Eric Zweig

department of throwing stuff: turning back the clock

/ puckstruck

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.

 

someone with more sense than bravado: clint benedict, conn smythe, and the 1929 mask mandate that never was

/ puckstruck

Benny In The Nets: After playing seven NHL seasons (and collecting three Stanley Cups) with the Ottawa Senators, Clint Benedict joined the Montreal Maroons in 1924.

This is the first of a two-part series on the NHL’s original masked man, and how in 1929 the NHL almost (but not quite) came to mandate protection for all its goaltenders.

Olive Benedict might have blamed herself when her husband Clint went down in Montreal that January night in 1930, but it was mischance — and a puck Howie Morenz fired — that actually felled the 37-year-old goaltender for the Montreal Maroons and precipitated the painful end of his long and illustrious NHL career.

That came, the end, nine weeks later when, on a Tuesday, 92 years ago this past week, Benedict played the 390th — and final — game of his Hall-of-Fame career, during which he played in five Stanley Cup finals, winning four of those, three with the (original) Ottawa Senators and another with the Montreal Maroons.

In hockey history, that final game of Benedict’s is also annotated as the end of the goaltender’s desperate two-week experiment with the first face-mask in league history. Five games that lasted. It would be 1959 — 29 years later — before Montreal Canadiens goaltender Jacques Plante donned his famous mask in an actual game, jump-starting a new era in the NHL.

Why was the NHL (and hockey generally) so slow in adopting masks to protect the well-being (and faces) of goaltenders? Institutional conservatism, I guess. Hubris would figure in as a major factor, too, I might say, even if Clint Benedict wouldn’t. Asked in 1964 about the possibility of any such stigma having been attached to goaltenders erring on the side of self-preservation, the old goaltender (he was 71) wasn’t having any of it. “Nah,” he told an inquiring reporter, “we took such a beating anyway that nobody would have thought it sissified. No, it was just a case of not developing one that was practical.”

Even before Benedict tried out his mask, the 1929-30 campaign looked like being a pivotal one for goaltenders, with the Toronto Maple Leafs’ owner, coach, GM, and force-of nature Conn Smythe in a leading role. Not much has been made of this, over the years, but that fall, mere months before an infant Jacques Plante celebrated his first birthday, there was an effort afoot to require the league’s goaltenders to wear masks.

From the start, the 1929-30 season was a challenging one for Clint Benedict, who was playing in 13th NHL season, the 18th, if you felt like counting his years in the NHA, too. In November of ’29, just as the season was getting going, he left a game in Ottawa after the first period after what was described as “a violent attack of indigestion.” Maybe he shouldn’t have tried to play: reported to have been ailing all day, he took the ice “in a weak condition,” as Montreal’s Gazette described it.

Flat Walsh replaced him that night, and went on holding the fort as Benedict recovered, as it was subsequently reported, from a case of ptomaine (food) poisoning. Something he ate in Boston, he said. He lost eight pounds, missed eight games.

Benedict was back in December, but in his second game of his return, he went down again. Painful as it sounds, he got back up on his skates in short order, this time. He was playing brilliantly, by all reports, frustrating the Boston Bruins at the Forum, when he sprawled to stop Dit Clapper and took the puck full in the face. “Benny dropped,” the Gazette reported, “and lay still as if he had been shot dead.” He was unconscious on the ice, revived, repaired to the dressing room. With no concussion protocol or common sense to keep him there, Benedict returned to finish the game.

He was back in action three nights later, on January 7, at the Forum, against the Canadiens. This was the night his wife, Olive, was looking on from a seat just behind his first-period net, a reluctant witness who’d travelled from her home in Ottawa. It was the first game she’d attended in six years, and one of just a dozen or so she’d ever been to in the course of her husband’s lengthy career. It may have been, as one Montreal newspaper suggested, that she thought she brought him back luck, but it might just as well have been that she preferred not to see the dangers he faced every night on the job.

On this night, the game wasn’t yet a minute old when Howie Morenz swept onto Maroon ice and fired the puck. “A smoking shot,” the Montreal Star’s reporter called it; “got him straight between the eyes and smashed the bridge of his nose,” the Gazette detailed. “The impact of the drive could be heard in the far reaches of the building,” the Star said. Players from both teams carried Benedict to the dressing. There was a great mess of blood.

Damage Report: The Montreal Star headline for the game on January 7, 1930. Canadiens’ sporting gesture was tnot to rush sickly substitute Flat Walsh as he suited up in Benedict’s place.

While Benedict’s wounds were being tended, the Maroons dispatched a taxi to retrieve Flat Walsh, who was home in bed, recovering from a bad bout of flu. He arrived at the Forum wearing an overcoat over his pyjamas, changed into his gear, pulled on a cap. “He was almost tottering on his pins,” said the Star, “with his grave face showing a grey pallor beneath his upturned visor. Unsteadily he braced himself for a few practice shots, and then went on to stardom.” After a half-hour delay, that is, hockey resumed, with the Maroons winning by a score of 2-1, and thereby taking over first place in the Canadian side of the NHL standings from their Montreal rivals.

The Star checked in next day at the LaSalle Hotel, just east of the Forum on Drummond at St. Catherine, where Benedict was resting under his wife’s care. “An examination today revealed his nose badly broken with a V-shaped cut that required five stitches, and the flesh is torn all the way down the nose.” The next day, the couple left for Ottawa, where Benedict would spend his convalescence.

He’d miss 15 games this time, over the course of six weeks, with Flat Walsh and (for one game) Abbie Cox, lent by Montreal’s IHL farm team, the Windsor Bulldogs, standing in his stead.

Neither of them saw fit to protect their faces in the wake of Benedict’s injury. In the wider hockey world, discussion of the need for and practicalities of masks had been going on for years. Goaltending in the NHL has never been an easy way of making a living, but in the 1920s and 1930 it was particularly dangerous. Battered by pucks, scythed by skates, run into and over by barrelling opponents: the men who volunteered to man the nets were constantly being jarred, cut, knocked out.

They came to, groggily acknowledged their surroundings, were patched up: mostly, they finished a game they’d started. It happened all the time, in those years.

“I remember at least four times being carried into the dressing room to get all stitched up and then going back in to play,” Benedict said in 1962. “There were some other times, too, but I don’t remember them.”

Much of the mayhem has faded away from modern memory. For its part, the NHL doesn’t, at the best of times, display a nuanced or even particularly reliable memory of its own history, and when it comes to unflattering aspects of the historical game — extreme violence, concussions, other grievous injuries — it’s not as if the league is interested in curating … any of it.

When it comes to early NHL goaltenders, the league will occasionally highlight agony-adjacent events. The emergency foray that New York Rangers coach Lester Patrick made at the age of 44 into the New York Rangers’ net in April of 1928, for instance, is a polished gem of popular hockey history, even if the details of how he was called to duty aren’t always so well remembered. A shot from Nels Stewart of the Maroons caught the regular Ranger goaltender, Lorne Chabot, in the face that night. It was several days before doctors were satisfied that he wouldn’t lose his left eye. Guarding the goal for Montreal that night: Clint Benedict.

Was Canadiens goaltender George Hainsworth, in fact, the first NHLer to don a mask in January of 1929 after his nose was broken by his teammate Aurèle Joliat in a pre-game warm-up? I’ve delved into that possibility to some depth here; the short answer is probably not.

But something was building around that time. I’m not sure you can call it momentum, given how slowly the evolution of hockey masks progressed in the game’s early years. My friend Eric Zweig, hockey historian extraordinaire, has written about Ev Marshall in Calgary in 1899, who is (to date) the first documented goaltender to mask up.

There were others after that, though not many. Some who sought protection did so to safeguard the glasses they wore, and glass-protectors were common in amateur hockey (and in particular on U.S. college ice) through the years of the First World War and into the 1920s. (Not all historians allow that these qualify as masks.) In any case, as with hockey helmets, there was no organized effort to develop a purpose-built hockey mask.

In 1920, the Ontario Hockey Association did add a rule permitting goaltenders to wear masks. It’s possible that some judicious soul took advantage of that provision as soon as it was passed. What we do know with certainty is that during the 1926-27 season, Lawrence Jones did. A stopper of pucks for the Pembroke Lumber Kings of the Upper Ottawa Valley Hockey League, he was noted (in Ottawa’s Journal) as “one of the few net guardians in the sport who wears a baseball mask.”

That same year, suiting up for the women’s team at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, goaltender Elizabeth Graham famously donned a fencing mask.

In the unprotected NHL, pucks kept on hitting goaltenders in the face, which was bad for them, generally. More specifically, if they were injured seriously enough that they ended up missing games, that was bad for their teams which, in most cases, didn’t keep a full-time back-up on the roster.

Something had to change, and almost did, two months before Clint Benedict went down with the injury that ended up, finally, shifting the balance. Playing protagonist again in November of 1929 was Lorne Chabot. He was with the Toronto Maple Leafs now, gearing up with his teammates to open the season against the Chicago Black Hawks. The Globe described the mishap at the Leafs’ final pre-season practice at Arena Gardens:

The big goal-guardian was struck in the face by one of Charley Conacher’s terrific drives and was practically knocked unconscious. He quickly recovered, however, but it was necessary to put four stitches in the wound that was opened up in his cheek. He will play tonight, however, although he may present a bandaged appearance.

And so he did, helping his team to a 2-2 tie on a night that Conacher was making his NHL debut (and scoring a goal). Leafs GM and coach Conn Smythe, meanwhile, was working on a plan.

That same fall, the NHL had adjusted its “anti-defence” rules, hoping to speed up the game, increasing scoring opportunities and thereby, goals. To open up play (and specifically confound the packing-of-the-defence scheme perfected by Pete Green and his Ottawa Senators with their “kitty-bar-the-door” strategy”), the new rule stipulated that only three defenders (including the goaltender) were permitted in the defensive zone when the puck was elsewhere. This meant that forwards couldn’t precede the puck into their own zone: they had to wait to enter with the play.

Another rule barred goaltenders from holding pucks that came their way. Previously, they’d been permitted to hang on to a puck for three seconds before casting it away to a teammate or a corner. Now, they had to release the puck instantly, or pay the penalty of a punitive face-off ten feet in front of their net, with no defenders allowed on the ice between the goal and the puck-drop.

What all this meant for goaltenders, Smythe said, was more shots and more danger. (The league seemed to acknowledge this in its amended rules: where previously goaltenders were allowed ten minutes to recuperate from an on-ice injury, an extra five minutes was now added in the case that the goaltender had to be replaced.) The Gazette in Montreal explained Smythe’s position: “To prevent a serious accident,” Smythe wanted to mandate that goaltenders “be protected as much as possible by headgear and especially constructed masks.” To that end, he had a proposal he was going to present at the next meeting of the NHL’s governors that would compel all goaltenders to wear masks.

According to the Gazette’s report, Smythe had the support of “several managers in the NHL.” The problem was one of social stigma as much as anything else: goaltenders themselves were reluctant to be the first to take up a mask. “If all teams were compelled to do so,” the dispatch concluded, “it would be quickly adopted.”

