debris

boom goes the dynamite

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The great Bernie Geoffrion was born in Montreal on a Monday of this date in 1931. As a hard-charging right winger, he starred for 14 years for Montreal’s mighty Canadiens, helping them claim six Stanley Cup championships, and collecting accolades for himself, too, including in the form of Calder, Hart, and Art Ross trophies. He was elevated to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1972. He died in 2006 at the age of 75.

After the glory years in Montreal, Geoffrion finished his playing career in New York with the Rangers. His time there included a fit or two of pique, including in February of 1967, when Geoffrion was just about to turn 36. The Rangers were hosting the Boston Bruins at Madison Square Garden on the night, which ended in frustration. Thanks in large part to 21-year-old Bernie Parent, Boston won the game by a score of 2-1. Geoffrion made his mark, too, scoring the Rangers’ only goal and then, as the game wore down, earning both a misconduct and a game misconduct (along with a $75 fine) as a result of the incident pictured here.

The Bruins had too many men on the ice, is how the story goes, and the officials presiding had missed the call, according to the Rangers. John Ashley was the referee (on the left, behind); Walt Atanas (pushed-upon, left) and John D’Amico (restraining, right). There were two minutes left in the game. Ranger fans littered the ice. As Atanas collected the puck, Geoffrion approached. Here’s Gerald Eskenazi’s report from the New York Times:

The pair had words. Geoffrion swung his stick a stray beer can and it sailed past Atanas. The official was still trying to move out of harm’s way when Geoffrion pushed him twice.

The Boomer and his coach, Emile Francis, said later that Geoffrion had tripped on a beer can and fell into Atanas.

Geoffrion was banished. “The game,” as another dispatch from the scene told it, “was finally finished amid a tonnage of debris on the ice.”

Geoffrion was duly called before NHL president Clarence Campbell for a hearing, who promptly suspended him for three games, ruling that Geoffrion’s “conduct was completely inexcusable and the product of his own temperament, which has got him into trouble on at least two other occasions in the past.”

Campbell was referring to a couple of notorious encounters, both from 1958, one of which involved a $250 fine for manhandling referee Frank Udvari, the other wherein Geoffrion swung his stick into the face of Ron Murphy of the Rangers (and was suspended for eight games).

“I feel bad because I got suspended for a foolish thing,” Geoffrion said of his ’67 sanction. “I thought I’d be fined more, not suspended.”

pique performance

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Baz O’Meara from the Montreal Star was on location at the Chicago Stadium on that Tuesday night in late March of 1961 when the Montreal Canadiens barged in on the Chicago Black Hawks for the fourth game of their Stanley Cup semi-final. “The crowd tossed a lot of paper cups on the ice,” he wrote, “and they littered the surface with paper darts and pieces of torn programs. They love rough hockey and they reveled in the fight featuring Bonin and Vasko, but there were no fights in the stand as last year when it took four or five policemen and ushers to quell tow quarrelsome customers.”

That’s the scene here, viewed from on high: somewhere beneath that knot of irked players is the first-period fracas between Montreal winger Marcel Bonin and Chicago defenceman Moose Vasko. Identifiable Canadiens are (#14) Claude Provost and (#3) J.C. Tremblay and for Chicago (#10) Ron Murphy and, viewing from afar, goaltender (#1) Glenn Hall. Jacques Plante is another distant spectator.

After much punching, grappling, and (as the Star’s Red Fisher wrote) “some expert shoving,” referee Eddie Powers sanctioned Bonin with a five-minute fighting major and two 10-minute misconducts. Vasko got five for his fighting and just a single misconduct. Bonin’s additional misconduct was for grabbing Powers’ shirt. Each of the misconducts came with a $25 fine.

Montreal won the night, going on to a 5-2 win that tied the series at two games apiece. It was Chicago, though, who won the next two games to take the semi-final, and the Black Hawks would continue on to beat the Detroit Red Wings to take the Stanley Cup that year.

 

(Image: © Chicago Sun-Times Media, ST-17500275-E1, Chicago Sun-Times collection, Chicago History Museum)

department of throwing stuff: turning back the clock

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Tool Time: In February of 1939, 13 years after he was not-quite brained in Boston, Charlie Querrie (right) handed over a repurposed wrench to Boston coach and manager Art Ross. (Image: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1266, Item 56558)

I’ve reported before on the bedlam that ensued on the night of Tuesday, December 21, 1926, when Toronto’s bygone St. Patricks went to Boston to beat the Bruins and Toronto’s coach was lucky to escape with his life, after frantic local fans threw a hardboiled egg and a monkey wrench at his head — only the egg hit its target.

That’s a chaotic story I told in some detail in a 2016 post — you can find it here. Our business tonight is with the aftermath, which is to say the monkey wrench, insofar as the 1939 photograph shown here of that very implement is one I recently unearthed at the Toronto Archives.

Charlie Querrie was the Toronto coach: that’s him on the right. He was 61 in 1939, and had been out of hockey management for more than a decade. On the left is 54-year-old Art Ross, who was very much in it, still coaching and managing the Bruins as he’d done since their advent in 1924.

The two were old rivals. In the NHL’s very first season, 1917-18, when Querrie was manager of the Toronto team that went on to win the Stanley Cup, Ross was the referee for the penultimate game of the finals. While Toronto did upend the PCHA’s Vancouver Millionaires to take the Cup, that game didn’t go their way, with Vancouver winning by a score of 8-1.

