down, the first-place Montreal Canadiens paid a visit to Boston to play the Bruins. The third was when all hell broke loose. With six-and-a-half minutes remaining and Boston leading 4-1, the Bruins’ Warren Godfrey took a holding penalty. Montreal coach Dick Irvin pulled his goaltender, Jacques Plante, and Canadiens went to the attack. It was then that Bruins defenceman Hal Laycoe, 32, high-sticked Canadiens’ superstar Maurice Richard, 33. Tom Fitzgerald of the Boston Globe gave it a decidedly more passive spin in his description: “Laycoe’s uplifted stick caught Richard on the side of the head.”

In the fight that ensued, blood flowed as both players swung sticks and threw fists, and in the chaos of it all, Richard punched linesman Cliff Thompson. “Thompson tried to pop Maurice right back,” Fitzgerald wrote, “but landed short, and meanwhile Laycoe flung his red-drenched towel at [referee Frank] Udvari, earning his misconduct.”

The coverage next day in Boston also included the headline above in the Daily Record and the artist’s impression below, from the Boston American. NHL President Clarence Campbell wasted no time in suspending Richard for the remainder of the season and the playoffs, a sentence that would have consequences in Montreal four days later.

boston mass

/ puckstruck

When the modern-day Montreal Canadiens skate into Boston’s TD Garden tonight to meet the contemporaneous Bruins, it will be the 751st regular-season meeting between the two teams since 1924, when Boston joined the NHL. Canadiens won their first encounter 4-3 at the old Boston Arena, on Monday, December 8 of that year, with Montreal winger Aurèle Joliat putting the winner past Boston goaltender Hec Fowler. The Bruins moved to the brand-new Garden in 1928, hosting the Canadiens for the their very first game there, and losing it, 1-0. Overall, Montreal has the better record, with 363 wins/274 losses/103 ties/10 OT losses entered into the books; Canadiens have a record of 106-71 in the 177 playoff games the teams have played. The last time they met (below) was February 12, 2020, in Boston, with the Bruins prevailing by a score of 4-1 on the strength of a David Pastrnak hattrick. Above, a postcard view of the old rivals at the original Boston Garden in the 1930s.

shot attempts: taking aim with the 1930s bruins

/ puckstruck

Hall-of-Fame centreman Marty Barry played a dozen distinguished years in the NHL, starting his career with the New York Americans in 1927 and featuring as a Bruin, a Red Wing, and a Canadien before he finished in 1940. He won a Lady Byng Trophy in Detroit and thrived as a goalscorer in Boston, where he also served as captain. As many prominent Bruins did in the early 1930s, he also took time away from the rink for trapshooting, taking aim at clay pigeons at the (wince) Paleface Gun Club in Medford, Massachusetts, about eight kilometres, as the puck flies, from the old Boston Garden.

The image above dates, I’m thinking, to 1931 or 32. Barry was 26 that year and topped the team in goals, scoring 21, and finished second in points behind Dit Clapper. I don’t know how his aim was on the day depicted here, though I can report that a year later, in February of 1933, he and his teammates were back at the Paleface for a 100-target shooting competition. The Bruins were coming off a 10-0 home win over Montreal that week, so you can imagine that their mood was light. Barry was well off the mark on the day, taking down 69 targets. Best among the players was defenceman Fred Hitchman, who shot a 94, and team captain Clapper, who hit 91.

No-one outaimed Bruins coach and manager Art Ross, whose score of 95 was enough to win him the prize of the dead deer seen here. Ross was also made an honorary member of the club that day, receiving an engraved gold medal. Another wince-warning is in order here: “Presented to Art H. Ross,” it read, “Honorary Member of the Paleface Gun Club — 1933. Big Chief Push ’Em In.”

back to the garden

/ puckstruck

Putting On A Show: For the first time since March 7, 2020, there will be fans on hand in Boston’s TD Garden tonight, some 2,300 of them, as the Bruins take on the New York Islanders. Herewith, some views from the beforetimes, collected on February 12, 2020, when I saw the Bruins beat the visiting Montreal Canadiens by a score of 4-1 on the strength of a David Pastrnak hattrick.

number 22, willie o’ree

/ puckstruck / 2 Comments

Beantowners: The 1960-61 Bruins line up for picture day. Back row, from left: Murray Oliver, Andre Pronovost, Dallas Smith, Charlie Burns, Willie O’Ree, Jim Bartlett, Gerry Ouellette. Middle row, from left: Trainer Win Green, Aut Erickson, Jerry Toppazzini, Gary Aldcorn, Tom McCarthy, Bob Armstrong, Don McKenney, Doug Mohns, Bronco Horvath, trainer Hammy Moore. Up front, from left: Bruce Gamble, Leo Boivin, GM Lynn Patrick, coach Milt Schmidt, president Walter Brown, captain Fern Flaman, Johnny Bucyk.

The Boston Bruins had a plan to raise Willie O’Ree’s number 22 to the upper reaches of the TD Garden tonight, in honour of his “trailblazing impact on and off the ice” — but then, you know, there’s this pandemic. Now, instead of a ceremony ahead of tonight’s fan-free game between the Bruins and New Jersey’s Devils, they’ll plan to do it (with full attendance, everybody hopes) on January 18, 2022 — 64 years to the day that O’Ree made his NHL debut. Of course, he wore 18 that particular night, and the next, when he and the Bruins tangled in a home-and-home series with the Montreal Canadiens. O’Ree took 22 when he returned to the Bruins’ line-up in the fall of 1960, the one seen here, with whom he played a more regular role over the course of 43 games. The first Bruin to wear 22? That would be defenceman Ed Kryzanowski, starting in 1948. Others to have borne it include Joe Klukay, Larry Hillman, Brad Park, and Brian Leetch. Shawn Thornton was the last Bruin to wear 22: it’s been out of circulation since he relinquished it in 2014.

lapses in the legacy: tallying up boston’s neglected captains

/ puckstruck / 2 Comments

“Patrice Bergeron was meant to be a Bruins captain,” a former Boston teammate of his was saying last week, Martin Lapointe, emphasis on the meant and on the destiny. Is there anyone who pays attention to the NHL who’s going to dispute it?