Bright Idea: A Montreal newspaper reports on Smythe’s modest 1929 proposal.

There’s no reason to believe that Smythe didn’t follow through on this effort. If he did, details of the discussion didn’t filter out to the newspapers, and no decision on mandatory masks was taken. NHL President Frank Calder did oversee a meeting of league governors in mid-December in Chicago, but no mention of masks or mandates surfaced in the press that week. And Smythe, it seems, was in Montreal anyway, coaching the Leafs in a 3-1 loss to the Maroons and earning himself a fine of $50 for haranguing referee Dr. Eddie O’Leary.

As urgent as Smythe’s push for a mask mandate had seemed, it … evaporated? Maybe he did present his proposal to the league and failed to rally enough support. Could he have been persuaded in the interim that the goaltenders themselves didn’t like the idea? We don’t know.

And so the mask debate faded away into the background again … for a month. “Some day the league will authorize masks for netminders as baseball does for its catchers, and these accidents will be avoided.” That was the Gazette, in its original report of Morenz’s shot and Benedict’s resulting distress in January of 1930.

Baz O’Meara weighed in the following day in his Montreal Star column. “So far no mask has been made which gives the maximum of protection, and the minimum of discomfort,” he wrote. “Still someone with more sense than bravado will come out some night and set a new fashion in protection to eyes and noses — but it won’t be till someone invents a better mask than any that can be utilized at present.”

Masked Man: Clint Benedict poses with his mask in 1930.

Benedict was on the case, of course, commissioning a sporting goods firm to make him a sensible apparatus with which he could return to the Maroons net. The record hasn’t, over the years, had much more to say in the way of specifics than that.

According to several accounts, the firm was in Boston — that’s what Jim Hynes and Gary Smith report in their book Saving Face: The Art and History of the Goalie Mask (2008), though they don’t list a source. Another history, Douglas Hunter’s lavish A Breed Apart: An Illustrated History of Goaltending (1995), mentions Boston, but also notes a second possibility: that the Maroons’ trainer (not named, but it would have been Bill O’Brien) “modified a black leather face mask boxers wore in sparring by riveting a thick black bar across the front to protect Benedict’s nose and cheekbone.” Again, no sources are listed.

The Hockey Hall of Fame’s Benedict mask.

There is this famous contemporary photograph of Benedict showing off his mask. As Hunter points out, the Hockey Hall of Fame has in its collection another mask of a slightly different design that it says belonged to Benedict. Is that one a prototype, then, or an alternate mask? In 1932, Benedict announced that he was contemplating a hockey comeback with the aid of a whole new mask — maybe that’s what the Hall has?

One photograph I hadn’t seen until I came across it recently in the pages of a Montreal newspaper from February of 1930 must have been taken at the same time as the one above. Benedict has the same distant gaze in this new one, but his cap is off: you can see the head-strap that held the mask in place, or not — in at least one of the games in which the mask served, the strap failed and had to be taped.

Even more interesting than the photograph is the short article that accompanies it. It may not solve any of the small puzzles associated with Benedict’s mask — indeed, on a point or two, it stirs up new questions. There’s insight here, too, though, into the makings of Benedict’s mask that I haven’t seen before in my scourings of archival records.

That’s for another post, though, I think, on another day. Stand by.

 

sight plan: picturing a mask, one of hockey’s earliest

/ puckstruck

Eye Test: Princeton’s E.W. Gould shows off his headgear (said to be of his own design) on December 21, 1921.

First hockey goaltender to wear a mask?

It’s a question that has diverted many a hockey researcher, including some here on the Puckstruck campus. This is well back beyond NHL pioneers Jacques Plante and Clint Benedict we’re talking now, before Elizabeth Graham and Corinne Hardman, pre-Eddie Giroux. The 2020 findings of hockey historian Eric Zweig, who’s done the digging, are as definitive as you’re going to come across. He settles us on Ev Marshall, of Calgary, who did the sensible thing and masked up in a game in 1899.

Next question: where to look if we’re seeking the first photograph of a hockey mask and the player who wore it?

While we do have images of both Hardman and Giroux, from 1916 and 1907 respectively, they show goaltenders only, no masks.

So this might well be it, hereabove, from 1921.

The thing is, this isn’t a goaltender we’re facing: E.W. Gould was a defenceman for Princeton University’s hockey team. I haven’t tracked his university record or found much in the way of a civilian biography, but his hockey file is … also thin. I haven’t even been able to glean a full first name. He may only have played a single season with the Tigers, over the winter of 1921-22, when he seems to have seen duty mostly as a substitute.

Gould’s mask got some play that winter, even if he didn’t: this photograph appeared in newspapers across the United States that winter, mostly as a standalone, the novelty of the mask was enough, no need for a whole story. While (to me) it looks like it might be a baseball mask, contemporary captions explain that Gould invented his rig himself.

As it turns out, Gould wasn’t the only one wearing a mask that year: his teammate (and captain), Princeton goaltender Gene Maxwell, sported one of similar design. That’s him above, in 1922, and then in the back row of the team grouping below from Lake Placid, with Gould and his mask kneeling up front.

While Gould may well have donned his mask as a measure of prudent protection, Maxwell wore glasses behind his. He had recent precedent to draw on in this regard: in 1915, Boston A.A. goaltender Ollie Chadwick used what looks like — see an artistic impression below — a pair of motorcycling or aviator’s goggles.

I guess they did work, insofar as Chadwick could have been even more painfully injured if he hadn’t been wearing them. Playing against Hobey Baker and his New York St. Nicholas team in March of ’15, Chadwick took a stick to the eyes. “The Boston goal tender plays with glasses,” the Boston Daily Globe detailed; “these broke and the player was badly cut.” He was patched and returned to his goal — without the glasses.

(Sad to say, Chadwick was killed in action at the age of 28 in 1917, while serving with the Lafayette Flying Corps over Belgium. Baker was with the U.S. Army Air Service when he died in a crash in France just over a year later. He was 26.)

Since we’re skating American ice, it’s worth noting that Chadwick wasn’t the first to wear headgear there. In February of 1911, New York A.C. captain Riley Casselman hit the ice against Crescent A.C wearing a baseball catcher’s mask — “much to the bewilderment of the fans,” as one local newspaper noted.

Casselman, who hailed from Morrisburg, Ontario, was no goaltender, either: in the old seven-man game, he was a free-wheeling rover. Those fans in New York came around to his way of seeing things, I guess: “Some said,” the report continued, “they didn’t see why all the players weren’t equipped with masks, especially when a rough game for the amateur league championship was on tap.”

Whether Gould’s 1921 half-mask was of his own design or not, it does seem to have made a lasting impression, to the point that the apparatus that Franklin Farrell wore a decade later while tending goal for the 1932 U.S. Olympic team — images here — looks like it could have been the very same model.

 

hello, canada, and hockey fans in the united states and newfoundland

/ puckstruck

He Shoots, He … You Know: Franklin Arbuckle painted Foster Hewitt at work high up above the ice at Maple Leaf Gardens for the cover of Maclean’s that found its way to newsstands on March 3, 1956.

A big anniversary today for radio in Canada: it was 100 years ago, on a Thursday of this same date in 1920, that the first scheduled broadcast took place, when XWA in Montreal relayed a musical program from the top floor of the Marconi building on William Street to the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa. That was a North American first, too: the inaugural American broadcast, emanating from Pittsburgh, didn’t hit the air until November of 1920.

Hockey’s radio debut came in the winter of 1923, via the Toronto Star’s radio station, CFCA. No, it wasn’t Foster Hewitt narrating the play, though he still often gets the credit. Historian Eric Zweig has cast the most light on this in recent years, and you can step into it here, if you have a subscription to the Star.

Hewitt was at the the paper in 1923, and did just a few days later get on the air to talk hockey. But it was in fact a part-time Star sports reporter Norman Albert who first gave a voice to hockey, on February 8, when he called the third period of an OHA intermediate game at Toronto’s Mutual Street Arena.

Albert also seems to have been on the job for the first broadcast of an NHL game. That came on February 14, 1923, when the hometown St. Patricks overturned the Ottawa Senators, the eventual Stanley Cup champions that year, by a score of 6-4.

Again, listeners heard just the third period that night, which means that Jack Adams’ goal for the St. Pats was the first in NHL history to be broadcast. Ottawa’s Frank Nighbor was next, with a pair. His teammate Punch Broadbent scored the final goal of that auspicious evening.

Albert died in 1974. I’m hoping someone asked him if he remembered how he called those landmark goals, and/or whether the words “He shoots, he scores” formed in his mouth that evening. And if someone did ask? I hope they wrote down the answer somewhere where I can snuffle it out, at some point.

Even if he wasn’t first off the mark, Foster Hewitt quickly — and lastingly — became a hockey broadcasting institution, of course. In his 1975 book, A Pictorial History of Radio in Canada, Sandy Stewart notes that while radio soon featured prominently in Canadian living rooms in the 1920s, most of the listening the citizenry was doing was to American stations.

There were two reasons for this, he posits: “the Canadian government’s indifference towards financing radio broadcasting prohibited big Canadian stations and the Canadian radio programming was not significantly different from American programming, which did it better.”

It was hockey that made the difference, Stewart says.

In the U.S., “going to the movies” had become the Saturday night pastime, but in Canada there were not as many movie houses available to a widely scattered population, and so Canadians stayed home to listen to the radio. Since almost everybody in the U.S. was at the movies on Saturday nights, the American broadcasters often didn’t bother to list the evening’s programs, but in Canada General Motors sponsored the Saturday night broadcasts. Canadians tuned in and hockey became as Canadian as maple syrup and still is.

General Motors eventually gave way to Imperial Oil as sponsor of hockey on Canadian radio, but Hewitt remained constant all the way through to 1968. (From 1952 through 1963, his broadcasts were simulcast on television, too.)

Sandy Stewart expounds on how Hewitt’s on-air talents ensured that his hockey broadcasts dominated the radio scene through the 1930s and on through the Second World War. And yet when hockey went national in 1932, General Motors was worried that the broadcast wouldn’t be able to hold its audience between periods. Their answer? They switched to dance music from Toronto’s Silver Slipper Dance Hall.

Stewart:

Later they produced drama sketches during intermissions, and eventually they hit on the “The Hot Stove League” with Elmer Ferguson, Wes McKnight, and Court Benson discussing the game. Another institution that survived from the 1930s to this day is the 3-Star Selection inspired by 3-Star Gasoline, [which] advertised on the broadcast.

For years Foster started the broadcast after his introduction from Charles Jennings with, “Hello, Canada and hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland.”

During the war, he also greeted “our men overseas,” and on one occasion when it was known that the Germans were transmitting the hockey game to our troops in Belgium and Holland along with the pitch from a Nazi female broadcaster, “Why not call off the war and go home to see the hockey games,” Foster added on the Christmas broadcast, “and an extra big hello to Calamity Jane of Arnhem.”

Gondola Gazing: Hewitt at the mic in the late 1940s.

 

syd howe’s six-goal smash (and unremembering joe malone)

/ puckstruck

Not Quite: Six-goal Syd Howe.