An Ottawa Journal report from February 3, 1939.

Ross did not, shall we say, failed to endear himself to Querrie on that occasion. Talking to reporters after it was over, the referee decried Toronto’s tactics. “The Blues gave a most brutal exhibition,” he said of Querrie’s team, “and unless the western club gets absolute protection from the referees, they will all be killed.”

“If the Vancouver club gets protection,” he added, “it has a good chance to win the world’s championship series with Toronto.”

Querrie was furious. The two had words after the game, which the Toronto manager was only too glad to pass on to the newspapers. “Ross started in by telling me that I was a poor loser,” he said, “and went on to say that I [was] mixed up in a crooked league, and was a crook in sport. I promptly called him a liar, and then he threatened to lick me.”

“If Ross is such a fighter,” Querrie said, “there is plenty of room for him over in France.”

Eight years later, with Ross running the Bruins and Querrie back in charge of a Toronto team now clad in green and called the St. Patricks, the 1926 havoc we’re interested in got going late in the game. With about five minutes remaining, with Toronto leading by a score of 5-2, Boston winger Percy Galbraith put a puck past St. Pats goaltender John Ross Roach. Too bad for Boston, referees W.H. O’Hara and Dr. Eddie O’Leary called it back, for offside. Definitively so, as Charlie Querrie saw it from the Toronto bench. “The offside goal,” he told a Toronto newspaper, “was easily 60 feet offside.”

Boston disagreed. Here’s Querrie’s version of what happened next:

Just as soon as the goal was called back, the Boston players, led by [captain Sprague] Cleghorn, rushed at the officials, and Art Ross, manager of the Bruins, and Charles Adams, the owner, clambered over the fence and took a hand in the argument. Ross had a rulebook and he tried to make monkeys out of the officials by producing it and reding the rules to them in front of the crowd. Naturally the actions of Ross and Adams worked the crowd up and in a moment three or four excited spectators were over the fence and the pennies and the bottles and other things commenced to fly. I got over the fence, too, to protest against the presence of Ross and Adams on the ice and someone hurled a monkey wrench at my head. It wasn’t any toy, either, but a full-sized three-pound wrench, and I brought it away as a souvenir. It only missed my head by a foot.

Querrie didn’t preserve the egg that hit him after that — it was, he quipped, “not an overly fresh one at that” — but he did hang on to the wrench.

Thirteen years later, he dug it out and decided the time was right to send it back to Boston. Globe and Mail columnist Vern DeGeer took note in February of ’39, reporting that Querrie had “had the wrench polished and coated with a glistening touch of varnish. It was converted into a unique desk set, with an eight-day clock attached.”

When the Bruins came to town to meet the Leafs for a Thursday game that February 2, Querrie arranged to hand over the wrench to Ross in the press room at Maple Leaf Gardens. As I’ve written previously, it now bore an engraving:

To
‪ARTHUR ROSS

From
CHARLIE QUERRIE

‪Returning a Gift
Thrown at Him
‪Many Years Ago

Back in those dangerous days of 1926, Charlie Querrie was not only coaching the St. Patricks, he was the owner of the team, too, though not for much longer: in mid-February of 1927, he would divest himself of the St. Pats (and his coaching duties), selling out to a syndicate headed by a Toronto sand and gravel contractor by the name of Conn Smythe, who (spoiler alert) turned them into Maple Leafs.

As I’ve written elsewhere, profiling Querrie’s distinguished sporting career, his post-hockey days revolved around the movie-house he ran on Toronto’s west-end Danforth Avenue. He didn’t stray too far from the city’s ice and its proud hockey record: in 1944, he noted that in the 32 years since professional hockey debuted in Toronto in 1912, he had (incredibly) been on hand to witness all but three games.

Charlie Querrie died at 72 in 1950, four years before Art Ross finally retired from the Boston Bruins. He was 79 when he died in 1964.

And the time-telling monkey wrench? It’s back in Canada, again, having been presented (regifted?) by the Ross family to hockey historian Eric Zweig, author of Art Ross: The Hockey Legend Who Built The Bruins (2015).

Clocked Work: The monkey wrench that almost clouted/could have killed Toronto’s NHL coach in 1926 is now in the collection of hockey historian Eric Zweig.

 

department of throwing stuff: nuts, steel bolts, smoked fish, bags of rice, bags of flour, boxes of soap flakes

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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.”

 

 

chicago proud: dead fish from the gallery

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

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

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

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

charlie querrie’s toronto may be gone, but his legacy endures in the stanley cup championships he won and the team he (almost) named

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Rink Boss: A century ago, there were few more conspicuous — or energetic — players on the Toronto sporting scene than Charlie Querrie, seen here on the ice at Arena Gardens, the Mutual Street rink he managed.

The downtown arena he ran for more than a decade is gone now, reduced to a lonely plaque in a strip of park shadowed by condo towers in downtown Toronto. The big theatre he built on the Danforth is no more, which is also true of the daily newspaper where he worked for years.

The hockey teams he owned and coached to a pair of Stanley Cups in the early years of the NHL? Yes, that’s right: they’re history, too.

Like Charlie Querrie’s name and record of achievement, the Toronto that he moved in, and the institutions he built, occupy a faded if not quite forgotten geography of the city’s past. A century ago, there were few more prominent — or energetic — players on the Toronto sporting scene.