Bergeron’s inevitable ascension to the captaincy came last Thursday, seven days after Zdeno Chara’s 14-year tenure sporting the Boston C ended when the lofty defenceman signed with the Washington Capitals.

Was a week enough to dissipate the regret associated with Chara’s departure? Maybe not quite, but the announcement of Bergeron’s succession still made for a proud picture to add to the gallery commemorating the Bruins’ 97-year history.

It was also very much of the fraught moment: players, coaches, and managers at TD Garden that day were all masked for the dressing-room ceremony that formalized Bergeron’s new role. Elsewhere, online, the team marked the occasion with a profusion of nouns and glossy graphics, the former (“Integrity. Humility. Resiliency.”) featuring in the latter. Bruins GM Don Sweeney threw in a few more in his statement.

“Patrice Bergeron exudes leadership, character, talent, will, and empathy,” Sweeney said. “We all know Bergy embraces the legacy of the Boston Bruins, as he will with the captaincy.”

Patrice Bergeron: Boston’s new  (but not 20th) captain.

Bergeron, who’s 35, is skating into his 17th season as a Bruin. He had his say, too.

“It’s very humbling. It’s a huge honour,” he offered. “There’s been some tremendous captains and leaders along the way, and some legends of the game, and as I said it’s an absolute honour and I’m going to try to keep bettering myself and learning and leading by example, but also trying to be me.”

All in all, then, a bright note on which to get the new season going in such a fraught time.

Yes, true — unless you’re talking hockey history, which Bergy and the Bruins were. From a hockey history perspective, last Thursday’s announcement was (at best) confused. It wasn’t Bergeron’s fault, and it doesn’t make him any less deserving of the Boston C, but it was — and continues to be — a bad look for the Bruins, who’ve been careless with their own history, inattentive to the detail of their rich past, and even willfully neglectful.

If they’re willing to revel in their history (and they should), they ought to take pains to get it right.

There have been, as Bergeron noted, tremendous captains and leaders along the way since Charles Adams took his grocery money and put the Bruins on ice in 1924. They should all be remembered, and recognized.

Bergeron isn’t the 20th man to captain the Boston Bruins, as the team is content to claim. Somehow, somewhere the Bruins have forgotten — and duly erased from their records — the captaincies of at least six Bruins — and maybe as many as eight.

Included in those numbers are five (or six) Hall-of-Famers, some of the greatest names in the annals of the team.

How did this happen? It’s not entirely clear.

Are these mistakes that can be corrected? Easily.

Will they be? Hockey is full of surprises.

These are not contentious cases. The evidence backing up the claims I’m making on behalf of six (or eight) famous Bruins takes some finding, which is to say it involves a certain amount of steering search-engines through newspaper archives, which is to say, no, actually, not that much finding is required at all, just some persistence.

Other than that, it’s not controversial, or particularly difficult to decode. It’s pretty plain. I have it organized here at my desk, because, well, that’s the kind of thing I enjoy doing. I like to share, too, which is why I’ve offered this information I shuffled together to the Bruins in case they wanted to look at it and, you know, acknowledge their own, update the record.

There are errors and inconsistencies in the records of other NHL teams and their accountings of who captained them. Mostly, these are irregularities of the calendar, having to with when a certain player was appointed captain, for how long he served. With no other team (I’ve looked) is the forgetting on a scale that matches Boston’s.

There’s nothing sinister behind this. Part of it seems to be that the record has been faulty for so long that the gaps have worn down, grown over. It’s easy to accept antiquity as accuracy; it’s not just in matters of hockey history that errors get repeated over and over again to the point that they sound almost truthful. (It does happen in hockey history a lot, though.)

What’s baffling in this Bruins case is that the team seems to be so very much … not really interested. Give them that: there does seem to be a consistent commitment to indifference over the years.

•••

“I’m not really in the know on this stuff,” Bob Bauer said when we talked a few months ago. “I mean, I know my dad’s career, but I didn’t know about the being overlooked as captain thing.”

He’s a lawyer in Toronto, Bob; his dad was Bobby Bauer, legendary Bruins, right winger on the Kraut Line, three-time winner of the Lady Byng Trophy, Hall of Fame class of 1996. He died in 1964 at the age of 49, when his son was 17.

Maybe the younger Bauer could have followed his father into the NHL — Bob played at Harvard, for the Crimson, and later in Austria. “I didn’t think really — I thought I’d be more likely to be riding the buses in the IHL,” he laughed, “and that wasn’t really a pleasant thought for me, so that was kind of it.”

Bob Bauer knew his dad’s linemates well, Milt Schmidt and Woody Dumart. Knowing what Bobby achieved in the hockey, Bob worked, too, on compiling the nomination package that helped see his namesake inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in ’96.

But the fact that his father captained the Bruins in his last year in the NHL? That was news to Bob when I first got in touch by e-mail. “I went back and looked at what I had submitted [to the Hall],” he said on the phone. “It didn’t mention one way or another about him being captain that year.”