Syd Howe’s big night in February of 1944 started halfway through the first period when his Detroit teammate Don Grosso passed him the puck and he put it by New York goaltender Ken McAuley. Howe, a 32-year-old centreman, who scored again 18 seconds later, just kept going at Detroit’s Olympia, 76 years ago tonight. By the time the game was over, he’d notched six goals to help the Red Wings hammer the visiting Rangers 12-2. It was a mighty feat, to be sure, and it unleashed headlines across the NHL realm.

“Syd Breaks the All-Time NHL Mark,” touted the Detroit Free Press, under a six-column banner across the front of the sports section: “Here’s How: Howe, Howe, Howe, Howe, Howe, Howe — and How!”

“Howe Smashes Six Goals To Smash Aged Record,” The Globe and Mail proclaimed.

“Howe Sets League Record With Six Goals as Red Wings Crush Rangers Again,” declared The New York Times.

They were mistaken. The writers — like the Red Wings and the NHL at large — had forgotten their history. In a day before historical game summaries could be summoned by the click of a mouse, long before newspaper archives were readily accessible, the actual record had simply faded out of view.

It wasn’t Howe’s fault. He’d done his job. “I just hit a hot night,” he said in the dressing room, after the game, wearing what the Associated Press described as “a broad grin.” As hockey players did in those wartime years, he had another job, off the ice, working days in the tool room of a Detroit plant manufacturing war materials.

“I wonder what the boys in the shop will say now,” he was quoted as dutifully saying. “Yes, I’ll be on the job at 7:10 a.m., just like I am six days a week.”

Ottawa-born, Howe had started his NHL career in 1930 with his hometown Senators, eventually landing in Detroit after stints with Toronto’s Maple Leafs and a couple of other teams that, like those first Senators, didn’t last: the Philadelphia Quakers and St. Louis Eagles.

He came to be a much-beloved and valued Red Wing, and stepped up to captain the team in 1941-42. The year of his six-goal outburst, he put on the best offensive showing of his 17-season career, compiling 32 goals and 60 points in 46 regular-season games. Playing the wretched New York Rangers helped: that same January, he’d notched a hattrick and two assists in a 15-0 Red Wing drubbing of the New Yorkers that still stands as the worst defeat in NHL history. The goaltender who went unrelieved on both occasions was an overwhelmed rookie by the name of Ken McAuley: “the one-time Saskatchewan truant officer,” the Detroit Free Press called him.

Talk of Howe’s achievement turned on the idea that he’d surpassed eight other NHLers who’d previously scored five goals in a game, going back to Harry Hyland of the Montreal Wanderers on the league’s opening night in 1917.

In fact, four other players had previously already done what Howe did: Newsy Lalonde of the Canadiens and Joe Malone of the Quebec Bulldogs had each scored six goals in the winter of 1920, with brothers Corb and Cy Denneny (of the Toronto St. Patricks and Senators, respectively) repeating the feat the following season.

And Malone, of course, had done even better: he already owned the record for most goals in an NHL game, as he still does: a hundred years ago, on the last day of January, he scored seven in Quebec’s 10-6 win over Toronto. He could have had eight, in fact: another goal he deposited in the St. Patricks’ net was disallowed by the goal judge.

Prolific Joe: Malone in Quebec livery.

Twenty-four years later, Malone’s achievement continued to go unrecognized. Columnist Jim Coleman of The Globe and Mail seemed to be on the case within the week, writing that he’d heard from another Coleman, the industrious Charles L., no relation, who was a Toronto mining engineer with a passion for NHL history and statistics that he would eventually pour into three celebrated volumes of The Trail of the Stanley Cup.

Syd Howe’s six were all very well, but between them, the Colemans wanted it broadcast that both Newsy Lalonde and Tommy Smith had each scored nine goals in a single game. Lalonde’s triple-hattrick had come in 1910, when he was playing for Renfrew, while Smith’s was in 1914, on behalf of Quebec. Both of those outbursts had come, of course, in the old National Hockey Association, before the NHL’s time. Coleman’s list continued, too, citing six players who’d scored eight times in pre-NHL games, along with a further three who’d registered seven. Joe Malone was in the latter bunching, though not for what he did in 1920 in the NHL: he’d scored a whole other seven for NHA Quebec in 1913.

A year later, in March of 1945, Syd Howe surpassed Nels Stewart as the NHL’s all-time leading scorer when he notched the 515th point of his career by assisting Joe Carveth’s goal. The Red Wings were playing the Rangers again, and beat them 7-3 this time; Ken McAuley was, again, the goaltender.

A young Ted Lindsay was a teammate by then, though not Gordie Howe: he didn’t join the Red Wings until the year after Syd Howe retired from the NHL in the spring of 1946. The two Howes weren’t related: as the younger man’s fame grew over the years, the elder found himself clarifying this more and more. “I kid the people by telling them that Gordie’s my son,” Syd said in 1965, by which time, with Gordie as the NHL’s all-time leading goalscorer, the question was coming up two or three times a month.  

Out of the NHL, Syd Howe, returned to his hometown, Ottawa, where he played a final year in the Quebec Senior Hockey League with the Senators. It was in February of 1947 that a former teammate of Howe’s on the old St. Louis Eagles, Bill Cowley of the Boston Bruins, overtook him for the all-time NHL tally of points.

It was the following month, March — a full three years after Howe’s six-goal performance — that the fact of Malone’s record seems to have started to surface in the NHL’s consciousness.

“It appears now that the NHL may have to revise its list of individual scoring records for a game,” Bill Westwick mentioned in his column in the Ottawa Journal. “Some fan has dug up evidence that Joe Malone once scored seven for the old Quebec Bulldogs against Toronto. If he did, Malone never bothered mentioning it.”

According to columnist Bob Mamini of the Calgary Herald, the NHL was looking into it. “Ken Mackenzie, head of the league’s information department, says the league will credit Malone with the seven-goal record,” he reported. “The newspaper files will be accepted as the authority, although the league may do more checking before it makes the change official.”

It seems to have taken a further three years for that process to play out. As Eric Zweig noted last week in his review of Malone’s seven-goal bonanza, it wasn’t until 1950, when the man they called “Phantom” was elected to hockey’s Hall of Fame, that the NHL seems to have fully ordained the record.

Even then, not everybody seems to have gotten the memo. On the June day Malone was inducted, a Canadian Press dispatch in the Calgary Herald acknowledged Malone’s seven goals as “a record that has not been equalled in National League play.” But if you were in Windsor, reading the local Star, this was the confusing news:

On January 31, 1920, [Malone] scored seven goals for Quebec against Toronto St. Pats. (NHL record books credit Howe’s one-game six-goal splurge the best since the NHL formed in 1917.)

 

perhaps some day: hockey’s early, battered goaltenders and the long wait for a better (non-baseball) mask

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“All his teeth were loosened:” Not long after John Ross Roach posed in a baseball catcher’s mask in 1933, he was cut, contused, and concussed while going barefaced into the breach in the Red Wings’ net.

Last Friday was November 1 and therefore an auspicious anniversary in the history of hockey preventatives: it was 60 years to the day that Montreal Canadiens’ goaltender Jacques Plante decided that he’d played enough barefaced hockey in the NHL. Cut by a puck shot by Andy Bathgate of the New York Rangers that night in 1959 at Madison Square Garden, Plante left the game bleeding badly. When he returned to the ice, he was wearing a mask over his stitches and bandages. Clint Benedict had experimented with a mask (or masks) back in 1930, of course, but it was with Plante that the practice of goaltenders protecting their faces became commonplace in the NHL.

That’s not to say that throughout the rest of hockey history goaltenders weren’t constantly thinking about mitigating the damage being done to their faces. Baseball’s catcher’s mask originated at Harvard University in the 1870s, and it makes sense that hockey players might reach for a handy one of those come wintertime.

Eric Zweig has written about Eddie Giroux experimenting in 1903 with just such a mask. Giroux would go on, in 1907, to win a Stanley Cup with Kenora, but this was four years earlier when he was playing for Toronto’s OHA Marlboros. A shot by teammate Tommy Phillips cut him in practice, and so he tried the mask, though it’s not clear that he wore it in an actual game.

Same for Kingston’s Edgar Hiscock, who had his nose broken playing for the Frontenacs in 1899. He was reported to be ready to don a “baseball mask” in the game that followed, though I haven’t seen a corroborating account from the actual game in question. Mentioning Hiscock’s innovation beforehand, a local correspondent weighed in:

This is a new idea, and one which, perhaps, will create some amusement among the spectators at first, but yet there is not the least doubt of it being carried into effect, as something should be worn by goalkeepers to protect the head from the swift shots of some hockey players.

Is Hiscock’s the earliest recorded instance of a goaltender sporting a mask? That I’ve come across, yes — but only so far, and not by much. A goaltender in Calgary, Ev Marshall, donned a baseball mask in an intermediate game a couple of months later.

Hockey players and pundits were constantly discussing the pros and cons of masks throughout the early years of the new century. There was talk in 1912 around the NHA (forerunner to the NHL) that it might be time for goaltenders to protect their faces, though nothing ever came of it. In 1922, the OHA added a provision to its rulebook allowing goaltenders to wear baseball masks.

We know that Corinne Hardman of Montreal’s Western Ladies Hockey Club was wearing a mask a few years before that. And in 1927, while Elizabeth Graham was styling a fencing-mask while tending the nets for Queen’s University, Lawrence Jones was wearing a mask of his own to do his goaling for the Pembroke Lumber Kings of the Upper Ottawa Valley Hockey League.

“Keeping both eyes on the elusive rubber disk is a decidedly more difficult matter than watching a pitched or thrown ball in baseball,” the Globe explained in 1922 in noting that catcher’s masks weren’t generally up to job that hockey goaltending demanded from them. On that count, nothing had really changed since Eddie Giroux considered a baseball mask 20 years earlier. “He wore it at a couple of practices,” the Globe noted then, “but found it unsatisfactory owing to the difficulty in locating shots from the side.”

If you’ve dug into hockey-mask history, you’ll recognize that as a refrain. Goaltenders who, liked most of us, would rather not have exposed their heads to hurtling puck and errant sticks and skates chose to do so because nobody had invented a mask that would allow them to see well enough continue their puckstopping at the level they were used to.

I don’t know whether we can properly understand the bravery and hardiness of the men who tended the nets in the early NHL, much less the suffering. Hard as it may be to quantify, I’m ready to declare that the 1920s and ’30s were the most damaging era ever for NHL goaltenders. Lester Patrick’s unlikely turn in the New York Rangers’ net during the 1928 Stanley Cup finals came about because his goalie, Lorne Chabot, nearly lost an eye when Nels Stewart of Montreal’s Maroons caught him with a backhand. Chabot was back in net, mask-free, to start the next season.

It’s just possible (if not entirely probable) that in 1929, a year before Clint Benedict debuted his mask, George Hainsworth of the Montreal Canadiens tried one of his own after a teammate’s warm-up shot to the face put him in hospital. The history of goaltenders contused, cut, and concussed in those first decades of the NHL is as grim as it voluminous — and that’s before you get to the part about the frontline goalies, Andy Aitkenhead of the New York Rangers and Canadiens’ Wilf Cude, whose NHL careers seem to have been cut short by what might today be diagnosed as PTSD.