Time, then, to acknowledge him and lend his story some context, maybe amend an oversight or two in the historical record? As it turns out, Querrie’s legacy as a prime hockey influencer has endured, even if it has been hiding in plain sight amid the foliage that adorns the sweaters of the team that he shepherded into NHL history.

Born in Markham, to Toronto’s  north and east,  in 1877, Querrie made his mark as a field lacrosse player before he ever fixed his focus on the ice. He’s in the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame for his exploits on the grass, back when the game there was a much bigger deal than it is now.

He was shifty, those who saw him play later said, and speedy, with a deadly shot. In 1902, he scored 68 goals in a run of 17 games. That was with a Toronto team, during a tour of England that included a game at Lord’s in London in front of King Edward VII and a crowd of 20,000.

Querrie played professionally after that, signing on in 1906 as the playing coach of another Toronto team, Tecumsehs. He was not, court records confirm, an entirely peaceful player. Words like firebrand and hair-trigger temper figure in reviews of his career. He was arrested for clouting a referee during a game on Toronto Island in 1904. For that, he was convicted of assault in Police Court, and paid a $5 fine for his efforts. In the aftermath, one Ottawa newspaper accorded him this recognition: “He has caused more trouble through rough work than probably any other man in the game.”

Islanders: Toronto’s Tecumsehs as they lined up in 1907. Charlie Querrie is in the front row, third from the left. Standing in the back row at far left is Tim Daly, who’d later serve several decades as trainer of the Maple Leafs.

When he wasn’t wielding a lacrosse stick, Querrie was working as a printer in those years. Later, he was a sportswriter and editor for the daily Toronto News. While there’s no record of his having played hockey of any competitive kind, he ended up rinkside all the same. In 1912, professional hockey debuted in Toronto with the opening downtown of Arena Gardens on Mutual Street. Without quitting his day job at the News or his summer lacrosse gig, Querrie took up, too, as manager of the new facility.

He was 40 in 1917, the year that the professional hockey world shifted, transforming the former lacrosse star’s trajectory as it did so. That November, after eight seasons as hockey’s major league in eastern Canada, the National Hockey Association died a quick administrative death one afternoon in Montreal’s Windsor Hotel — only to be immediately reformed as the National Hockey League.

That maneuvering was all because of one not-much-liked man, Eddie Livingstone, another former newspaper editor who’d owned several of the NHA’s Toronto franchises over the years, aggravating peers, players, and officials as he went. “The toxic Toronto owner,” hockey historian (and former prime minister) Stephen Harper called Livingstone, “quarrelsome and litigious.”

So thoroughly loathed was he by his peers in the old league that they were willing to scuttle the whole enterprise just to be rid of him. And it worked.

Backed by Montreal owners, the NHL’s new, Livingstone-free Toronto team found a home at Arena Gardens, where Querrie was still running the operation. The man originally picked to manage the team was Jimmy Murphy, another veteran of the lacrosse field who came with solid hockey bona fides, too.

And when Murphy bowed out just two weeks before the league’s inaugural season got underway? “I’ve got a new job,” Querrie told The Globe as the NHL’s four teams prepared to launch into the league’s inaugural season.

Managers in the early NHL were often more directly involved than their modern-day counterparts, exhorting their players and directing traffic from the bench as much as attending to matters of personnel, arranging trades and doling out contracts. And so while Querrie did hire Dick Carroll as a coach that first NHL season, that didn’t mean he wasn’t on the front lines himself, as thickly into the action as he could be without donning skates.

Querrie’s team was named the Torontos that year, plain and simple, though imaginative press reports sometimes styled them as the Blueshirts. Before they hit the ice that December, 103 years ago, Querrie issued a remarkable 15-point manifesto, distilling his own rigorous sporting philosophy as he laid down the law for the players in his charge on how they should apply themselves.

Point #4: “Remember that it does not require bravery to hit another man over the head with a stick. If you want to fight, go over to France.”

Point #8: “You will be punished for indifferent work or carelessness. If you are anxious to win all the time you will be a good player. Indifference or lack of pepper is one thing we never did like.”

The season that ensued in the winter of 1917-18 was as tumultuous as any in the NHL’s 103-year history — present company, perhaps, excepted.

Still, Querrie’s team found a way through. After he tended to an early goaltending crisis, the team that styled themselves simply as the Torontos went out and won both the NHL title and the subsequent Stanley Cup final, beating the Vancouver Millionaires, the west-coast champions, in five games.

It wasn’t always pretty. Frank Patrick was president of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association that year. There was too much gambling in the Toronto rink at the final, he felt. Also? “Torontonians are very prejudiced.” As for Querrie, “he acted pretty friendly,” Patrick allowed, “except when under stress of excitement.”

That might help explain the feud that Querrie cultivated in that same series with Art Ross, then a former star defenceman assigned to referee a pair of the 1918 Cup games. Querrie was only too pleased to describe the exchange he had with the man who would go on to more or less invent the Boston Bruins. “Ross started in by telling me that I was a poor loser,” Querrie said, “and went on to say that I was mixed up in a crooked league, and was a crook in sport. I promptly called him a liar, and then he threatened to lick me.”