It’s true, though. Even though the Bruins fail to acknowledge it, Bobby Bauer was indeed captain of the team for the 1946-47 season, his last in the NHL.

There’s no doubt about this. The evidence isn’t cloudy, doesn’t leave room for other interpretations.

Bauer was 31 in ’46, heading into his eighth year as Bruin. Like many hockey players — like lots of his Bruin teammates — he’d interrupted his NHL career to go to war. Serving with the RCAF, he missed three full seasons before making a return to the ice in 1945. Back on skates, he helped the Bruins reach the Stanley Cup final the following spring, though the Montreal Canadiens beat them in five games.

After the final game at the Forum Bauer tried to pack up his sweater, number 17, to take home as a souvenir. Manager Art Ross wouldn’t surrender it. “You’ll be using it next year,” he said.

Globe and Mail, October 17, 1946

He was right. In October, Bauer joined the rest of his Boston teammates in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where the Bruins convened to train for the upcoming season. It was on a Wednesday, the 16th, that Ross announced that number 17 would be the Bruins’ new captain.

“Bauer, often referred to as the ‘Brain,’ will make an excellent leader,” Boston’s Globe reported. “The Bruins will also have two alternate captains in the event Bobby is not on the ice during a dispute. These cocaptains [sic] are defensemen, Johnny Crawford, team leader the past few seasons, and Murray Henderson.”

It was a year of change in the NHL. Clarence Campbell succeeded Red Dutton as president of the league that fall. Rosters, reduced in wartime, expanded. Tweaks to the NHL’s rulebook saw changes to regulations governing penalty shots, broken sticks, and unnecessary roughness. New face-off dots were mandated and, as a safety measure, it was decreed that across the league, all gates leading to the ice now had to swing inwards.

Also, for the first time in NHL history, captains of teams got a letter for their sweaters. Never before had players actually worn a letter to indicate their role as captain or alternate. The effort to limit players crowding referees to complain and dispute calls had been ongoing over the years, and this new act of embroidery was another piece of that.

“One Captain shall be appointed by each team,” Rule 14 of the NHL Rulebook now stipulated, “and he alone shall have the privilege of discussing with the Referee any questions relating to interpretation of rules which may arise during the progress of a game. He shall wear the letter ‘C’, approximately three inches in height and in contrasting color, in a conspicuous position on the front of his sweater.”

If this new lettering aided referees at the time, now privileged with easy identification of players permitted to get in their grill, it also continues to abet historians and curious record-keepers alike. The first to wear an actual C in Boston, Bauer wore his front and centre, stitched in between the 1 and the 7 of the sweater he’d almost given up earlier in 1946. There’s no mistaking it in the Bruins’ team photograph:

It’s apparent, too, in images from games the Bruins played that year, like this one below, from Maple Leaf Gardens in March of 1947. That’s Bauer and his C lurking in front of Leaf goaltender Turk Broda. Leaf captain Syl Apps (his own C obscured) is down on a knee in the slot. Bruin winger Joe Carveth is the man with the puck.

If that’s not proof enough, then maybe could I interest you in the notation official NHL documentation for that same game, with Bauer and Apps annotated with Cs and Nick Metz and Gaye Stewart listed as alternate captains along with Crawford and Henderson?

As mentioned, I’m not the first to flag this, or to have tried to engage with the Bruins to point it out.

Others have written to the team to make the case over the years, or even phoned, cold-calling the TD Garden with the quixotic notion that somebody there might be curious.

Boston author and lifelong Bruins fan Kevin Vautour is one such optimist. For years he’s been trying to get the team’s attention and recognize Bauer’s captaincy. Vautour has collected (and shared) newspaper articles, program notes, photos of Bauer wearing the C. He’s not so much frustrated by the Bruins’ attitude towards their own history as he is flummoxed.

Okay, he is, possibly, a little frustrated. “Maybe they don’t care,” he hazarded in “Recognizing An Omission,” a 2008 article for the Society for International Hockey Research’s annual Journal. In that same piece he chronicled a call he put in to the team’s PR department, which someone named John gamely took, and from whom Vautour … never heard back.

Taking up the challenge last year, I made a little more … what? Not progress, exactly. After arrowing several e-mails into the Boston ether, I did eventually hear from Heidi Holland, the team’s director of publications and information, whose job it is to corral and compile all the stats and esoteric detail that goes into the team’s voluminous annual Guide & Record Book, the de facto official record of all things Bruin.

Team guides used to be published the old-fangled way, on paper, but now they’re only online. The latest edition, for 2020-21, went up before last week’s news, so if you scroll over to page 241, where the honour roll of Bruin captains is listed alongside the men who’ve managed, coached, and presidented the team since its start in 1924, you won’t find Patrice Bergeron’s name.

Nineteen others are there, from Sprague Cleghorn all the way through to Chara:

Boston Wrong: Boston’s register of captains, as listed in the team’s 2020-21 Guide & Record Book.

What about Bobby Bauer? How was the list sourced? Were the Bruins aware of Guide’s several absences and anomalies? Could I send along some corroborating evidence in the spirit of friendly good-faith remedial philanthropy?

I e-mailed my questions, then chased that e-mail with a few (exponentially irritating?) follows-up. In Holland’s perfectly gracious reply, I gleaned, if nothing else,that the reason the Bruins’ complacency when it comes to bygone captains seems as solid as it does may be largely Schmidt-based. Holland wrote:

This question has come up a couple of times over the past several years but unfortunately, I have no way of confirming it. The list of captains from earlier media guides lists John Crawford as captain in that season. The earliest media guide that I have is 1947-48 and Crawford’s bio in that book only says that he has “been captain or assistant captain of the Bruins in recent seasons.” Bauer does not have a bio in that guide.