All of which is to say that goalies needed all the help the protection they could get in 1933, which is when this photograph dates to. At 33, John Ross Roach was a cornerstone of Jack Adams’ Detroit Red Wings, and while he was the oldest player in the NHL that year, he wasn’t showing any signs of flagging, having started every one of Detroit’s 48 regular-season games in 1932-33. He was still in his prime when a photographer posed in a mask borrowed from a baseball catcher. The feature that it illustrated does suggest that Roach did experiment with a similar set-up in practice, though he’d never tested it in a game.

Roach’s problem with the catcher’s mask was the same one that Eddie Giroux had encountered 30 years earlier: it obscured a goalie’s sightlines. Playing under the lights in modern rinks only compounded the problem. “The mask creates shadows under artificial lighting that do not exist in sun-lit ball parks,” Jack Carveth’s Detroit Free Press report expounded, “and Roach wants no shadows impairing his vision when fellows like Charlie Conacher, Billy Cook, Howie Morenz or dozens of others are winding up for a drive 10 feet in front of him. Perhaps some day in the not too distant future a mask will be made that will eliminate the shadows. Until such a product arrives, Roach and his fellow workmen between the posts will keep their averages up at the expense of their faces, having the lacerations sewn up and head bumps reduced by the skilled hands of the club physician.”

Detroit took to the ice at the Olympia on the Sunday that Carveth’s article ran. Montreal’s Maroons were in town for an early-season visit (which they ended up losing, 3-1). Other than a second-period brawl involving players and fans and police, the news of the night was what happened just before the fists started flying. Falling to stop a shot from Montreal’s Baldy Northcott, Roach, maskless, was cut in the face by teammate Ebbie Goodfellow’s skate, and probably concussed, too. “His head hit the ice,” Carveth reported, “and he was still dazed after the game was over.” Relieved for the remainder of the game by Abbie Cox, Roach went for stitches: three were needed to close the wound on his upper lip.

The Tuesday that followed this, December 12, is one that lives on in NHL history for the events that unfolded in Boston Garden when Bruins’ defenceman Eddie Shore knocked the Leafs’ Ace Bailey to the ice. The brain injury Bailey suffered that night ended his career and nearly his life.

Roach was back in the nets that very night for Detroit’s 4-1 home win over the Chicago Black Hawks. Any ill effects he was suffering weren’t mentioned in the papers. But two days later, on the Thursday, Roach was injured again when the Red Wings played in Chicago. This time, he fell early in the third period when a shot of Black Hawks’ winger Mush March struck him in his (unprotected) face. Once more, Roach was replaced, this time by defenceman Doug Young. Roach took on further stitches, seven to the lips, five more inside his mouth. “All his teeth were loosened,” the Chicago Tribune noted. He was checked into Garfield Park Hospital and kept there while his teammates caught their train home.

Roach ceded the net to Abbie Cox for Detroit’s next game, the following Sunday, but he was back in the Tuesday after that, shutting out the Americans in New York by a score of 1-0. But while he did finish out the calendar year as the Red Wings starter, playing three more games (losses all), that would be all for Roach that season. Just before the New Year, Detroit GM Jack Adams borrowed the aforementioned, yet unbroken Wilf Cude from Montreal, announcing that Roach was being given two to four weeks to “rest” and recover from his injuries.

No-one was talking about post-concussion syndrome in those years, of course. “He has given his best efforts to the club,” Adams said, “but he has been under strain and his recent injury in Chicago, when seven stitches had to be taken in his face, combined to affect his play.”

By the time Roach was ready to return, Cude was playing so well that Adams didn’t want him, and so the former Red Wing number one ended up the year playing for the IHL Syracuse Stars. Roach did make it back to the NHL for one more turn when, still unmasked, he shared the Red Wings’ net with Normie Smith. Adams would have kept Cude, if he’d been able, but he’d played so well on loan to Detroit that Montreal manager Leo Dandurand called him home to serve as Canadiens’ starting goaltender for the 1934-35 season.

Fashion Forward: Could it be that hockey players might one day actually protect their heads? The case for protection came into stark focus in December of 1933 after Eddie Shore ended Ace Bailey’s career. Modelling football helmets here are (left) centre Russ Blinco of the IHL Windsor Bulldogs and his goaltender, Jakie Forbes. At right, Forbes wears a modified (and just how puck-proof?) baseball mask.

 

of fred: pam coburn talks lionel hitchman, hockey fame, ottawa infamy

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Earning His Stripes: Lionel Hitchman was 21 when he made his NHL debut in early 1923,  quitting his job as an OPP constable to join the (original) Ottawa Senators.

Pam Coburn didn’t know her grandfather well: she was just 12 when he died in December of 1968 at the age of 67. Growing up, she learned that her mother’s father’s legacy is fixed in the annals of hockey history as surely as his name is inscribed on the Stanley Cup that Lionel Hitchman won in 1929 as captain of the Boston Bruins.

Should Hitchman, a truly outstanding defenceman from the NHL’s earliest decades, be in the Hockey Hall of Fame? Probably so. Pursuing the question of why he’s been consistently overlooked, Coburn ended up writing and publishing her grandfather’s biography.

Now in her 60s, Coburn is a former executive director and CEO of Skate Canada who lives south of Ottawa, where she runs her own digital communications firm. Hitch:Hockey’s Unsung Herolaunched in April. If it doesn’t solve the mystery of her grandfather’s omission, it does detail his life and times as it’s never been detailed before, not least in its revelations relating to Hitchman’s many concussions and the tolls that injuries took on him in his later years.

A barber’s son, Frederick Lionel Hitchman was born in Toronto in 1901. Friends and hockey fans knew him as both Fredand Hitch throughout his career, which got going when he signed to play with the (late, lamented, original) Ottawa Senators in 1923, having resigned his day-job as a constable with the Ontario Provincial Police to devote himself to hockey.

He skated for parts of four seasons with the Senators before being sold, in 1925, to the Boston Bruins. His first partner there was Bobby Benson; later he’d pair up with Sprague Cleghorn and, lastingly, Eddie Shore. Ten years he played with the Bruins, through to 1934 when, slowed by injuries, he stepped aside to take up as playing coach for Boston’s farm team, theCubs.

If Hitchman’s name doesn’t now often set the hockey world buzzing, contemporary proofs of his prowess aren’t hard to come by. They confirm that he was, above all, a defender, which may have something to do with why he remains so undersung. The forwards he foiled on the ice never doubted his worth. Toronto Maple Leafs centreman Joe Primeau said Hitchman was the toughest player he ever faced. Frank Boucher of the New York Rangers classed him the best bodychecker he’d ever run into. “You could be carrying the puck in your teeth and Hitch would steal it from you,” sportswriter Jerry Nason recalled in 1946. Hitchman helped make his more prominent partner’s dominance possible. “In spite of Shore’s prestige,” Niven Busch wrote in 1930 in The New Yorker, “[Hitchman] has been voted the Bruins’ most valuable player. Shore doesn’t seem easy in his mind unless Hitchman is on the ice with him.”

Legendary referee Cooper Smeaton was another who took this line. “Always remember,” he said, “that Hitchman was the man back there blocking them when Eddie Shore was doing a lot of the rushing. There was no gamer or greater defensive player in every sense of the word than the same Hitch.”

In August, I e-mailed Pam Coburn a raft of questions about Hitch, her grandfather, and the first time she saw NHL hockey in person. She was good enough to answer.

What was your feeling in June when the Hockey Hall of Fame announced its 2019 inductees without (again) recognizing your grandfather? You say in the book “we are a resilient and optimistic family;” any signs that the message is getting through?

I’m very happy for the four players who made the cut in 2019, especially Hayley Wickenheiser. But it’s always disappointing when the latest class of the Hockey Hall of Fame is revealed, and my grandfather, Hitch, is again not honoured.

The goal of writing the book was to bring his story out from the shadows and to showcase his contribution to hockey. I’ve heard from many who have read the book or know Hitch’s story, and they can’t believe he’s not in the Hockey Hall of Fame.

You talk about three Hall submissions that the family has organized over the years — any plans for formally mounting a fourth?

It’s a strong possibility! Since writing the book, I’ve heard from people like Don Cherry, Brian McFarlane, Eric Zweig, and Dave Stubbs who have all studied or knew about Hitch’s career and have expressed that he belongs in the Hockey Hall of Fame. Plus I’ve heard from many who have read the book, encouraging me to mount another Hall of Fame submission.

The book is, itself, an answer to this question, but in a nutshell, why do you think he’s been overlooked for so long?

I think the Hall has overlooked Hitch because his contribution to hockey isn’t easily summed up with statistics.

On the surface, his offensive numbers are underwhelming, and when Hitch was playing, they didn’t keep defensive stats or have a trophy for best defenceman. Over time, the retelling of his hockey career became diluted. You need to delve into the reports of the 1920s and ’30s to fully understand his contribution to hockey, especially to its professional development in Boston. As Richard Johnson, the curator of the Boston Sports Museum, once told me, “Hitch was a gift to Boston.”

His Back Pages: Hitchman’s Boston scrapbooks reside in the vaults of Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa.

Again, the book lays out his virtues as a player in vivid detail, but if you were writing his citation for the Hall, what might it include?

February 22, 1934, was “Hitchman Night” at the Boston Garden and the Boston Bruins formally retired Hitch’s number 3. It was the first number they retired, the second in pro sports. That night, Bruins’ management, players, and fans also presented a silver plaque to Hitch the “Athlete — Sportsman — Gentleman:” a perfect description of the person he was.

During the 12 seasons that Hitch played in the NHL, he earned the reputation as the “greatest defensive” defenseman and greatest “money-player” of his generation. He was a pioneer of and perfected the poke- and sweep-checks, and delivered the hardest (and cleanest) body checks in the league, making him the toughest defenseman to get by. For 60 years, he held the Boston Bruins record for the most overtime goals by a defenceman.

Hitch broke into the NHL in late February 1923, and with a crucial goal and his crushing checking, helped the Ottawa Senators earn the hardest-fought Stanley Cup championship to that date. The following season, while still with Ottawa, he tied for most assists in the NHL.

After the Boston Bruins acquired him in 1925 during their inaugural season, Art Ross and began building a team around him. In his four seasons as Boston captain, the team accomplished the following:

  • four division titles,
  • two Stanley Cup finals, plus,
  • their first Stanley Cup championship (1929), and,
  • in 1930, they earned the best team winning percentage (.875) in the NHL, which remains a record today.

Also, in 1930, Hitch placed second in Hart Trophy balloting.

As the target of some of the most brutal violence in hockey history, Hitch became a catalyst for improvements in establishing regulations and penalties for fighting, cross-checking, and high-sticking.

After his retirement, Hitch remained with the Bruins organization for another seven years.