However else it’s remembered, the early history of the NHL stands out for the pains the league took to go on thwarting Eddie Livingstone, who was bent on revenge if acceptance wasn’t in the cards.

Pre-Leafs: By the time the St. Patricks posed for this photograph during the 1923-24 season, Querrie had already steered two Toronto teams to Stanley Cup championships. Back row from left, that’s trainer Billy Popp, Shrimp Andrews, Red Stuart, John Ross Roach, Bert Corbeau, Toots Holway, assistant trainer Oh Boy Saunders, Querrie. Front, from left: Chris Speyer, Amos Arbour, Jack Adams, Babe Dye, captain Reg Noble, and Stan Jackson.

As part of that program, the Toronto team relaunched in 1918 as the Arenas. A year later, when Querrie and an old lacrosse pal took control, the team was briefly renamed the Tecumsehs, though almost overnight the owners of hockey’s senior-league St. Patricks swooped in to buy the club and change the name again.

Querrie remained a part-owner of the NHL St. Patricks, newly clad in green, and he continued his hands-on management, with success — the St. Pats won another Stanley Cup championship in 1922.

When in 1924, the NHL fined Querrie $200 for “abusing an official,” the object of his ire was — guess who? — Art Ross.

Their quarrel continued after Ross took over as coach and manager of Boston’s expansion Bruins. One night in December of 1926, with Querrie’s St. Patricks battling the Bruins at Boston Garden, a melee broke out over a called-off goal. Ross was already out on the ice remonstrating with the referee when the Toronto manager followed him.

“Someone hurled a monkey wrench at my head,” Querrie recalled when he was back safe in Toronto. “It wasn’t any toy either but a full sized three-pound wrench and I brought it away for a souvenir. It only missed my head by a foot. Then someone socked me with a hard-boiled egg and not an overly fresh one at that. There were plenty of eggs flying.”

Even when they weren’t under barrages, the St. Patricks were not very good that season. Querrie was back behind the bench, but he didn’t seem to have any answers as the team won just two of their first ten games. Local newspapers reported that he and his partners were ready to sell the team, with C.C. Pyle stepping forward as the likeliest buyer, an American promoter who wanted to move the team to Philadelphia.

The story of how the hockey team stayed in Toronto has been burnished into legend. It’s the one in which Conn Smythe — war veteran, gravel contractor, hockey coach — saved the day, backed by a partner or two. Smythe had been hired and quickly fired by the fledgling New York Rangers that fall and parlayed his earnings into even bigger money with a couple of sports bets. Then he combined those winnings with his own daring, pluck, and sense of civic duty to buy the St. Patricks. In February 1927, he duly transformed them — in the middle of the NHL season, no less — into the Maple Leafs.

And that’s, more or less, the way that it went.

The team’s new name was nothing particularly novel. The maple leaf had been a national emblem since before Confederation and had been appropriated by hockey and lacrosse teams across the country ever since — complete with the spelling-error of the plural. Toronto’s minor-league baseball Maple Leafs had been swinging away since 1895.

If nowhere in the historical record does Smythe take explicit credit for the recycling the Leaf, nor did seem to mind when credit accrued to him and his patriotic pride.

“I had a feeling that the new Maple Leaf name was right,” he wrote in his 1981 autobiography, invoking the 1924 Olympic team and the insignia he himself had worn while serving with the Canadian artillery in the First World War. “I thought it meant something across Canada.”

That was right, of course, as nearly a century of subsequent Leaf history bears out. It’s just Charlie Querrie got that feeling first.

As Morey Holzman and Joseph Nieforth note in their 2002 book Deceptions and Doublecross, Querrie had had a name-change in mind three months earlier.

Back in December of ’26, before anyone had hurled any tools at his head, Querrie had been mulling the very switch that Smythe and his new partners would make official in February.

It wasn’t any secret. The Toronto Daily Star reported (and endorsed) the Querrie plan.

“The name St. Patricks doesn’t mean anything,” the Star opined, “and he is seriously considering dubbing his team the Toronto Maple Leafs.”

A more recent review of contemporary accounts reveal that Querrie’s first choice was, fun fact, to return the team to its NHL roots, rebranding as the plain-and-simple Torontos — only to discover that Eddie Livingstone owned the rights to that. Star columnist (and NHL referee) Lou Marsh declared himself on board with Querrie’s “non-partisan” second choice that was, to boot, “a name of fame in sport.”

“A lot of folks,” Marsh wrote, “never could understand why the club was labeled St. Pats.”

“If the switch in nomenclature is made,” the Star went on to hazard, “the green sweater may be dropped in favour of some other color scheme with a large Maple Leaf on the back.”

If Querrie was even minorly irked at not getting credit for his plan coming true, he doesn’t seem to have shared his annoyance in any public way. After the deal was done with Smythe and company that winter, he was reported to have walked away from NHL ownership with $65,000 — almost $1 million in 2020 terms. His 1919 original stake was said to have been no more than $1,200.

Out of hockey, Querrie busied himself running the Palace Theatre, the popular movie-house he’d opened in 1924 on the Danforth, in Toronto’s west end. He returned to writing, filing a genial weekly column in the Star and penning features for Leafs’ programs. He was proud of his ongoing devotion to Toronto hockey: in 1944, he noted that in the 32 years since professional hockey first launched in the city, he’d witnessed every game but three.