When the subject first came up, I asked Milt Schmidt (as the only person who was active at that time) if he remembered Bobby being named Boston’s captain and he did not have any recollection that he did.

Makes sense, I guess — other than the abundance of proofs that don’t rely on the memory of the altogether eminent and venerable Schmidt, an institution unto himself, who captained, coached, and GM’d the Bruins in his day, and, right up until his death at age 98 in 2017, remained a beloved icon in and around the team.

Especially since, as it turns out, Bauer isn’t the only Bruin great to have somehow vanished off the historical ledger.

Waiting to hear back from Holland, I kept on shaking the archives, as I tend to do, to see what might fall from the branches. One of the more instructive items I came across was from Montreal Gazette columnist Vern DeGeer writing in 1961.

He’d been talking to Ken McKenzie, the co-founder of The Hockey News who also served as the NHL’s long-time publicist. It was thanks to McKenzie’s research that DeGeer was able to report that Chicago’s Black Hawks was the club with the most captains in its history to date, with 18. (Almost but not quite right: Chicago is another club who’ve forgotten a leader or two. But maybe that’s another day’s post.)

The captaincy-confusion seems to have been general. While Montreal’s Canadiens have subsequently righted the record, the Gazette was at in ’61 confident that new Habs skipper Jean Béliveau counted as the team’s ninth captain since the founding in 1909, when in fact he was the 16th.

Remarking on the Bruins, DeGeer alluded specifically to the scattered state of Boston records. According to McKenzie, team records of the captaincy were so lacking that they only included six names and reached back no further than 1939 and Dit Clapper.

“The Boston publicity department,” DeGeer lamented, “hasn’t been able to track down names of any earlier leaders.”

I don’t know — maybe the modern-day Bruins can find some comfort in knowing that 60 years ago, the record was already wanting.

Back in the present, I was a little affronted, I suppose, when Heidi Holland didn’t invite me to send along my Bobby Bauer findings. So along with DeGeer’s article, I didn’t send them.

I guess I was feeling a little sheepish, too, as though it were my fault that the more I juddered the archives, the more the captains missing from the record seemed to multiple.

By then, gazing back beyond Bauer through the 13 seasons before he got the C stitched onto his solar plexus, I found that five other famous Bruins had somehow been effaced from the record.

When I’d first e-mailed the Bruins, I’d been ready to pronounce that Bauer was the Bruins’ seventh captain, which meant that Zdeno Chara came 20th in the succession. Actually? Bauer is (confirmably) the 12thman to have led the team. Given that, Patrice Bergeron is at the very least the 26th captain in Boston Bruins’ history. Depending on your interpretation of a later situation from the 1960s, he could be the 28th.

Either way, that’s a big helping of oblivion. As a team proud of its history you’d want to get that looked at, you’d think.

•••

It was at some point during the 1931-32 NHL that Art Ross made a decision that’s key to the story of the Boston captaincy and its missing protagonists. Just how Ross reasoned this isn’t clear — I haven’t seen it explained, at least — but the Bruins’ coach and manager decided that, in the future, the team would pick a new captain each season.

Hired to launch the expansion Bruins into the NHL in 1924, Art Ross steered his team that first year without naming a captain. (Vern DeGeer speculated in 1961 that if he hadchosen one, the likeliest candidate would have been left winger Herb Mitchell, sometimes said to have been the first player ever signed by the Bruins as well as — maybe not coincidentally — Ross’ brother-in-law.)

Ross did name a leader in 1925, making Sprague Cleghorn the team’s first captain. At 35, Cleghorn was an old Montreal friend of Ross’, as well as a wily, much-scarred — and all-too-willing-to-scar — veteran who, in the five years before joining Boston, had played in four Stanley Cup finals, three times on the winning side.

Cleghorn captained the team for three seasons. To start the last of these, 1927-28, Ross, ever the innovator, named a 25-year-old Lionel Hitchman as his deputy — vice-captain, he called him. This was an NHL first, as far as I know.

“Sprague Cleghorn,” Ross explained to the Boston Globe, “continues, of course, as the Bruins’ captain, but Hitchman a year ago was the regular starting defenceman with [Eddie] Shore, and he will be the playing captain of the team when he is on the ice. Cleghorn will continue to have the entire supervision of players’ conduct as team captain, and when on the ice he will make all decisions.”

Like Cleghorn’s, Hitchman’s stint as captain lasted three years. In his first year at the helm, 1929, he led the Bruins to their first Stanley Cup. In 1930, slowed by injuries, Hitchman tried to relinquish his role. Ross wouldn’t hear of it, convincing him to stick with it for one more season.

As the manager told it in 1931, the team picked his successor in their dressing room at the Montreal Forum the day before they opened the season against the Maroons. Hitchman nominated 30-year-old defenceman George Owen, with Eddie Shore seconding the motion. The resulting vote was unanimous. Owen himself missed the election: he’d stayed back in Boston to tend tending to his business, joining his teammates for the game next day.

Dit Clapper was next. He was 25. “The likable right winger yesterday was elected to lead the Bruins,” the Globeheralded in October of 1932, “continuing the policy of selecting a new captain each playing season.”

By his biographer’s account, Clapper’s inauguration involved a ceremonial shower of snow and ice-shavings in the Boston Garden dressing room.

As far as the Bruins are concerned, Ross’ one-off policy ended the following year, with Clapper re-upping and continuing on as captain for five further seasons, through 1937-38.

As with Bobby Bauer, that’s where their history is wonky.

Boston Globe, November 7, 1933.