He first coached their farm team, the Boston Cubs to a Canadian-American Hockey league final and championship. Later, back with the Bruins as an assistant coach, he helped scout, and develop promising young players who became Stanley Cup champions and, in the case of Milt Schmidt, Woody Dumart, and Bobby Bauer of “Kraut Line” fame, were inducted into the HHOF.

Hitch was the last original Boston Bruin, a cornerstone of Boston’s early success and the pioneer of its rugged style of defence that continues today.

You write about the first NHL game you attended, in 1969, and witnessing the infamous Green/Maki incident was a “horrific introduction” to the professional game. What are your memories of that? How did it influence your view of hockey and the NHL? 

That incident of nearly 50 years ago remains a vivid memory for me. Hitch had died nine months earlier, and my grandmother wanted to do something nice for my 13th birthday. She asked my brother to take me to the Boston/St. Louis exhibition game in Ottawa that fall with the tickets she received from Hitch’s protégé, Milt Schmidt, who was now the Bruins’ GM. I still remember what I wore to the game, as it was going to be a special night, meeting Milt after the game. According to my grandmother, he idolized my grandfather and wanted to let us know this.

We had great seats in the Ottawa Civic Center, just up a few rows at centre ice with an unobstructed view of Wayne Maki’s stick landing on Ted Green’s head. And the sound of the lumber hitting his skull was horrifying. I still get an uneasy feeling just thinking about it. It was awful watching Green writhe in pain as he tried to stand with a strange expression on his face. When he tried to climb the wire mesh at the end of the rink, I began to cry. Even as a kid, I knew his injury was really bad. Then to top it off the entire Boston team cleared the bench and went after Maki. I feared for Maki and all the players that someone else would get as hurt as Green did.

After this incident, I steered away from hockey for a long time, both as a player and a fan. In fact, at the time, I was a strong skater from my figure skating training and was looking to play a team sport, and hockey should have been the logical transition. But I chose basketball instead, partly because the rules didn’t permit body contact. I did teach power skating to hockey players for a time and started playing hockey a bit as an adult, but it was only when the Ottawa Senators came back into the NHL that I became a fan of the sport.

After all your research into your grandfather’s life and times, what was the thing that surprised you most? 

I learned so much about Hitch’s life and times, but the one thing that really sticks out is just how good a hockey player he was and how much his team depended on him.

 Towards the end of the book, you write about “Hitch’s increasing reliance on alcohol to manage the lingering effects of his multiple head and body injuries” and the fact that he was turned down for military service for “his documented multiple concussions.” Was the price he paid for a long and distinguished hockey career ever discussed in your family? Do you think his experience has any bearing or light to shed on hockey’s modern-day concussion crisis? 

 I chronicled Hitch’s hockey career on a micro-level partly to know more about the head injuries I had heard about from my grandmother and parents. I stopped counting at ten. I didn’t even put all of them in the book. Knowing what we know now about the effects of such injuries, his story is indeed a cautionary tale.

Hitch was remarkably talented, excelling at every sport he took up, gifted in music, and wrote poems and literature. He was mild-mannered, generous to a fault, and had a strong sense of right and wrong.

Hitch never lost the traits that made him who he was, but in the late ’30s, he started to lose the ability to concentrate, making it difficult for him to use his talents to their full effect. My grandmother told us that Hitch suffered wicked headaches, was in constant physical pain, and became less dependable over the years. He took to the woods where he was happy and at peace. Hitch had a keen interest in protecting the forests and fortunately found work in the lumber industry as an assayer, which allowed him to spend lots of time there and earn a living. Later he became a forest ranger.

How has the book been received? Has there been particular response from Boston and/or the Bruins? 

I’m delighted with the response to the book. Both the paperback and e-book are widely available online in Canada, the US and overseas and are doing well. For the fall, I’d like to get it into some local Boston bookstores.

The book has received supportive testimonials from hockey historians Brian McFarlane and Eric Zweig. I’ve heard from Don Cherry, who is a big supporter of Hitch, and the Boston Bruins Alumni has been very supportive.

This interview has been condensed and edited. Hitch: Hockey’s Unsung Herois available in bookstores. For further news and advisories, visit pamcoburn.com.

Send Off: Cartoon clipped from a 1934 Boston newspaper on the occasion of Hitchman’s final NHL game.

face facts: the first men in the masks, winter olympics edition

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Face First: Japanese goaltender Teiji Honma at the 1936 Winter Olympics.

Japan made the first of its eight Winter Olympic hockey showings in 1936 at the Garmisch-Partenkirchen Games in Germany. They played twice there, and lost twice, though by respectable margins. After going down 3-0 to the eventual gold medallists from Great Britain on February 7, they fell again the next day, 2-0 to Sweden. That left them in ninth place in the final standings for the 15-team tournament, tied with Poland, France, and Italy. (Japan’s best showing came in 1960 in Squaw Valley, when they ended up eighth.)

Stopping pucks for the Japanese in 1936 was goaltender Teiji Honma, here above, who also garnered attention for his protective facemask. In those years, of course, most goalies headed into the breach bare-faced. Elizabeth Graham did wear a fencing-mask when she tended nets for Queen’s University in the mid-1920s. A decade before her, Corinne Hardman of Montreal’s Western Ladies Hockey Club donned a baseball catcher’s cage. And Eric Zweig has written persuasively about an even earlier masking, in 1903, by Eddie Giroux of the Toronto’s OHA Marlboros.

In the NHL, Clint Benedict was first (famously) to don a mask in 1930 — unless George Hainsworth beat him to it. (Probably not.)

And at the Olympics? As far as I can determine, Frank Farrell set the precedent in 1932 when he backstopped the host team from the United States at Lake Placid. A Connecticut native, he was 23 when he got the U.S. job after proving himself playing for Yale and New York’s amateur St. Nicholas HC. Like Honma, he wore glasses and hoped, apparently, to protect them from pucks. The crude mask Farrell wore at Lake Placid is (not so clearly) visible in the U.S. team photo below.

In Lake Placid, Ralph Allen from The Winnipeg Tribune singled Farrell out for his communication skills. “Should have been a quarterback,” he wrote. “His leather-lunged method of delivering instructions to his mates would make any gridiron field general turn green with envy.”

Representing Canada on the ice, the Winnipegs came highly touted, but the U.S. gave them a run for their (slightly complacent) money. In the tournament’s opening game, “there was” (said the AP) “scarcely anything to choose” between the two teams. They were tied 1-1 going into overtime. It as Canadian forward Vic Lindquist who decided it, halfway through the non-sudden-death period, with a “blistering” shot.

Both Canada and the U.S. dispensed, and handily, with the other two teams in the tournament, Poland and Germany, and when two teams met again nine days later, the Canadians sat atop the standing two points ahead of the U.S. With a win, the hosts could force a playoff game that would decide the Olympic title; Canada could claim the gold with a tie.

The U.S. looked the stronger team for much of the game, taking the lead two minutes in. Hack Simpson tied the score for Canada before the U.S. scored again in the second on a two-man advantage. Canada left it late to reply: with just 33 seconds remaining in the third, Romeo Rivers snagged the puck and scored with what the Montreal’s Gazette saw as “a snipe shot.” He “stickhandled his way into position and rifled a smoking drive into the far top corner of the United States goal for a beautiful marker.”

The AP correspondent wasn’t quite so impressed, it might be noted. Rivers “let fly a hurried shot from near the boards at the blue line and the curving puck slipped past Goalie Frank Farrell for the tying goal:” that’s what he saw. Yet another (American) account told of “a crazily bounding disc that rolled past Goalie Frank Farrell.”

Thirty minutes of overtime saw no more goals. “With the fat thus pulled out of the fire,” advised the AP, “the Canadians set themselves to repel a series of fierce charges by the determined challengers.” It was good enough for gold, in the end, even if it wasn’t always so pretty. “So tired they could hardly skate,” the Gazette conceded, “the [sic] Winnipegers flung the puck to the other end of the rink whenever they got a chance toward the end of the game.”

Embed from Getty Images

Front row, kneeling, from left to right: Frank Farrell and his mask, Jack Bent, Buzz Hollock, John Cookman, Doug Everett, Ty Anderson, and Ted Frazier. Standing: Coach Ralph Winsor, Ding Palmer, John Chase, Bob Livingston, Frank Nelson, John Garrison, Gordon Smith, Joe Fitzgerald, manager C.J. Gleason, and Tom Murray.

my first hockey game: eric zweig

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Eric Zweig’s expertise in matters concerning hockey history is shared out, along with his enthusiasm, through a score of books. His first was a novel, Hockey Night in the Dominion of Canada (1992), about the Renfrew Millionaires. In recent years he’s published a deep-delving biography, Art Ross: The Hockey Legend Who Built the Bruins (2015), and, this fall, the comprehensive Toronto Maple Leafs: The Complete Oral History.

 Zweig, who lives in Owen Sound, Ontario, is a member of the Society for International Hockey Research, and has been one of the editorial forces helping to shape the NHL’s Official Guide & Record Book. You can find his work in the pages of The New York Times and elsewhere, as well as on his lively blog at http://www.ericzweig.com. Today, as part of Puckstruck’s ongoing series, he weighs in with memories of his earliest first-hand encounters of big-league hockey.  

I grew up in Toronto and attended my first NHL game when I was seven years old. The date was December 30, 1970. It was a Wednesday night during the Christmas holidays. The Maple Leafs always seemed to play at home on Wednesdays and Saturdays when I was a kid. This night, they were playing the California Golden Seals. The Leafs won 3–1.

I’m sure it’s no coincidence that all the players who would become my early favourites did something good for the Leaf that night. Dave Keon scored just 33 seconds after the opening face-off. Garry Monahan (he autographed my cast when I broke my arm in the summer of 1973) got the second. Norm Ullman set up Paul Henderson for the third. But goalie Jacques Plante became my favourite of them all. The Toronto Star reported that the Leafs’ goalie was “excellent” that night. “Plante had his moments…” said the Star, “and the youngsters in attendance because of the school holidays rocked the Gardens with their applause.”

I was one of those youngsters!

Author and historian Eric Zweig shows off a famous wrench. Hurled (the wrench) at Toronto GM Charlie Querrie in the early ’20s, it was later fitted with a clock and given as a gift to Boston’s Art Ross.

Now, I’ve always been a person with a great memory for places and dates (though, sadly, that’s not quite as true as it used to be on the other side of 50). That being said, I have realized over the years that I don’t actually have a great memory for visual details. All I really remember about that first game was the score, the teams, and the fact that Plante played so well. (Also, the troughs for urinals in the men’s washroom. Gross!) I had to look up the rest. Even so, I would have to say that, before that game, I have no memories of hockey whatsoever. Since that game, I have been a lifelong fan.

I wish I could remember more from that night, but really, I was lucky enough to attend many games in Maple Leaf Gardens over the years (Leafs, Marlies, Toros) and most of those from my younger days blur together. I’m pretty sure the next Leafs game I attended was December 26, 1973. Another Wednesday night during the Christmas holidays: Toronto beat Montreal 9-2. I was there with my brother, David, who had turned eight the day before. I was 10. We went together, by ourselves, on the subway. Imagine anyone letting children do something like that today.