His feud with Art Ross withered away, then sprouted into friendship. Querrie had stowed away the wrench that just missed his head and in 1939 he had it mounted, with a clock, as a decorative desk-set, and presented it to his old rival.

Charlie Querrie died in April of 1950. He was 72. The Leafs were trying, that week, to defend the Stanley Cup they’d won three times in a row. Querrie’s last regret was said to have been that he couldn’t be on hand to watch the team he’d once owned — and almost named.

In Memoriam: Charlie Querrie’s grave in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery, fall of 2020.

 

(A version of this post appeared on TVO.org in January of 2021.)

 

 

another night at the office

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In The Soup: A tomato-besmutched Clarence Campbell departs his Forum seat on the night of March 17, 1955, in the early going of Montreal’s riot.

Later, Clarence Campbell was asked what he would have done differently if he’d known a riot was in the offing. “I wasn’t frightened, if that’s what you mean,” was his response. “I think, in the interest of everybody, if I had known what was going to happen, the thing then to have done would have been to call the whole thing off.” As it was, let history show that on a Thursday of this date in 1955, Montreal’s game against the Detroit Red Wings went ahead a day after the NHL president suspended Canadiens’ superstar Maurice Richard for the end of the regular season and the playoffs to follow.

During the first period, unhappy Habs fans accosted Campbell in his Forum seat, yelling insults and bombarding him with (as Montreal GM Frank Selke remembered) According to Frank Selke: “bad fruit, eggs, and bags full of water.” Worse followed: Andre Robinson, 21, Rue St. Henri squeezed a tomato over Campbell’s head. (He was charged with assault.) Another young bravo held out his hand for a shake: when Campbell extended his hand, he got a slap in the face. At about that same time, someone tossed what Montreal police later described as “a U.S. Army type tear-gas bomb.” The Toronto Daily Star reported: “Campbell, after being punched in the face, was buried under an avalanche of rubbers, peanuts, programs, eggs, tomatoes, and pennies.” The Forum organist played “My Heart Cries For You.”

The game was called off soon after that, forfeited to Detroit, who’d been leading 4-1.

Recalling his service as a soldier with the Canadian Army in the Second World War, Campbell said, “I’ve seen lots of panics, but never anything like this.” Soon enough, of course, the riot spilled out into the streets of Montreal. Cars burned, looters sacked stores.

“Let us hope the outside world has been sufficiently distracted by the H-bomb and the Yalta papers, during the last couple of weeks,” the Star’s editorial page opined next day from Toronto, “to keep it from taking a close look at Canada. Otherwise the idea might have got abroad that this is a nation of hicks and hooligans.”

department of throwing stuff: stadium sweepstakes

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Flyboys: Pilots of the upper gallery at Chicago Stadium prepare to launch their planes at the ice in February of 1942.

Earl Davis announced his findings in January of 1944.

“Hockey fans are the craziest people, of that I am sure,” was what years of experience had taught him. “They do not seem to know it is dangerous to throw things — that a player could break his leg on the junk they toss — and that we are breaking our backs picking it up. One night we scooped up 300 or 400 pennies, several dimes and nickels, and a couple of quarters.”

Davis, the long-suffering supervisor of the 12-man clean-up crew responsible for keeping the ice clear at Chicago Stadium, unburdened himself toAssociated Press correspondent Charles Chamberlin that winter.

Programs, tissue paper, poker chips, marbles, decks of cards, rice, navy beans were all on Davis’ list of items he and his team had retrieved through the past few wartime seasons. “Eggs — a dime a dozen. Oranges, apples, grapefruit, slices of bread — some day we’ll get the knives and forks. If it wasn’t for rationing …”

Chamberlain also inquired into the flying machines that filled the Stadium airspace night after night. “Made with painstaking care from programs by guys in the far, smoke-bound reaches of the upper gallery,” dozens of paper airplanes regularly went winging down from on high in these “stadium sweepstakes.”

Blackhawks president Bill Tobin described how it worked: “They choose a blueline or a circle on the ice and try to see who can sail their planes closest to the marks. They bet anything from five cents to five dollars on the accuracy of the flights.”

Tobin had his choice cut when it came to stories of flying food.

“The Hawks were in Boston when what should splash down on the ice but a big chunk of beef steak, uncooked. Taffy Abel, who was playing defence for us then, picked it up, made a bow towards the gallery, and carted it off. He said he fried and ate it after the game.”

Could have happened, I guess, just not in ’37: Abel played his last game in the NHL in 1934.

 

 

department of throwing stuff: without your help, we would find it extremely difficult to win

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Pelting Plea: in early 1935, the Stanley Cup champions appealed to their fans to discontinue the deluge.

A month into the NHL’s second COVID-modified season: how’s that going? As of last night, 175 games of 210 scheduled games had been played, 35 postponed. Around the league, 108 players on 26 teams have spent time on the COVID protocol list, not all of whom have tested positive, with 52 players from 10 teams now cloistered, along with a couple of linesmen. Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and St. Louis are the teams that have, so far, avoided listing any players.

Time to be erring on the side of shutting it all down? Not according to the NHL. At least, there’s been no public suggestion of any hiatus in the interest of all-around health and safety. Must the show go on? Maybe not, but it will.

And maybe, soon, with more fans. The Florida Panthers, Arizona Coyotes, and Dallas Stars have already been skating in front of diminished crowds, and now there’s word that both the Columbus Blue Jackets and Tampa Bay Lightning are hoping to be getting the public-health approval that will allow them to welcome a limited number of fans into their respective buildings, maybe in March.

