falling through the ice

hamby shore: away he goes like a flash

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He started as a forward, and he was a good one, at that: in 1905, as what one newspaper would call “a wiry stripling of 17,” Hamby Shore was summoned to play left wing for the mighty Ottawa Silver Seven as the team fended off the challenge of the Rat Portage Thistles to hold on to the Stanley Cup they’d made a habit of winning in the early years of the new century.

An Ottawa boy, born and bred, Shore would play a part in three Cup championships over the course of his career, which included a season in the fledgling NHL in 1917-18, during which he anchored the (original) Senators blueline. His death on a Sunday of this date in the fall of 1918 jarred hockey’s tight-knit community. A victim of the virulent Spanish flu pandemic that killed some 50,000 Canadians between 1918 and 1920, Shore was just 32 when he contracted the virus as he nursed his sickened wife, Ruby. She seems to have recovered, but by early October, her husband was under care at the Rideau Street Hospital, where he died of pneumonia that October 13, a Sunday.

When he wasn’t on the ice, Shore was, like many a star of Ottawa’s early hockey scene, a faithful civil servant, working a job in the federal Department of Interior. On the ice, he made the switch to defence in 1909 when Cyclone Taylor departed Pete Green’s Ottawa concatenation to sign with the Renfrew Creamery Kings in the old NHA, and Shore dropped back from the left wing work from the old cover-point position. The report from the rink early on that winter: “His shooting, checking, passing, and skating were all to the merry.” That same winter he also seems to have had a close call, falling through the ice of the Rideau Canal and being saved from drowning by a friend.

In 1912, when Art Ross put together a team of all-stars from eastern Canada to take on the best of the west, Shore partnered the future Bruins supremo on the Eastern d. (Paddy Moran tended the goal they defended; Joe Malone, Odie Cleghorn, Skene Ronan, and Jack Darragh worked the forward line, with Sprague Cleghorn and Cyclone Taylor standing by as substitutes. For the West, Hugh Lehman played behind Frank Patrick and Moose Johnson, with Newsy Lalonde, Harry Hyland, Tommy Dunderdale, and Ran McDonald on attack.)

The Ottawa Citizen may not have been an entirely independent authority, but in 1917, the paper declared Hamby Shore “the most effective chassis in the NHA” and “easily the most spectacular player in the game.”

“He rushes from end to end with more speed than he ever showed previously,” a hockey correspondent advised, “is blocking in clever style, and his shooting has been fatal to opposing goalkeepers.”

The key to his success? His take-off, apparently. “The average defenceman is slow in starting,” the Citizen’s man noted. “Not so with the Ottawa boy. One strike toward the puck, a neat sidestep, and away he goes like a flash.”

“He gets 15 yards on the other players before they know he is off,” added the distinguished referee Cooper Smeaton.

Shore played his final game in February of 1918, when his Senators overwhelmed the Montreal Canadiens by a score of 8-0 at Ottawa’s Laurier Street Arena towards the end of the NHL’s inaugural season. Ottawa released him a few days later: it’s not entirely clear why. The Ottawa Journal reported at the time that he himself was declaring that his career was finished and that “he would not attempt a comeback.”

Following his death eight months later, the Senators organized a memorial game in Shore’s memory and to raise money for his family. With the NHL season over, as the Montreal Canadiens prepared to depart for Seattle for their ill-fated (and never-completed) Stanley Cup series, the game was scheduled at the Laurier Street Arena for the end of March of 1919.

“Two of the fastest and strongest teams that have ever stepped out on the ice lined up,” the Ottawa Journal reported, “they being the All-Ottawas, a team consisting of thoroughbred home brews, and the Imported Stars.

Ottawa’s line-up featured Senators from stem to stern, with Clint Benedict in goal, Eddie Gerard and former Senator Horace Merrill (a former defensive partner of Shore’s) on defence, and a forward line of Jack Darragh, Punch Broadbent, and Buck Boucher. A former NHA Montreal Wanderer, Archie Atkinson, was Ottawa’s sub.