It was Norm Ullman’s birthday, and David and I carried a homemade sign that read “Leafs Win For Norm” using a team logo for “Leafs” and the number 4 for “For.” I remember the older kids who sat next to us saying that would have been a lot smarter of us if Ullman wore #4 instead of #9 … but that didn’t stop them from leaning in and trying to get on television every time we held up our sign.

My other memories from that night include just how amazed we were to see the Leafs score nine goals and so thoroughly dominate the Canadiens. I also remember a fantastic save by Doug Favell (I always liked the goalies) and the fact that rookie Bob Neely played a very strong game. I have no idea why that stands out. (Looking up this one, I find that Ullman had an assist on the goal Neely scored. Maybe that has something to do with it?)

Among my most vivid memories over the years was seeing Gordie Howe in the stands at a Marlies game during the 1972-73 season. He was watching his sons, Mark and Marty. Two years later, I saw all three Howes at the Gardens again, this time playing together for the Houston Aeros against the Toronto Toros. But one thing that lingers most strongly in my memories of Maple Leaf Gardens has nothing to do with the action on the ice. It’s of an ancient-looking woman working in the concession stands using her bare hands to place a hot dog I’d ordered into a bun. It was a long time before I ate a hot dog at the Gardens after that.

 

 

(Ullman: hockeyMedia & The Want List on flickr; Zweig: Stephen Smith)

 

curb appeal: the 1924 stanley cup by the side of the côte

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Roadside Attraction: The Stanley Cup, circa 1930, was all grown up compared to the one that Sprague Cleghorn left by the side of the road six years earlier. The band that Léo Dandurand added to commemorate his ’24 champions is the bottom one. (Image: Archives de la Ville de Montréal, VM6, D1980-33-11-002)

After months of lay-off, the Stanley Cup reported back to work a week ago Sunday night. The routine wasn’t a whole lot different from last year, though the scene was Nashville this time instead of San Jose: up went the Cup, one more time, over Sidney Crosby’s happy head, as the Pittsburgh Penguins once more started off a summer’s-long celebration that will see members of the team show off hockey’s sacred silverware around the world while also taking time to fill it with cereal, champagne, and babies.

In September, the Cup goes to Montreal to meet with Louise St. Jacques. She’s the engraver whose solemn duty it is to hammer in new names next to older. As Ken Campbell noted recently in The Hockey News, some of those senior names will depart the Cup before next spring’s Cup presentation. In order to make room for future winners, as happens every 13 years, the topmost band of the five that encircle the base of the Cup will be removed to a display at the Hockey Hall of Fame and replaced by a fresh blank.

It’s in this and other ways that the Cup has grown in physical stature since Lord Stanley donated the original bowl in 1892, shifting its shape through the years. The names of early winning teams were sometimes etched on the Cup, though sometimes they weren’t. The first NHL team to claim the Cup — Toronto, in 1918 — went unengraved at the time, as did the Ottawa Senators (champions in 1920, ’21, and ’23) and the Toronto St. Patricks (1922).

Léo Dandurand changed that. In 1924, his Montreal Canadiens won the Stanley Cup for the second time in their brightening history. The following season, the coach and manager would add a globe to the team’s sweaters, reflecting their worldly hockey dominance. The Cup itself — one writer described it at that time as “a tureen resting on an ebony base” — Dandurand decided to annotate. As a result, to accommodate with the names of Canadiens’ players and members of management, the Cup gained a new band.

Global Express: A season after they’d won their Cup, wearing new sweaters to reflect their worldly excellence, Canadiens repeated as NHL champions before falling to the Victoria Cougars in the ’25 Stanley Cup finals. The squad included: Sylvio Mantha, Billy Boucher, Howie Morenz, Aurèle Joliat, Georges Vézina, Odie Cleghorn, Sprague Cleghorn, Fern Headley, Billy Coutu, Johnny Matz, and Léo Dandurand.

All of which winds us around to another feat with which Dandurand maintains a close association: ditching the Stanley Cup, if only briefly, by the side of a midtown Montreal street.

Eric Zweig was writing about this incident a little while ago in The New York Times — that’s what prompted all this, fore and aft. Stories involving indignities visited upon the various editions of the Cup over the years aren’t hard to come by, many involving drunken behaviour, others defecation. Zweig turned his focus on two of the best-known and most-repeated tales, staples both of hockey lore, in an effort to determine whether there might be any truth in them.

The first involves members of Ottawa’s Silver Seven, in 1905 (or maybe ’06?) punting the venerable Cup across (though possibly into) the capital’s Rideau Canal. Zweig’s conclusion, having weighed the available evidence: never happened.

The second Cup tale concerns Dandurand’s 1924 Canadiens. As Zweig details, the central source for this one is The Hockey Book, Bill Roche’s rich 1953 anthology of anecdotes, wherein Dandurand narrates the story himself. It’s a short and sweet and fairly straightforward account. The pertinent passage:

Georges Vézina, Sprague Cleghorn, Sylvio Mantha and I, got into a model T Ford to make the trip. The little lizzy stalled going up Côte St. Antoine Road in Westmount, and we all got out to push.

Cleghorn, who had been jealously carrying the hard-won Stanley Cup in his lap, deposited it on the curb at the roadside before he joined us in shoving the car up the hill. When we reached the top, we hopped back into the car and resumed our hockey chatter as we got going again.

Upon reaching my house, we all started in on a big bowl of punch which my wife had prepared. It wasn’t until she asked, “Well … where is this Stanley Cup you’ve been talking about?” that we realized that Cleghorn had left it on the side of the road.

Sprague and I drove hurriedly back to the spot almost an hour after we had pushed the car up the hill. There was the Cup, in all its shining majesty, still sitting on the curb of the busy street.

Zweig’s verdict on this one: probably true. Sprague Cleghorn himself is said to have vouched for its veracity. I’ll add a vote of confidence here, too, based on a further Dandurand account that adds further weight to the case, along with some finer — and occasionally divergent — detail.

•••

As is often the case in the canon of popular hockey lore, the original anecdote hasn’t quite kept its original shape through the years of repetition. Roche’s Hockey Book has the car stalling, and subsequent accounts (Stan Fischler’s 1970 book Strange But True Hockey Stories) stick to that. Elsewhere the version you’ll find is the one in Andrew Podnieks’ Lord Stanley’s Cup from 2004: it was a flat tire that waylaid Dandurand’s party, “and while they changed wheels they placed the Cup by the side of the road.” Other variations (see Brian McFarlane’s 2015 Golden Oldies) separate Cleghorn and Dandurand, with the former arriving chez latter sans Cup, whereupon the coach “ordered Sprague and his pals to go back and retrieve the trophy.”

Cup To The Curb: The 1924 anecdote is a familiar one in hockey folklore. Above, a Bill Reid illustration adorning Brian McFarlane’s Peter Puck and the Stolen Stanley Cup (1980).

We’ll get to the testimony back up Dandurand’s Hockey Book account — first, a pinch of background:

Dandurand bought the Canadiens in 1921, paying $11,000 with partners Joe Cattarinich and Louis Letourneau. Installed as managing director, Dandurand stepped in to guide the team from the bench that season after a dispute with his playing coach and team captain, Newsy Lalonde. Dandurand keep on with the coaching for another four seasons, none of which saw his Canadiens succeed as they did in the spring of 1924. That was the was the year they overcome Ottawa’s Senators to claim the NHL championship, Montreal then went on to beat the PCHA Vancouver Maroons for the right to play the WCHL’s Calgary Tigers for the Stanley Cup.

Montreal’s championship team featured Georges Vézina in goal and a defence anchored by Sprague Cleghorn and Sylvio Mantha. Up front: Joe Malone, Aurèle Joliat, Billy Boucher, and a promising rookie by the name of Howie Morenz. Calgary had Red Dutton and Herb Gardiner manning the defence, and Harry Oliver and Eddie Oatman at forward.

Montreal won the first game of the best-of-three series on home ice at the Mount Royal Arena in late March. Bad ice sent the teams to Ottawa’s Auditorium for the second game, where Canadiens prevailed again. That was on March 25, a Tuesday. They had to wait until the following Monday to lay hands on the actual Cup, when trustee William Foran made the presentation back in Montreal, at a Windsor Hotel banquet, April 1, organized by a committee of prominent Canadiens supporters.

Artist’s Impression: A La Patrie illustration highlighting distinguished guests — including, top, Dandurand and his Canadiens — at the Windsor Hotel banquet.

A crowd of 450 was on hand, with all the Canadiens ensconced at the head table, except for Vézina, who was back home in Chicoutimi. The goaltender did send along a humorous greeting, which was read aloud, along with congratulatory telegrams from Governor-General Lord Byng of Vimy as well as, also, a concatenation of Canadiens’ fans in Grimsby, Ontario, where Montreal trained in the pre-season in those years.

There were toasts: to King George V, to the Canadiens, and to the NHL, as well as to “visitors” and the press.

Gifts were given, too: the team’s 11 players as well as trainer Ed Dufour received engraved gold watches. Dandurand got luggage: what the Montreal Gazette described as “a handsome travelling bag.”

When the time came for Dandurand to address the gathering, he started in French. In English, he said, “I am proud of the bulldog courage and tenacity which our English brothers revere so much and which our players exhibited so frequently throughout the season, no matter what the odds were against them. No matter what was said or done, it was understood that our players should go through the games like good, game sportsmen.”

College Fête: On a Thursday night in April of 1924, Canadiens and their newly own Stanley were head-table guests at a University of Montreal gala at the Monument National.

Thursday there was a further tribute, at a gala University of Montreal event at the Monument National theatre on Saint Laurent Boulevard. On a night on which U of M undergraduates were celebrating a season of sporting successes by some of their own accomplished fellows, the Canadiens once again occupied the head table. They got a cheer from the crowd of 1,500, of course, and more gifts: fountain pens and engraved gold pencils, by one account. Among the student athletes honoured were Leo “Kid” Roy, newly crowned Canadian featherweight boxing champion, and Germain McAvoy, who’d recently matched the national indoor record for dashing 60 yards.

After supper, the program included a display of fencing; three wrestling matches; and no fewer than eight bouts between boxers. There were musical performances, too, by the university orchestra and a jazz sextet.

And a repeat of the Cup presentation: the honorary president of the U of M’s Athletic Association, Dr. Edouard Montpetit, handed it to the Hon. Athanase David, Quebec’s provincial secretary who also served as Canadiens president. Amid (the Gazette) “mighty applause and cheering of the students,” David in turn passed it on to Dandurand.

The latter mentions this event in his 1953 Hockey Book account. “It is the only time in history,” he writes there, “that a professional hockey club has been so honoured by a major seat of learning.” He then proceeds to describe the fateful forgetting of the Cup.

Here’s where we can expand what we know of the waylaid Cup by just a bit. A year before the Hockey Book appeared, Dandurand told the story elsewhere in print. Because Rosaire Barratte’s biography, Léo Dandurand: Sportsman (1952), seems only ever to have been published in French, this somewhat more detailed version isn’t one that’s been widely disseminated. It is broadly similar, though it does include a few key variations.