The policy didn’t expire: in early November of 1933, in Quebec City, where the Bruins convened their training camp, 27-year-old Marty Barry was anointed captain.

He was expected, I suppose, to lead by example — nobody could have been expecting him to rule by oratory. The Globe sketched the scene as his captaincy was announced. “Barry, who never utters a word in the dressing room, as usual had nothing to say, but his playmates insisted, so Marty stood up and made the longest speech of his career. ‘Thanks fellows,’ then he sat down.”

Barry was the first of four captains from the 1930s who are now forgotten by the Bruins. Nels Stewart, 31, came next, a 32-year-old Eddie Shore after him, Hall-of-Famers both. Next was Red Beattie, who was 30.

The announcements of these appointments are all there in 90-year-old print, not just in the Boston papers, but across North America as, year by year, the merits of Boston’s new captains were duly discussed.

In 1934, the Globe noted that Bruins’ goaltender Tiny Thompson had been in the running alongside Stewart, but that coach Frank Patrick “felt a goalie-captain tends to slow up the game in case of disputes on the ice. In 1935, extolling Shore, the Globe reminded readers that Boston captains were appointed (by Ross) rather than elected, and that their term lasted just a year.

Boston Globe, October 25, 1934.

That policy was in fact finally coming to its end. Cooney Weiland, 34, was the new captain in 1937 and kept the job for a second year, during which he also served as Art Ross’ assistant coach, and so might deserve a double measure of credit for the fact that Boston claimed the Stanley Cup in the spring of 1939. (Not to rain on that parade, but I have to report that the Bruins have their dates wrong on Weiland, crediting him with just a single year as captain instead of his two.)

Weiland’s 1939 retirement opened the door for a return to the captaincy by Dit Clapper, now 32, starting into his 13th season as a Bruin. He lasted five seasons this time around, raising a Stanley Cup in 1941.

And the Bruins … well, the Bruins have him staying on through to 1946-47, after which (they assert) John — a.k.a. Jack — Crawford stepped up.

No.

It was the fall of 1944 that Clapper handed over the captaincy to concentrate on his duties as Boston’s playing coach. Yet another long-unacknowledged name took his place: 32-year-old Bill Cowley.

It was after Cowley that Crawford got his turn as captain, and while the Bruins give him credit for four years’ service in the role, he actually only lasted one. Bobby Bauer was next, as mentioned, followed by his (forgetful) friend and linemate Milt Schmidt.

There are other kinks in the Bruins’ list as you go on, mostly to do with dates, nothing on the scale of the gaps that mar the ’30s and ’40s. A corrected list of the entire span of those first decades and the captains who (actually) reigned is here for your consideration, in case you’re interested. Eventually I’ll add in the later decades and highlight some of the confusions and anomalies therein.

For now, let’s just preview a single, significant one of those.

If you study the Bruins’ master list, you’ll see that they declare “No Captain” for the years 1967-68 through 1972-73. Johnny Bucyk’s name appears on either side of this chasm in the captaincy, before (1966-67) and after (1973-74 to 1976-77).

Why so?

It’s complicated and (in this later case) open to some interpreting. I’ll spare you most of that here, focussing (for now) on the first of those No-Captain years, 1967-68, if only because I have a fairly explicit explanation at hand of what went on that year.

Again we go to the Boston Globe, for whom reporter Kevin Walsh was on the Bruins beat as a new NHL season, the first of the expansion era, approached in October of 1967. Here’s Walsh’s lede from a piece headlined “Three Captains Leading Bruins:”

The big ‘C’ Johnny Bucyk wore on his uniform a year ago that designated him as team captain of the Bruins has been retired. He now wears an ‘A’.

Coach Harry Sinden was happy to explain the spelling correction. He and his GM had were opting in this new hockey age for co-captains — that’s the word that he and (none other than) Milt Schmidt were using.

“We decided,” Sinden said, “the important duties of the captain would be shared among Bucyk. Ted Green, and Phil Esposito. All share equally the responsibility of captain.”

Bucyk, he reported, was all aboard. “He thinks it’s a good idea.”

Divided C: The 1967-68 Bruins, featuring co-captains (and GM Milt Schmidt).

“If the league rules allowed it,” Sinden went on, “we would have three men on the ice wearing a C. We may eventually have a captain but right now we will have three players share the duty.”

“We are the first team in the league to have co-captains,” he added, perhaps as a nod of trailblazing respect to Art Ross, “and I feel it’s a good idea.”

So, then: do Ted Green and Phil Esposito deserve to be tallied in the catalogue of Boston captains? Is the proper total 28 rather than 26?

As well as it might have worked at the time, the decision to divide the captaincy in three clearly posed a problem for the team’s records-keepers who, maybe, decided that “No Captain” was simpler that Co-captains. I suppose it’s an easier solution than having to annotate and explain, even if annotating and explaining might better reflect and even honour the team’s history.

I’m satisfied to offer Green and Esposito up for debate. It’s true that they never wore the C for Boston, so it makes a sort of sense that they’re not counted in the overall tally of Bruins captains. Does it, though? By Harry Sinden’s description here, they were captains of the team just as much as Johnny Bucyk was before and after he shared his title.

As for the earlier others, I don’t see how Boston can continue to ignore them. With all due respect to Milt Schmidt’s memory, proof of the Bruin captaincies of Marty Barry, Nels Stewart, Eddie Shore, Red Beattie, Bill Cowley, and Bobby Bauer is available and confirmable.

It’s time to elevate their distinguished names to the register up alongside Patrice Bergeron’s.