Toronto’s Bert Lindsay tended the other goal, with Ottawa’s Sprague Cleghorn and Harry Cameron on defence, and a forward line featuring Senators’ stars Frank Nighbor and Cy Denneny alongside Toronto’s Dave Ritchie, with Art Ross standing by as a sub.

Canada’s governor-general was on hand, the Duke of Devonshire, with a party of guests from Rideau Hall, and His Excellency brought along the band of the Governor-General’s Foot Guards to strike up a tune.

I haven’t seen word on how much money was raised on the night, but the crowd was reported to have been duly entertained, despite the sticky surface underskate: “the poor ice made the exhibition more of a burlesque than a contest,” the Citizen said. The Ottawas prevailed by a score of 8-3, with Buck Boucher busting out with six goals for the winning side.

The Journal noted that the GG was delighted by the hockey, taking “keen delight in the antics of the players.” Also? “The event was not without its excitement as a real fist-fight started in the bleachers and the police had to take a hand.”

loosening my grip on bobby orr

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No quick thought-piece here on why Bobby Orr did what he did, or how terrible the disappointment tastes, or how patently absurd it would be to write a sentence like “President Trump has delivered for all the American people, regardless of race, gender, or station in life,” let alone submit it for publication. The ad that Orr paid to mar half of page A9 of today’s New Hampshire Union Leader is here, if you want to study it.

Me, I’m admiring “Winter on the Don,” above, another of Winnipeg photographer Diana Thorneycroft’s masterpieces, from her 2007 series “Group of Seven Awkward Moments.” Her interest here, she’s said, is in combining “iconic northern landscapes, which have come to symbolize Canada as a nation,” with “scenes of accidents, disasters, and bad weather.”

“By pairing the tranquility of traditional landscape painting with black humour,” Thorneycroft writes, “the work conjures up topical and universally familiar landscapes fraught with anxiety and contradictions.” For more of her bracing views of our north, visit dianathorneycroft.com.

falling through the ice: yow! crash! (crack, crackle) help! holy smoke!

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Headed out this week for some pond hockey, a little lake puck? Know that if you’re centrally situated in North America and it’s big wide-open shinny settings you’re after, looks like Lake Erie is your best bet. As of Sunday, some 90 per cent of everybody’s favourite fourth-largest Great Lake was locked up in ice, according to analysis by the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. Throw in Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Ontario, and out superlative lakes are, overall, 29.5 per cent frozen. That’s way up from last year at this time, when the number was 11 per cent.

I’m not saying you should. Head out on a Great Lake, I mean. Safer to skate at the park, or on someone’s backyard rink. In Toronto, where the harbour is frozen over for the first time in years, the message from police regarding natural ice is the plain and perennial one: no ice is safe ice. History and hockey literature have lots to say about this — lots and lots. Picture books, too, and horror movies, and archives.

There’s also a rich library of comic books to instruct us in the hazards inherent in taking the good old hockey game out on the bad old treacherous ice. Today’s exemplar is a 1949 edition of New Heroic Comics, a dead-serious venture from your friends at Famous Funnies Inc. For such a bright and colourful publication, it’s actually a terrifying piece of work. The through-the-ice story is just the start of a harrowing 48-page handbook of true-life havoc and misfortune featuring accounts of runaway horses (“Hooves of Horror”), men overboard (“Soldier Rescues Sailor”), riptides (“Riptide”), flash floods (“Canyon Rescue”), and high-rise calamity (“Elevator Firetrap”).

The good news is that everybody gets out okay. That’s the point, of course: heroes prevail. They stop the stallion, drive their jeep into the canyon, force the doors of the elevator. The hockey story celebrates 18-year-old Philip McAuliffe Jr., a member of the Boston College hockey team out for a New Year’s Day skate with some pals on a Massachusetts lake when the inevitable happens. That’s him in the red sweater, going after poor Johnny, and (I’m pleased to report) hauling him to safety. In a later panel, McAuliffe gets a silver medal for his efforts, from the state Humane Society. “That was a brave thing you did, young man!” says the comics-doctor tending his wounds. “You’re a real hero!”