Dandurand relates (again) that, following the U of M soirée, he and his wife, Emélia, were hosting a late-evening buffet for Canadiens players and management at their house, which, we learn, was in the west-end Montreal neighbourhood of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. A little more digging turns up the address: 3801 Avenue Northcliffe.

Dandurand was among the last to leave the Monument National, Barrette writes (in French; the translation is mine, Google-aided), “for he had to take home the Stanley Cup.”

So our happy companion jumped into Jos Cardinal’s car, an ancient model-T Ford with three seats, into which Sprague Cleghorn and Georges Vézina also climbed. Everything went well until the Côte-Saint-Antoine, where the old wreck [“bazou”] refused to climb the slope. Jos Cardinal begged his companions to get out of the car.

Cardinal was a Montreal theatre impresario, and a friend (we’ll assume) of Dandurand’s. No mention here of Sylvio Mantha — and no room for him in the car, either. Vézina could presumably returned from Chicoutimi for this second Cup event, and indeed the Gazette account of the U of M event speaks of the players “attending in body.” Although — hmm — other French-language dispatches make specific mention of Vézina’s absence from the banquet. So maybe Mantha was aboard?

But back to Jos Cardinal. “My car can go up backwards,” Barrette has him telling his passengers. “Meet me at the top.” That’s not how it went in The Hockey Book: all got out to push there, “shoving the car up the hill.”

The Barrette narrative continues:

Léo, Sprague and Georges did as they were asked. On the pavement, Cleghorn put down the Stanley Cup at the foot of a streetlamp, and the three of them lit cigarettes. When Cardinal called them, after having accomplished his tour de force, our friends hurried up and took their places in the vehicle. But they forgot the famous trophy on the Côte-Saint-Antoine.

This is not a neighbourhood I know myself. Spying in with Google’s help doesn’t really clarify anything. This weekend, I happened to be visiting Montreal with my son Zac, so on a Sunday morning that had already started to swelter, we drove along Sherbrooke Ouest, as the Stanley Cup might have on a spring night 93 years ago. I was telling Zac the story as we turned onto Avenue Argyle, which you have to do to get to Chemin de la Côte-Saint-Antoine, taking the first left by the Westmount Hôtel de Ville.

Past Metcalfe, past Mount Stephen. The road starts to rise. The steepest stretch gets going just past Strathcona. It doesn’t last long: the serious part of the hill tops out at Arlington. This is guesswork, but I’m willing to take a stand here and now and declare that if Dandurand and Cleghorn did forsake the Cup one night in April of 1924, it was here.

I pulled over and parked. The leafy green expanse of King George Park is on the right and then there’s a stone wall that starts. A few paces up the hill and the wall opens to the house at 331. There’s a streetlamp there. Does it date back (almost) a century? I don’t know. It looks … elderly. As I told Zac, given what’s documented, I’m nominating it as the one whereby Jos Cardinal’s Model-T faltered and everybody bailed out and Sprague Cleghorn laid down the Stanley Cup. I took a bunch of photographs while Zac, to be funny, photographed me.

Site Visit: The hill on the Chemin de la Côte-Saint-Antoine, as it looks today. On the right is the streetlamp where (best guess) Sprague Cleghorn forgot the Stanley Cup in 1924.

Northcliffe isn’t far, a four-minute drive on a modern-day Sunday in June. I don’t know if the modest two-story semi-detached house at 3801 is the same one that the Dandurands occupied before they moved in 1940 to a mansion in Beaconsfield — it could be a later replacement.

Back to 1924, and back to Barrette: Madame Dandurand had prepared a punch. With her husband and his companions arriving from their gala supper, the hostess wanted (naturally enough) to be serving her brew from the Stanley Cup.

Which, of course, wasn’t there. Dandurand froze.

O wonder! O calamity! The magnate believed that his heart was caught between a hammer and an anvil. He came out of the house like a whirlwind and hailed a taxi that broke all speed records. Léo devoted himself to all the divinities and made all promises imaginable to good Saint Anthony.

Can the celestial joys be compared to that which the terrified manager experienced when he found the treasure at the same place or Sprague Cleghorn had left it?

•••

“Léo Dandurand wasn’t above stretching the truth,” Eric Zweig wrote in the Times, citing the myth he crafted concerning the score of children Georges Vézina was supposed to have fathered. Still, Zweig says, his 1924 Stanley Cup mostly holds up. Rosaire Barratte’s account only adds ballast to that conclusion.

It doesn’t, of course, answer all the questions it raises. There was a taxi cruising Northcliffe late on a Thursday night?

A further clockly note might be in order here, too. In The Hockey Book, Dandurand writes that the Cup was stranded for “almost an hour.” With the evening’s slate of gala events starting at 8 p.m., the proceedings can’t have wrapped much before midnight, can they? (I’m assuming that the team and its trophy stayed until the end.) The journey to and through Westmount would have taken a little time, followed by the delay before the rescue. If that’s the case, is it fair to suppose that events in question unfolded in/around/after 1 a.m.? A nocturnal setting doesn’t forgive the forgetfulness; the context of the whole episode taking place on a slumbering residential street does, however, slightly undercut the end of Dandurand’s English account in which he refers to retrieving the Cup from “the curb of the busy street.”

Whatever the hour, there’s no doubting Dandurand’s relief. With the Cup safe, he took home a bright anecdote. Many years later, he wondered how, if things had turned out differently, how he would have explained the disappearance of “a trophy that has no price and which represents the most important emblem of the universe!” The evening’s events remained, he told Barrette, a “hallucinatory adventure.”

“There was surely,” he firmly felt, “a little Infant Jesus of Prague who protected me, as always!”

you naturally hope it can turn things around: a field guide to hiring and firing boston coaches

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Rodden + Patrick 1935 Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Boards Meeting: Boston coach Frank Patrick, at his command post on the Bruin bench, confers with referee Mike Rodden at the Garden, c. 1935. This was still a time before coaches patrolled behind the bench and their players; mostly, they sat alongside them. (Image: Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

Claude Julien lost his job as coach of the Boston Bruins on Tuesday. GM Don Sweeney announced the news at 8 a.m. in a written statement, and then followed that with a press conference a few hours later. Whether or not they agreed with the decision to dump the coach, many Boston fans and commentators found the whole business distasteful if not outright insulting to the city and all it stands for: the New England Patriots, after all, were parading in Boston that very day to celebrate Sunday’s Super Bowl victory.

Sweeney, as you would, looked like he’d rather be anywhere else, in any historical period. He apologized for the poor timing, tried to explain. He wanted to give the new, interim coach — 51-year-old Bruce Cassidy, who’d been aiding Julien as an assistant — hoped to give him a chance to practice with the players before they had to play a game.

“So we have a real opportunity,” Sweeney said, “to sort of step back from the emotional piece of this, and allow our players to get away and vacate it mentally and physically. I thought it was a good opportunity, today and tomorrow, to get their feet on the ground in a practice environment, which we haven’t had playing 50 games in 102 days. The schedule has been challenging in that regard.”

Julien, who’s 56, started in Boston in 2007. That made him (up to the minute of his dismissal) the longest serving of NHL coaches. He departed the Boston bench as one of game’s most respected benchers, having steered the club to a Stanley Cup championship in 2011, the first for the Bruins since 1972. No coach has won more Cups than that in the team’s 93-year-history. Julien also coached the team through more games than anyone else, including the legendary Art Ross, while chalking up the most wins. Graded by winning percentage (regular season + playoffs), his .555 falls back of Tom Johnson (.670) and Cooney Weiland (.602).

Cassidy has two wins, so far, to his name, and a perfect percentage: the Bruins followed up Thursday’s 6-3 victory over San Jose with a 4-3 decision this afternoon versus Vancouver.

While he relishes those, maybe what we’d better do is review the hirings and firings of Cassidy’s 27 forebears on the Bruins’ bench, starting back when the Bruins started, in 1924. Art Ross came first, of course, serving as Boston’s everything in those early years of the club, stocking the roster, forging an identity, and coaching the team through its first 461 games, which yielded one Stanley Cup (1929).

That gets us to the spring of 1934. The Bruins had finished at the bottom of the American Division, out of the playoffs. “I am leaving for Montreal on the 8.45 o’clock train tonight,” Ross told Victor Jones of The Boston Globe a couple days after the team played their final game. “I shall do some scouting during my absence and I may take in part of the Stanley Cup series. And before long I shall engage a coach for the Bruins.”

After ten years at the helm, he was looking to focus his energy. He was 49 and he’d been ill with intestinal trouble. Candidates were said to include Lionel Hitchman, Eddie Powers, Cecil Hart, and Tommy Gorman — maybe Nels Stewart? In the end Ross hired Frank Patrick, also 49, a good friend who’d been working as the NHL’s managing director.

“In my opinion,” Ross said, “he is the best coach in the game today. He should bring Boston a winning team.”

The Bruins did win under Patrick, though they didn’t manage a championship in the two seasons he was in charge. Eric Zweig’s 2015 biography Art Ross: The Hockey Legend Who Built The Bruins is a good guide to Patrick’s exit in 1936. Ross thought that Patrick was too friendly with players and referees, plus he was drinking too much, and the two men had stopped talking.

Frank’s son Joe Jr. told Eric Whitehead alcohol was a problem, but so was Ross’ reluctance to give his coach autonomy. “Art simply couldn’t or wouldn’t let go of the reins,” Joe Jr. says in Whitehead’s The Patricks (1980), “and my father couldn’t abide that.”

Patrick wasn’t fired, exactly: he just wasn’t, in newspaper parlance from the time, “re-engaged.” Former Bruins’ captain Lionel Hitchman was coaching the team’s minor-league affiliate, the Boston Cubs, and he was once again mentioned as a possible successor. Asked whether star defenceman Eddie Shore might take on coaching the team from the blueline, Ross was non-committal.

“Personally I do not think it would be a wise move,” he said. “In the first place, hockey is too tough a game for a playing manager and in the second, Eddie is much too valuable a player to ruin him by loading so much responsibility on his shoulders. A defenceman these days has all he can do watching opposing forwards without having to keep an eye on his own.”

So Ross returned. He stayed on through to 1939, when he decided for a second time that he’d had enough.

“I can’t go through this any more,” he said this time. “For some time I’ve thought I ought to get off the bench. Lester Patrick of the Rangers and I are about the only men in the NHL who have tried to combine front-office work and bench managing for so many years. He told me after the Bruins-Rangers series that he couldn’t stand it any more, and I know I can’t.”

ross-cooney-version-2

He ceded the coaching to Cooney Weiland, the newly retired erstwhile captain of the Bruins who’d spent the last year of his NHL career as Ross’ playing assistant. Under Weiland, the Bruins prospered, and in his second year, 1940-41, they won a Stanley Cup — whereupon the coach left the champions to take over the AHL Hershey Bears.

Eric Zweig suggests another feud. In a chapter of his book in which he looks into Ross’ fallings-out with Eddie Shore, Bill Cowley, and Herb Cain (not to mention his blood-grudge with Conn Smythe), he concludes that Ross wouldn’t, couldn’t — didn’t — let his coach coach.