Captains Three: Three B defenceman, all of whom led the team in their early decades. From left, Eddie Shore, George Owen, and Lionel Hitchman.

eddie shore and that old-time … agriculture

/ puckstruck

Reap Rep: Eddie Shore on his binder at the farm near Duagh, Alberta, at point in (probably) the early 1930s. (Image: Glenbow Archives, ND-3-4293)

Glenn Hall’s barn took its place in hockey history in the fall of 1966, the year he bought his farm in Stony Plain, Alberta, a half-hour’s drive west of Edmonton. That was the year Hall, then in his mid-30s, told the Chicago Black Hawks he was retiring. “When someone called one day,” Hall recalled a few years later, “my wife was home and answered the phone and said I was out on the farm painting the barn.” While the man they called Mr. Goalie returned to Chicago that same fall, and went on to play five further seasons with the St. Louis Blues, the barn took on its own life as a tale that was told perennially — still is — to explain why Hall was delayed for training camp: he had to paint his barn.

“I only tried to retire twice,” Hall, a native of Humboldt, Saskatchewan, tried to clarify in the 1970s. “The other times I had permission to be late for camp so I could get the crop in.”

Hall, now 89, still lives on the property in Stony Plain, where that barn, which is red, looks over the land. Its story is still favoured in hockey folklore.

Not so well remembered is the farmland 45 minutes away to the northwest that became a regular focus of the hockey world 30 years earlier, when another Saskatchewan-born hockey superstar, one of the most famous figures of the NHL’s early years, was in the habit of announcing he’d just as soon farm his fields than play defence for the Boston Bruins.

Today, on (probably but possibly not) Eddie-Shore’s birthday, a visit to his Alberta acreage.

First, regarding the birth: mostly you’ll see it dated to November 25, 1902, which a Tuesday 118 years ago. And that does seem to be all in order, given that it’s a date that Shore himself cited on such serious documents as his 1942 U.S. military draft registration. The 1985 record of his death in Massachusetts also names November 25.

And yet, as conclusive as that seems, the Province of Saskatchewan’s record of Shore’s debut in 1902 lists … November 23, a Sunday. Hard to say whose the error might be, especially since we do have evidence of a certain odd coyness on Shore’s own part — that’s to come, a little further on.

In the meantime, happy birthday, belated or not, to the Edmonton Express.

That nickname took some geographical liberties, of course: whatever the date, Eddie Shore was born 850 kilometres and a province to the east of the Alberta capital, in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, northeast of Regina. The former Kate Spanier was his mother, Thomas John — T.J. — his father.

When Shore was eight, the family moved about 50 kilometres north and to the west where, as Michael Hiam tells it in Eddie Shore and That Old Time Hockey, his 2010 biography, T.J. would eventually be farming a property of some 70,000 acres, with 400 head of horses and 600 of cattle on it, while annually producing 100,000 bushels of wheat.

So Eddie was farm-tested from an early age, which is also to say farm-forged. He was taming ponies at the age of nine, Hiam writes. At 12, he was driving four-horse teams to the grain elevator in Cupar. Shore was an expert roper at 15; by the time he was 16, he was riding herd on thousands of cattle.

Boy Cowboy: Eddie Shore at the age of 13 (and steed). The signature came later. (Image: Classic Auctions)

He later told a Boston sportswriter about nearly freezing to death in that era, riding herd one winter when temperatures had plunged to minus 61 F. In his own words:

I say 61 because our thermometers register to 60 below and they all broke. I had to drive 23 head of cattle 32 miles for my father.

There was sort of a trail about three feet wide and with the snow three feet deep on both sides the cattle stayed in file all right. We jog trotted them so that they wouldn’t freeze and got off the horses every once in a while so that we wouldn’t.

On the way back I started to freeze and just a little way from home my horse fell down. I didn’t realize it until then but I was partly frozen. My legs were frozen in the shape of the horse.

You could freeze to death in a very short time there and freezing would be a pleasure. Just a pleasant numbness but I wasn’t that far gone, and it was pretty painful, coming to and getting on the horse again.

Shore’s survival on the trial eventually allowed for his burgeoning hockey career to get him to Melville, Saskatchewan, in the early 1920s. From there he continued on to Regina, then to Edmonton, where he skated for the WHL Eskimos in 1925-26, before taking his talents to Boston in 1926.

Dealmakers: NHL President Frank Calder and Eddie Shore meet on the ice at Boston Garden in the late 1930s. (Image: Leslie Jones Collection, Boston Public Library)

It didn’t take Shore long to establish himself as one of the NHL’s biggest (and unruliest) stars. He’d help the Bruins win a Stanley Cup in 1929 and another in ’39, and in the decade between those championships he won the Hart Trophy as the league’s most valuable player four times.

In the Edmonton news, May of 1928

In 1928, he got back to the land. The Bruins had bowed out of the playoffs in early April, dismissed by the New York Rangers, eventual Cup champions. May brought news that Shore had bought himself an Alberta spread, paying $16,400 for Albert Elliott’s farm, just beyond Edmonton’s northern city limits. Though in Shore’s day the name of the locality was often misrendered in press reports as Daugh, it was in Duagh that Shore set himself up as a farmer. (The slip is not only historical: Michael Hiam’s biography gets it wrong, too.)

Sizewise, Hiam reports that the property was 640 acres, and some contemporary accounts agree with that, too, though in fact it was a half section, 320 acres.

I don’t know what salary Shore was getting from the Bruins at this point. The $9,000-a-year that the Montreal Maroons were paying defenceman Dunc Munro was reported to be the NHL’s highest salary in ’28 — though there was also some talk that year that these same Maroons had signed Canadian Olympic star Dave Trottier for $12,000.