All of which would seem to suggest that the time is right for a detour back through hockey history to a time when fans not only filled the seats of NHL arenas, but fulfilled their right to hurl whatever they might have in hand, or pocket, or on foot, onto the ice.

The throwing of stuff by fans at hockey games is, of course, as much of the history of the sport as the ice and/or referees that stuff has so often targeted. In a book I wrote about the culture of hockey (and vice-versa), I devoted six pages to the instinct fans have to throw stuff at hockey games; the variety of stuff thrown; and the dangers inherent in that stuff being on the ice — I could easily have filled a chapter of 20 pages.

Welcome, then, to a weekend’s series of posts focussing on Chicago’s old Stadium in the 1930s and ’40s.

Chicago is by no means the only NHL city with a history of dangerous debris:  the annals of stuff flung include them all, every franchise, every rink. Black Hawks’ fans were notorious, especially those occupying the high gallery seats at the Madhouse on Madison, for inundating the ice in outrage, protest, joy, or … just because they could. The 1944 Stanley Cup Finals stand out in this regard — more about that here — but there were plenty of instances before that of games delayed by coins and shoes and playing cards raining down from on high, paper airplanes, novels, fruit, empty bottles.

The Blackhawks did their best to curtail the bombarding over the years, deploying ushers and policeman, issuing threats and pleas. The entreaty reproduced here, above, dates to January of 1935, when Chicago was defending the Stanley Cup they’d won in the spring of ’34.

The Associated Press reported on this flyer, which was distributed to fans that winter. “So bold have the customers at the Chicago Stadium been getting that it was decided to appeal to their better natures in an effort to halt the aerial onslaughts.”

Fans had been growing bolder, the AP noted, since earlier in the season when a bottle-tosser, arrested by police, had been released at the request of Stadium authorities.

“Officials of the club were inclined to believe their printed appeal was conducive to better behaviour,” the AP noted, “because there was a noticeable depreciation in the amount of debris scattered on the ice the first night it was tried.”

Cleaner Sweep: Clearing the ice at the Chicago Stadium on Tuesday, March 23, 1965. The New York Rangers beat the home team 3-2 that night, the Blackhawks’ fourth consecutive loss. “The fans’ displeasure reached the high point in the final period,” according to a UPI account, when play had to be halted for 20 minutes while attendants cleared fruit, overshoes, playing cards and waste paper off the ice.”

leafs + canadiens, 1938: laying on a licking, avoiding a sand trap

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Net Work: Canadiens threaten the Leaf net on the Sunday night of March 6, 1938, with Leaf goaltender Turk Broda down at left with teammate Gordie Drillon (#12) at hand. That’s Montreal’s Toe Blake with his back to the goal, while Toronto’s Red Horner reaches in with his stick. Canadiens Johnny Gagnon (deep centre) and Paul Haynes are following up, along with an unidentified Leaf. (Image: Conrad Poirier, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Quebec)

The Maple Leafs meet the Canadiens in Montreal tonight, which is as good a prompt as any to cast back to a Sunday night in 1938, March 6, to revisit another meeting of the two old rivals.

The NHL was an eight-team affair then. That year, like this one, there was a Canadian division, though for balance it included the New York Americans as well as the Leafs, Canadiens, and Montreal Maroons. Toronto was top of the section at that late-season juncture, with Montreal in second. Saturday night the Leafs beat the Maroons 2-0 at the Forum, with Turk Broda getting the shutout. The goals came from rookie winger George Parsons and centre Syl Apps.

Sunday night the Leafs and Canadiens played to the biggest crowd to gather that season at the Forum: “11,000 fans banked solidly up the Forum’s sloping sides,” the Gazette’s Marc McNeil reported, and as seen in the photographs here.

McNeil wasn’t so impressed by the Canadiens. To his eye, they came up with “one of their shoddiest and most impotent displays of the campaign.” The Leafs licked them 6-3, in the end; “to make matters worse they didn’t even score a goal until the game had been hopelessly lost, 6-0.”

The Leafs were led by winger Gordie Drillon, who scored a pair of goals, and would end up as the NHL’s top scorer by season’s end. App, who finished second in league scoring, had a goal on the night, along with Bob Davidson, Busher Jackson, and Buzz Boll. Scoring for Montreal were Toe Blake, Pit Lepine, and Don Wilson. Wilf Cude was in the Canadiens’ net.

Other highlights of the night:

• Toronto scored four goals in the second period to pad their lead, but the game was also delayed four times while (as Marc McNeil told it) “sand, thrown on the ice in small bags which burst, was scraped from the surface.”

• A Montreal fan tried to make his way to the ice. Identified as “head of the Millionaires,” the devoted followers who occupied the rush seats in the Forum’s north end, this would-be interloper was apparently intent on making a case to referees John Mitchell and Mickey Ion. He was stopped before he got to the ice — by none other than Frank Calder, who was aided by several ushers in apprehending him as he passed near the NHL president’s rinkside seat.

• Late in the third period, Montreal’s Georges Mantha lost his helmet in the Toronto end. “He finished the contest without it,” McNeil noted, “because Turk Broda picked it up and wore it for the rest of the game. Afterwards, the Toronto goalie returned it to the speedy left-winger.”