Again Ross was ready to get back to doing it for himself. He stayed on this time through 1945. “I’m through,” he declared that spring. “I’ll never sit on the bench again.” Another of his faithful captains had been acting as a playing assistant, 38-year-old Dit Clapper, who was now ready to retire.

Or maybe be retired. “We want Dit to quit before he is seriously hurt,” Ross said. Clapper himself wasn’t entirely sure he was through as a player. Not long before hewas appointed, he’d been telling Harold Kaese of The Boston Globe that he’d “hate to do nothing but sit on the bench.” And, true enough, he did continue to play for the first couple of years he coached, if mainly on spot duty, replacing injured players in the line-up.

Something else Kaese reported: “The manager said he liked Clapper as a coach because he was willing to take his advice, which other Bruins coaches (Frank Patrick and Cooney Weiland) were not.”

Clapper coached on through the 1948-49 season. At the team’s annual season-ending banquet,  owner Weston Adams stood up and quieted the crowd. “I’m sorry that I have to make the saddest announcement of my career,” he said. “Just this noon I learned that Dit will not be with us another year.”

Clapper, who was 42, was headed for home. His wife hadn’t been well, and he had a teenaged son and daughter, along with (as Ross, once, had had, in Montreal) a thriving sporting goods store. “My family and my business in Peterborough, Ontario, now demand all my attention,” he told the room.

Art Ross was overcome with emotion. As for the players, they had a gift to give: a hunting rifle.

“Being a coach is a pretty tough job,” Clapper said, “particularly for an old player. To be a really good coach you have to drive the guys. I just couldn’t do that. All these boys were really my friends.”

I don’t suppose anyone would have batted an eye if Art Ross, now 64, had returned one more time to the Boston bench. He didn’t, though.

“We wanted a man who didn’t know our players at all,” Bruins’ president Weston Adams advised in 1949 when he hired 52-year-old George (Buck) Boucher, famous Frank’s older brother. “Everybody now starts from scratch. They’ve got to make the team. It’s up to Buck to select the men he wants. I don’t think we will have to make apologies for next year’s Bruins.”

Art Ross was on the same page. “Yeah,” he said. “We were looking for a two-fisted guy and got one. He won’t be a yes man to me.”

When the Bruins let him go a year later, Boucher was surprised. He called it a “dirty deal.” Ross let him know as the team travelled to Toronto for the final regular-season game of the season. “It was a blow, and made it a rough ride,” Boucher said. “I had rather expected it but it was tough to take. Art Ross told me I’d done a good job, but the club had other plans for next season. I asked him, ‘If I’ve done such a good job, why am I being fired? I think I deserve another chance.’ And he told me, ‘We have other plans.’”

Art Ross had his side of the story to tell. He was up in Canada, acting as league supervisor for the Stanley Cup playoffs, but made a special trip home to Boston to clarify things for reporters.

“We haven’t lied to you people in 26 years,” he told them at a press conference where he sat alongside team president Weston Adams and a director named Frank Ryan.

Ross reminded everybody what good friends he and Boucher were. They’d discussed finding another coaching job for him. “We could have paid him off for the season — we all know his contract was for one year — several times after some mistakes, but we didn’t.”

Ross addressed charges that upper management had interfered with Boucher through the course of the season. “Regardless of what has been written or said by anyone, it’s not true that any of us interfered at any time with Boucher,” he said. “I called him on the phone once in the season during the course of a game and that was to tell him one of several kids we had brought up for a look was sick and maybe should not play any more.”

“I also suggested — only suggested mind you — perhaps the kids should be changed more often in the third period or we might get licked. We had a three-goal lead at the time. Well, we lost the game. But that’s the only time he was ever told anything by either of us at any time during a game, immediately before or immediately after.”

Boston’s players were sorry to see Boucher go. They presented him with “a powerful short wave radio.”

“This was no sympathy act,” said captain Milt Schmidt. “We planned this some weeks ago as a gift to a swell guy.”

Bun Cook would be the next coach. That was the word. Or Joe Primeau? But no. Instead, Ross lured 38-year-old Lynn Patrick in from the wilds of Victoria, British Columbia. Lester’s son, he’d coached the Rangers for one successful year then quit. He preferred, he’d said then, “to rear my family in some place other than a big city.”

Suburban Boston would work, too. “This is the kind of an opportunity I’ve been hoping and searching for,” Patrick said. “I’m ambitious to get ahead in hockey and don’t want to be a coach all my life.” And so a succession plan was in place: after two years of coaching, Patrick would ascend to replace a retiring Ross as general manager.

That didn’t go quite as planned. Ross kept going through the spring of 1954, announcing his retirement, in the Bruin way, at the team’s annual end-of-year banquet. Under the new plan, Patrick would take on the role of general manager while continuing to coach for one more year. By then, captain Milt Schmidt would be ready to retire and, in the Bruin way, turn himself into the coach.

Bench Bruin: Coach Milt Schmidt, as he was when he finally hung up his playing gear, guided Boston through 11 seasons, from 1954 through to 1966. He later steered the Washington Capitals, from 1974-76.

Bench Bruin: Coach Milt Schmidt, as he was when he finally hung up his playing gear, guided Boston through 11 seasons, from 1954 through to 1966. He later steered the Washington Capitals, from 1974-76.

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first among veterans: chick webster, new york ranger

/ puckstruck / 2 Comments
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Nick Knack: Chick Webster poses with New York Ranger teammates just before Christmas in 1949. That’s him standing second from left. Others pictured include Tony Leswick (to Webster’s right) and Pat Egan, to his left; Wally Stanowski (standing fifth from left); and captain Buddy O’Connor. Suited up as Santa is erstwhile Ranger Phil Watson, whose non-festive job had him coaching the EHL’s New York Rovers.

The Boston Bruins honoured their late captain, coach, and GM Milt Schmidt this week with a video tribute ahead of Thursday’s meeting with the Edmonton Oilers. On their sweaters, Bruin players wore a patch blazed with Schmidt’s 15 to commemorate the man they call the Ultimate Bruin.

With Schmidt’s death on Wednesday at the age of 98, the oldest living NHLer is Chick Webster, who’s 96. He lives in Mattawa, Ontario. If his hockey CV is 848 NHL games shorter than Schmidt’s and also lacks its Stanley Cups, it’s long and varied and entirely commendable in its own right. Born John Webster in Toronto in 1920, his NHL career spanned all of 14 games, all of which he played with the New York Rangers during the 1949-50 season.

On Friday, I exchanged e-mails with Rob Webster, Chick Webster’s son. He’d just spent the afternoon visiting his dad who, he said, had been saddened to hear about Schmidt. Never one to seek attention, he’s been taking this week’s sudden burst of interest in his brief stint in the NHL in stride.

“As far as his career goes,” Rob Webster wrote, “I think he just never really got the breaks at the right time.” Chick Webster was in his early 20s as the Second World War was metastasizing and just as his hockey career was getting going, he joined the Canadian Army. He had no regrets there, his son says. “He wanted to go. Not skating much for over two years was hard … so I guess still making it to the NHL original six was somewhat of a nice goal to achieve.”

As a teenager, Webster senior played for teams in Toronto called the Stockyard Packers and (as an OHA junior, with Baldy Cotton as his coach) the Native Sons. He wasn’t big, 5’11”, 160 pounds, but he was a good skater and a proficient playmaker.

As a 19-year-old in the fall of 1940, he took his trade to the Boston Bruins’ training camp in Hershey, Pennsylvania. That’s where he skated on a line, for as long as it lasted, with one of the team’s young veterans: Milt Schmidt. Webster told didn’t make the cut, but The Boston Daily Globe noted that he was a “simon pure” (i.e. amateur) coveted by all six NHL clubs. He played the year with the Baltimore Orioles of the Eastern Amateur Hockey League, leading the team in scoring. (Update: having talked to Chick Webster himself this week for a piece in The Hockey News, Eric Zweig reports that at one of Webster’s Bruin camps, he took Kraut duty, centring Bobby Bauer and Woody Dumart when Schmidt went down with an ankle injury. I recommend Eric’s full account of Webster’s career , which is here.)

Like Schmidt and many other hockey players during, Chick Webster decided he had another job he’d better do. Enlisting in the Canadian Army, he ended up skating for the Army’s Petawawa Grenades before shipping out for deployment overseas. Serving with the 13th Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artlliery, he saw duty in England, France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany before the war’s end.

Chick Webster, Ranger winger

Chick Webster, Ranger winger

Back in hockey, he returned to the EAHL before graduating to the AHL’s New Haven Ramblers. It was from there that he launched into the NHL, called up by the New York Rangers in December of 1949. Coached by Lynn Patrick, the Rangers were up with Detroit and Montreal at the top of the league standings. Edgar Laprade and Buddy O’Conner featured bright among the team’s forwards that year, and Fred Shero was on the defence. In goal, Chuck Rayner was backed up by Emile Francis.

Webster played his first game in Boston, helping the Rangers to beat Schmidt’s own Bruins 3-1 in a game distinguished by … well, no, according a local report, the game was as undistinguished as they come, “sluggish,” “sleepy,” “boring:” all in all, “one of the dullest exhibitions of hockey played on Garden ice in quite a spell.”

Christmas Day, in Toronto, he left a game against the Leafs charley horse’d. In mid-January, in a game with Detroit at Madison Square Garden, he broke a couple of bones in his left hand — unless someone else broke them for him. (Another Ranger winger, Ed Slowinski, also finished the game with a fractured hand). Either way, it was Webster’s 14th and final appearance on NHL ice. Playing left wing, he’d recorded no goals or assists while sitting out two minor penalties. When he’d healed a bit, he returned to the New Haven ice wearing a soft cast, finishing the season in the AHL while the Rangers went on to defeat in the Stanley Cup finals at the hands of the Red Wings.

Don Webster, Chick’s younger brother by four years, had his own NHL stint: he played 32 games for the Toronto Maple Leafs across the 1943-44 regular season and playoffs, scoring seven goals and 13 points. Don Webster died in 1978 at the age of 53.

I asked Rob Webster to ask his dad who were the players he’d admired in his playing days and the answer that came back included Gordie Howe, Rocket Richard, and teammates Laprade, O’Connor, and Rayner.

The latter years of his hockey career took him around the minor-league map — Tacoma, Cincinnati, Vancouver, and Syracuse (where he played, unhappily, under Eddie Shore) — before he made his return to the Toronto area. He continued to play after he went to work for de Havilland Aircraft of Canada, before retiring, in 1969, to Mattawa.

“Been there ever since,” Rob Webster wrote, and skating all the while: he organized an oldtimers team with the Mattawa Legion and played until he was nearly 80. The nickname? From the gum Chiclets, his son says. “He always chewed gum as a kid. He thinks his aunt was the first to give it to him. As long as I can remember he always chewed when he played.”

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In The Army Now: Chick Webster (that’s him in the front row, third from right) poses with the Petawawa Grenades, circa 1943-44.

(All images courtesy of Rob Webster)