If Shore was taking in something less than that, he had been doing well enough the previous summer to have decided to give up his summer job back in Melville, where he’d been shovelling coal for the Canadian National Railway going back to when he was playing senior hockey there. (The end of the 1926-27 NHL season had, it’s true, enriched Shore by $2,000 in bonuses.)

For a view of the set-up at Duagh, we’ll trust to a plucky reporter from the Edmonton Journal who paid a visit in the summer of 1929.

The Bruins had won the Cup that spring, but Shore wasn’t resting much at all, let alone on any laurels. He was toiling hard, “enjoying 10 to 12 hours work every day on his farm.” He had 170 acres sown to wheat that year, and his barnyard roster included 14 horses and 400 chickens. He was just getting started, though:

Eddie is planning to have one of the finest farms in the entire district. He will have a beautiful bungalow, a big ribbed roof barn, an ideal machine shop, and there will be everything on the land that any successful farmer should have.

“It will take time,” said Eddie when he was talking to the Journal representative. “But in two years time I should have all the buildings up that I am planning.”

“Then I will have sufficient cattle, Holsteins, most likely; not very many horses, because machinery is better; plenty of chickens, pigs, and everything else.”

Shore got married that year, to Kate Macrae, a former basketball star with Edmonton’s mighty Grads. Their son, Edward Jr., arrived a year later.

By 1933, Michael Hiam reports, Shore had cultivated a “model farm,” featuring a modest house, a small barn in the Pennsylvania Dutch style, and “a picturesque windmill.” He had a hired man to help with the work and to run the place while he was away playing hockey. His line-up now included hogs, cattle, turkeys, ducks, chickens, workhorses (Percherons and Belgians), and “a prized Guernsey bull named Taywater Warrior.”

Playing his own particular brand of surly and, occasionally, near-fatal hockey, Shore continued to cut a swath through the NHL from his winter base in Boston. Summers in Duagh, he found time amid the call of crops and livestock for golfing (he shot in the 70s); baseball (he played outfield for the Professional Pucksters, a team that included NHLers Leroy Goldsworthy and brothers Neil and Mac Colville); and saving lives (in 1938, he dove into the Sturgeon River near the farm to rescue three swimmers in danger of drowning).

Glimpses of life on the farm reached the hockey world now and then. In 1937, for instance, Shore confided that he’d given up sowing wheat in favour of barley. “Can’t miss with that crop,” is what he told Andy Lytle of Toronto’s Daily Star, “with beer guzzled all over the country.”

Often, though, when the farm at Duagh made its way into the hockey pages of newspapers it was because Shore wasn’t happy with what Boston manager Art Ross was offering to pay him. Glenn Hall may have joked about painting his barn as a negotiating tactic; Eddie Shore’s Albertan hold-outs in the 1930s don’t seem to have amused anyone involved.

In October of 1933, when Shore was a no-show at the Boston training camp in Quebec City, it was initially reported that he was “delayed by harvesting.” Art Ross had already advised Bruin beat reporters a couple of times that the team’s star defenceman was “expected next week” before the Edmonton Journal dispatched a reporter to Duagh in early November, just six days before the Bruins were set to open their season in Toronto.

Shore was busy butchering a 300-pound hog when Ken McConnell arrived. “Sure, I’m a holdout,” Shore told him. Boston had initially offered him a satisfactory contract, he said, only to turn around and reduce their offer by $2,500 when he was a little late getting to Quebec. “I am not going to take it.”

Idle Idol: A reporter who visited the Shore spread in the fall of 1933 found Boston’s superstar defenceman butchering a hog. Also on hand: Shore’s wife, the former Kate Maccae; his son, Ed Jr.; the family house; the big old barn.

Would he quit hockey?

“If they don’t want to meet my terms,” Shore said, “why, I’ll stay here. I have everything I need right here. I don’t have to play hockey any more.”

In light of the inconsistency mentioned earlier regarding Shore’s birthdate, the next quote McConnell got is interesting. As it appeared, with McConnell’s parentheses:

“I am only 30 — have a birthday some time in this month [he would not name the date] and I figure I should be able to play NHL hockey for another seven years at least — Bill Cook of the New York Rangers is 39. But it’s entirely up to the bosses of the Bruins. I am standing pat.”

The next news of the negotiation came on November 9, the following Thursday. The Bruins were in Toronto that night, preparing to open their season Shoreless against the Maple Leafs. And Shore? As Boston’s Globe reported that the team’s other prominent dissenter, Cooney Weiland, had signed his contract, word from Alberta was that Shore was practicing with the WCHL Edmonton Eskimos, for whom Duke Keats presided as the playing coach. The word from the ice? “He looks good.”

Also: Shore was headed to the foothills of the Rockies for “a big game hunting expedition.”

Friday’s update: with a defensive corps consisting of Lionel Hitchman and a trio of rookies and journeymen, the Bruins had succumbed to the Leafs by a score of 6-1. That was front-page news in Edmonton insofar as in the same breath the Journal also declared that Shore and the Bruins had settled their differences.

The family headed east, and on the Monday, Shore was in Montreal to meet with NHL President Frank Calder. As often happened in those years, the team had handed its holdout problem over to the league, and so it was with Calder that Shore did his final dealing. In exchange for his signature, he was reported to have successfully secured the $2,500 that the Bruins had initially offered.

Shore made his debut in Boston the following night, though he couldn’t help his team find a win, as the Bruins fell to their third successive loss to start the new season. They never really turned it around that season, finishing the ’33-34 schedule in last place in the four-team American Division, out of the playoffs.