“Thanks, doctor,” comics-Philip says, “but it really wasn’t anything.”

skaters gonna skate

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Cautionary Fail: The temperature on the surface of Mars hit a daytime high of -23 C this week, according to weather-watchers at CTV, which is to say it’s been way more clement there than across much of the Canadian map. Ottawa was down to -29 C yesterday, making it the world’s coldest capital (Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia was basking at -26 C). With the wind, in the alpine shadows, Wednesday’s thermometer was down around -29 C, too, under Fairview Mountain in Alberta’s Banff National Park, where a brisk bout of morning shinny quickened the ice of Lake Louise. (Image: Stephen Smith)

falling through the ice: bob the good-natured bay

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He was doing his job, that’s all. A Tuesday in January of 1929, and Bob, as usual, was hauling the scraper across the ice at Boston’s Public Garden, getting it ready for skaters under the supervision of his driver, James Ward. “The big good-natured bay,” is how the Daily Globe recognized him, Bob, “favourite with all the children.” But on this day, as he neared the shore on the rink’s Arlington Street side, he went through. James Ward couldn’t help him, but as luck had it, Patrolman Arthur Blood from the Back Bay Police Station happened by and soon had the call out for reinforcements.

I’m not going to leave you hanging: Bob got out fine. Patrolmen Noyes, Regan, Gervan, and Maguire all lent a hand, roping up Bob’s legs and hauling him free. Although, from the photograph, some firemen were in on it, too. Nothing to worry about, in any case, according to The Globe:

After Bob was steady on his feet, officer Blood took him to the Animal Rescue League on Carver St., where he was given first-aid treatment. He was found to have suffered no serious injury.

(Photo: Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

falling through the ice: lucky I have this hockey stick

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rescue

“We’re coming,” Joe shouted. “Don’t be afraid.” And as he skated he tried to remember all he had learned at Scout meetings about rescuing people who broke through the ice.

“It’s lucky I have this hockey stick,” he thought, for as he drew nearer the terror-stricken child and felt the thinner ice begin to crack beneath him, he carefully went down flat on his stomach and held the stick out in front of him, pushing it slowly closer and closer to the hole. Once his heart was in his mouth, for the little red head disappeared and he was terrified lest the current should sweep the child under the ice, beyond all hope of rescue. The little boy was plainly growing weaker, but even such feeble attempts as he was able to make to clamber out of the hole kept breaking the ice around him.

At last Joe shoved the hockey stick close enough. “Hang on,” he pleaded. “Hang on to the stick. Just grab it with both hands and Joe will pull you out all right.” He kept his voice calm so the frightened, freezing child who had been sobbing piteously and thrashing into deeper danger in his panic, quieted for a moment — long enough to notice the stout stick on the jagged ice in front of him.

• Skating Today (1945), M.R. Renick, illustrated by Raymond Vartanian

falling through the ice: chilliest of the horror sequences

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omen

In Damien: Omen II, the dubious appeal of the original — a toddler turns out to be the son of the devil — is missing. The sequel takes place approximately seven years later and the toddler is now a teenage brat. Frankly, there’s nothing particularly surprising or horrifying about a teenager in league with the devil. Also, the commotion the kid inspires this time is not particularly frightening. A crow eats an old woman. Big deal.

• Gene Siskel, The Chicago Tribune, July 6, 1978

Before Damien has finished this time, there have been approximately a dozen new victims, a couple of whom have succumbed to what appears to be internal disorders while others have been sliced in half, stabbed, burned, impaled, gassed, pecked (by a nasty crow) and in the film’s most inspired moment of cinematic nonsense, drowned beneath the clear ice of a Wisconsin lake.

• Vincent Canby, The New York Times, June 10, 1978

Chilliest of the horror sequences — imaginatively achieved — a drowning scene during an ice hockey game.

• Bernie Harrison, The Washington Star, February 5, 1980

falling through the ice: the boys think the ice is thick, but it is thin

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1966

It is the Christmas holiday for the boys. They are at play in the park. There is ice on the pond there. The boys think the ice is thick, but it is thin. One boy is in the middle of the ice when he trips and falls. There is a crack and the boy falls through the ice.