 

Banked Solidly Up The Forum’s Sloping Sides: A look at Wilf Cude in the Montreal goal on March 6, 1938, with Toe Blake (#6) chasing Toronto’s Gordie Drillon (#12) into the far corner. A good view here of the Forum’s seating here. Notice, too, the goal judge caged behind Cude. (Image: Conrad Poirier, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Quebec)

department of throwing stuff: bernie parent’s mask

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Fling a waffle to the ice in Toronto in the early decades of this parlous young century of ours and chances are you’ll end up kicked to the Bay Street curb and banned for ever more from the premises. Lobbing a catfish you happen to have been carrying around in your underwear in Pittsburgh may well get you arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, possessing instruments of crime, and disrupting meetings and processions.

Maybe, in Pittsburgh, the charges won’t go forward. The outrage associated with the waffle and what it represents will, in time, fade away, even if the ban persists. The overall message, though, is clear: today’s NHL (or, I guess, yesterday’s) has decided that the time has come to break hockey’s vivid tradition, long and lustily favoured by fans, of expressing themselves by hurling whatever they might have at hand at the ice.

Fans were throwing stuff well before 1917, but it was in the NHL that the practice truly evolved into (a messy, disruptive, and often dangerous) art form. In Montreal, fans used to toss toe rubbers by the dozens to express their approval of the all-conquering Canadiens; in Chicago, live rabbits, dead squirrels, whisky bottles, and a life-sized dummy of Toronto’s Frank Mahovlich used to rain from the upper balconies of the old Chicago Stadium. Cataloguing hockey’s debris is an ongoing effort — evidence of my attempt to keep is in my 2014 book, Puckstruck, and peppered across this site, here and here and over here. And if, at some point, it becomes clear that the stuff that’s thrown sometimes goes the other way, from the ice to the stands? I think we have to look into that, too. Why not now?

Today is, after all, Bernie Parent’s 75th birthday. Born in Montreal on a Tuesday of this date in 1945, Parent had just 26 back in 1971 as his Toronto Maple Leafs headed into an opening-round playoff quarter-final against the New York Rangers.

Parent had already been a Philadelphia Flyer at this stage of his career. A trade had brought him to Toronto in February of ’71. He stay another season in Toronto before decamping to the WHA’s Philadelphia Blazers and, thereafter, back to the Flyers. It was in this second stint in Philadelphia that Parent was instrumental in the Flyers’ Stanley Cup triumphs of 1974 and ’75, as he won (let’s not forget) Vézina and Conn Smythe trophies in both those years.

But back to the Leafs in ’71: Parent was sharing the net that year with a 42-year-old Jacques Plante. It was Plante who started the first game of the playoffs early that April at Madison Square Garden, a 5-4 loss. Parent got the call for the second game the following night, and in that one, the Torontonians roared back to even the series with a 4-1 win.

Both teams were feeling sourly on the night. In the second period, New York left winger Vic Hadfield roughed up Toronto defenceman Bob Baun, and vice-versa. Hadfield and Leafs forward Jim Harrison were penalized for punching each other, too. In the third, when those two clashed again, they started a brawl in the Toronto zone, at the Seventh Avenue end of the rink. In the foolery that followed, Parent made his way into the melee, where he got a hold of Hadfield, if only briefly — Rangers’ goaltender Ed Giacomin was quick to attend and haul Parent away.

At some point during these proceedings, Hadfield got hold of Parent’s mask and donated it to the Garden crowd.

“Hadfield ripped off my mask,” Parent said in the immediate aftermath, “and threw it into the crowd.”

That’s now how Hadfield recalled it.

“He jumped me from behind,” he said. “Then I saw the mask sitting there, so I just threw it. But I lost a glove, too. Somebody threw a glove of mine into the stands.”

Initially, Parent stuck to his story. “Hadfield took the mask off my head and threw it in the seats,” he insisted. Somewhere, somehow, the goaltender relented. “When things settled down,” Parent writes in Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!, his exclamatory 1975 autobiography, “Hadfield picked up my mask and threw it in the stands.”

On the night, MSG police did their best to recover the mask, but the fans weren’t interested: it was, as The New York Times noted, “passed along, bucket-brigade style, around half the Garden. Appeals for its return rang from the arena PA. “But,” as Dick Beddoes reported in the Globe and Mail, “exuberants among the demonstrative 17,250 fanatics chanted ‘Don’t give it back! Don’t give it back!’”

The Leafs’ 68-year-old vice-president, King Clancy, thought he might be able to help with the search, though he soon found himself in hostile territory, and ended up retreating to his seat near the Toronto bench.

“Hadfield throwing the mask away was the most childish thing I ever saw,” Clancy said. “Those things cost $150 and the Rangers have to pay for it.”

Parent did have a back-up mask, but it was at home, in Toronto.

“I wouldn’t continue in the game without the mask,” Parent wrote in his autobiography.

His coach, Johnny McClellan, didn’t blame him, even if others did. “Parent has played with a mask since he was a 12 years old,” he said after the game. “He has never been in the net without a mask in 13 years, so you’re not going to send a guy into the net without a mask. He could get a shot in the face and that’s it.”

So in went Plante, who knew what that was like — though, of course, in 1959, the Andy Bathgate shot he took in the face just before he donned his mask for the first wasn’tit. This time out, he was only called on to play the final 4:42 of the game, stopping two shots and preserving Toronto’s win.