International Harvester: Eddie Shore works the land. (Image: Glenbow Archives, ND-3-5202)

In 1934, Shore seems to have been delayed by an actual late harvest. He made it to camp by the end of October, signing a contract (the Edmonton Journal said) for the NHL maximum salary of $7,000.

In subsequent years, Shore showed up more or less on time in the fall, when the time came to trade in threshers for hockey sticks.

“Word drifts through from the Maritimes,” Ken McConnell advised in 1936, by which time the Bruins had shifted their training camp from Quebec to New Brunswick, “that Eddie Shore has definitely signed a brand new contract with the Bruins and so that trifling matter is settled for this year at least.” (As it turned out, Shore would miss more than half of the season’s schedule, suffering from sciatica.)

The cut in pay Shore seems to have taken in ’37 reflected that shortened season, from what I can tell. When he stopped in to see Frank Calder in Montreal that fall, trouble seemed to be brewing, according to Calgary’s Herald. “The league prexy, when he heard that Shore wanted to make an appointment with him, naturally thought that Eddie was having contract trouble again. Imagine his surprise when Eddie appeared and said nothing about contract but simply asked Calder for permission to play with the All-Star team in the Howie Morenz benefit game.”

The Bruins convened their camp in Hershey, Pennsylvania, in ’38, and Shore, who was coming off another Hart-Trophy-winning season, hit the ice there in “prime condition.”

“I have never felt better,” said the 36-year-old veteran. “Every day for the past two months I have been working from dawn to dusk harvesting wheat, and then, to prove to myself I was in shape, I drove the family over the road from Edmonton to Boston, making the trip in a bit more than five days, and that’s no rest cure.”

With a full camp and a slate of exhibition games behind him, Shore finally saw the contract the Bruins were offering in early November, and when the Bruins boarded a train for Toronto and the opening game of the season, Shore stayed home.

All he wanted was to be paid like he was back in 1936-37, he said, before he’d agreed to a cut. “I was offered a slight raise and promised a share of the gate receipts,” he said, “but I was not satisfied with those terms.”

And so the stalemate was on. As Art Ross handed his problem once again over to Frank Calder, the Bruins revived their tradition of starting their season in Toronto. This time, with rookie Jack Crawford tabbed to fill Shore’s skates, the Bruins beat the Leafs 3-2.

Shore missed four games before he struck a deal with Calder. “Old Man Shore has signed,” he told reporters in Boston with a smile. The deal was said to be for $7,000: $6,000 in salary plus $1,000 if the Bruins made the playoffs (they did, winning the Stanley Cup, to boot). This was $500 more than the Bruins had originally offered. “The only extra promise we’ve made Shore,” Art Ross advised, “is that he’ll be paid for the four games he’s missed.”

The following year, 1939-40, was the one in which Shore might be said to have worn out his welcome in Boston. He’d bought the AHL Springfield Indians by then, furthering souring his relationship with the Bruins, who ended up trading him in early 1940 to the New York Americans, for whom he played the last ten games of his tempestuous NHL career.

And the farm at Duagh? “Mr. Eddie Shore, whose business interests are all in the east, has instructed us to sell his Half-Section of Land, northeast of the city,” read the ad that Edmonton realtors placed in the Journal in the fall of 1943. “His own words: ‘Sell, lock, stock, and barrel.”

The price was $20,000 — at first. Over the course of the year that followed, more ads appeared, with lower prices. I don’t know what the farm at Duagh sold for, in the end, but this is the last of the pitches that I’ve seen, from the fall of 1944:

 

 

the artful ross

/ puckstruck

Shoulder Season: Art Ross leans into Bruin defenceman Jack Portland at practice in the late 1930s. (Image: Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

There’s no need to exaggerate the influence that Art Ross exerted on the game of hockey and the way it’s played — what more could the man have done? He was an outstanding defender in the early years of the 20th century; designed the puck that the NHL adopted when it started up; devised the net that’s still in use today; was the first coach in the league to pull his goalie for an extra attacker. He did that, of course, as coach of the Boston Bruins, the team he was hired to run when they debuted in 1924, and the one he more or less shaped in his own never-back-down image, imprinting the franchise with his penchant for winning and contentious attitude right from the start.

A son of northern Ontario, Art Ross died on a Wednesday of this date in 1964 in the Boston suburb of Medford. He was 79.

His demise was, famously, reported long before that, in error: in the summer of 1918, newspapers across North America announced the sad news that he’d been killed in a motorcycle accident in New Hampshire.

Ross was 33 that year, and had just become a father for the first time. He’d spent part of the previous winter playing the only NHL games he ever got into, three of them. He was captain and playing coach of the ill-starred Montreal Wanderers, scoring his only NHL goal in the team’s very first game, against Toronto. The Wanderers didn’t last, folding after playing four games and defaulting another two. That was all for Ross as a player, though he did get back on the ice as a referee that season, and worked the Stanley Cup final that Toronto won that March.

In the summer, at the time of his purported death, Ross was mourned as one of the “best known hockey players, motor cyclists, footballers, trap shooters, and al-around sportsmen in Canada” — that, from the Vancouver Sun.

As it turned out, Ross had survived an accident that had killed his nephew, Hugh Ross. While some newspapers would still be mourning the elder Ross for weeks to come, he had escaped uninjured.

Ross was back on NHL ice the following winter as a referee. He got his next coaching gig in 1922, when he took the helm of another team that didn’t last, the Hamilton Tigers, before signing on in ’24 with Boston’s expansion team.

Reports of His Death: An ode to Ross from early July of 1918, after he was mistakenly reported killed in a motorcycle accident.