Another brawl ensued 30 seconds after he’d stepped in, when the Leafs’ Jim Dorey engaged with New York’s Ted Irvine. Going to teammate Ron Ellis’ aid, Plante (by the account of the New York Daily News’ Dick Young) “skated over and began banging on [Glen] Sather’s head.” That brought Giacomin back: “skating the length of the rink and taking a flying leap onto Plante.”

Giacomin, for what it’s worth, wondered at the time that Parent didn’t continue bare-faced. “That’s what I would have done,” he said. “Hell, for four minutes, why let Plante credit?” Though, of course, Plante didn’t get the win; that went into the books as Parent’s.

“Some writers actually suggested I was a coward for not playing without the mask,” Parent recalled in his book, take up Johnny McClellan’s line. “This one New York writer even said I’d never be the same goalie again. In other words, this writer thought I was chicken. Bull. If I got hit not wearing a mask, I might really never be the same again. A goalie is putting his life on the line out there.”

 

Danger Close: Having tossed Bernie Parent’s mask over the boards on April 8, Vic Hadfield added insult to injury on April 13 by scoring on Parent (and his new mask) at MSG.

With the series set to shift to Toronto, Leafs’ GM Jim Gregory put out an appeal. “If a guy who’s got a mask returns it, I’ll get him two tickets for Saturday’s game and pay his way to Toronto.”

In Toronto, meanwhile, NHL president Clarence Campbell visited a CBC studio to catch up on what had gone down in New York. The fact that the footage didn’t show Hadfield with the mask didn’t concern him too much: he said there was a standard $50 fine for throwing equipment overboards. “I wanted to get a general impression of what this affair looked like to the people who saw it there and on television,” Campbell said.

Upon further reflection, Campbell fined each team $5,000 — to that point, the largest bad-behaviour tax ever to be levied in the NHL. Further individual fines to players from New York added up to $3,300, including $400 to Giacomin for twice departing his crease. Toronto’s players were punished to the tune of $3,250, including $200 each to Plante and Parent for straying from their creases.

The missing mask was the one Parent had started using when he arrived in Toronto from Philadelphia. It was very comfortable — and happened to have been made by Fibrosport, Jacques Plante’s company, based in Magog, Quebec. The back-up Parent didn’t have in New York when he needed it was his old Flyers’ mask, which he’d used for about two years previously.

He didn’t have to revert to that one, as it turned out: with his connections, he relied on Plante getting on the telephone the morning after the night to call his Fibrosport partner, Marc Andre Beaudin, in Montreal. He in turn called in a couple of employees from their Good Friday holiday and got going on crafting a new model in time for Saturday’s game.

“The three of them would have to work all day to make the mask,” Plante said. “They would have the mold already, but there is a lot of work to making a hand-crafted mask.”

Saturday morning it was handed to an Air Canada pilot for the flight from Montreal to Toronto — the pilot, no less. Howard Starkman from the Leafs was there to retrieve it when it landed — he later went on to serve as PR director for the baseball Blue Jays — and he delivered it to Maple Leaf Gardens. Parent put it to use that night in helping defeat the Rangers by a score of 3-1.

The Leafs’ momentum didn’t last, though: with Parent and Plante and their respective masks sharing the net, the Rangers won the next three games to take the series and advance to play the Chicago Black Hawks.

That’s not quite the end of the story. There’s the part, too, about Vic Hadfield scoring a hat trick against Chicago at MSG towards the end of April, his first in the playoffs. Picking up one of the hats that landed on the ice in his honour, Hadfield put it on before skating to the boards and flinging it to the fans.

“I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time,” he said. “I felt so good about scoring all those goals, I wanted to show my emotion. It was a tremendous feeling, one of the highlights of my career.”

As for Parent’s mask, Leafs’ VP Harold Ballard said he was invoicing the Rangers. “We should send the bill to Bill Jennings,” Ballard said, “but I guess we’ll send it to [New York coach and GM] Emile Francis — it’s his department.”

I can’t confirm whether any such paperwork was submitted. But Jennings, who was the president of the Rangers, did send a bill of his own to the Leafs in the amount of $175 — for Vic Hadfield’s bespoke glove, said to have been manufactured and specially sewn in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, Francis’ hometown.

Ballard took it for a spoof. “At least,” he said, “I hope Jennings isn’t serious.”

The story might end there, which is to say right here, except for, no, sorry, there’s more.

Towards the end of that same April, the Chicago Tribune made fleeting mention of the mask’s having been returned to Parent by a 7-year-old boy. “It was mailed back to Bernie in a shoe box,” was how that story went, but no further.

That seems to be fanciful. In 2006, the mask did show up in a sports memorabilia auction, and then again in 2012, when a buyer, unnamed, decided the time had come to get the goaltender and his mask back together. Greg Wyshynski reported on this at the time for Yahoo! Sports — you can read about that here.

The old goaltender knew the mask he’d once worn the moment he set eyes on it, 41 years after Hadfield absconded with it. “Life is full of surprises,” Parent said. He only got to visit with the mask briefly, apparently: the owner’s plan was to keep it for himself, then donate it, posthumously, to the Hockey Hall of Fame.

In Phil: Bernie Parent in Flyer kit + mask in the mid-1970s.