The boys call the park keeper to help their friend. He finds that he can reach the boy and he pulls him out of the water. The boy is not hurt, but he is very wet, so the park keeper takes him home.

• Enjoying Reading (1966), W. Murray

falling through the ice: nat, come back here!

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pass that puck

Following a few series of “starts and stops,” Mr. Hopkins tossed outa dozen pucks that Whitey had handed him. This was the sign that formal practice had ended. The bay now became a madhouse of “shinny.”

After allowing a few minutes of this unrestrained fun, Mr. Hopkins called all but the seniors off the ice. Whitey Sherman limped out to the row of beams. He had to bring in the red flags that marked the boundaries. He watched Ted Dunsworth and Nat Collier skating down the ice passing the puck back and forth in mid-season form.

Just before reaching the boundaries, Ted stopped and fed a hard pass toward the beams, while Nat swung wide to pick it up. The puck, passed too hard, lifted slightly off the ice, hit the top of the beams, and skidded into the out-of-bounds area.

Without a bit of hesitation, Nat jumped lightly over the beams and skated in pursuit.

Aware of the closeness of treacherous ice, Whitey, who was nearest to him, shouted, “Nat come back here!”

The puck was sliding fast now. Nat reached it in a second, curled his stick around it, stopped suddenly and swept the puck back toward the beams. At the same time, Whitey and the others that were watching, saw the ice area around Nat suddenly sag and give way. With arms outstretched, hockey stick in the air, Nat Collier settled into the water.

• Pass That Puck! (1948), Richard T. Flood

falling through the ice: take your skates off, poletti, they’re weighin’ ya down

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dangerSometimes in the hockey novels, the pond where the high-school team plays its big game is beautiful, black and smooth and deep, and the sound that skates make on it bespeaks power and gracefulness and cold outdoor air, such that young Jack Taylor, who watches the game, can’t resist heading out onto this same ice a few days later when the weather starts to warm.

I’m speaking here of Lightning On Ice, Philip Harkins’ 1946 novel for young readers, and if you can see where we’re heading, well, yes, obviously. The pond doesn’t have a name, though it’s big enough, apparently, to be called a lake. The boys find a sheltered cove where the ice, soft as it is, seems thick enough. They ignore the signs warning them off. They shed their shoes, pull on skates. It’s older boys, mostly. Jack is younger, meek. At first, there’s no room for him in the game, but then one of the captains says he can tend goal. Poletti. Jack doesn’t want to play in goal but, okay, fine. Schulz is the other captain, and a jerk. It’s his wrist shot that hits Jack in the shin, fells him briefly, despite everybody having agreed to no raising. I’m not going to get into the bad blood that boils between Schulz and Poletti. Poletti pokechecks him — I will say that. And so:

Schulz, chagrined, watched the puck skim over the ice. Then his chagrin vanished as he saw the rubber disc slide serenely out of the cove onto the thin ice of the pond. Watching the puck and realizing what this would mean to its owner, Schulz broke into a laugh. “O.K., wise guy!” he cried. “There’s your pokecheck and there’s your puck. You go get it — and have a good swim!”

Poletti goes. It’s his puck, the only one he’s got. The rest of the players look on. He skates fast, gets to the puck, whacks it to safety, turns back.

Poletti was returning. The ice was sagging dangerously, rising up and down beneath him like a rippling snake. Poletti was skating uphill and downhill over the creaking ice. A boy yelled, “Come on, Poletti. You kin make it.”

No. Not true. He trips, cries out, crashes through the ice. O no.

The boys stood paralyzed. Then they broke into excited cries and skated in excited circles. “He’s up,” someone shouted. Poletti had pulled himself onto a ledge of solid ice and was pushing himself up with his arms. Suddenly the ledge gave way and Poletti dropped back into the icy water. Cakes of ice ground around him, seemed to promise support, and then sank under his weight.

ftti harkins - Version 2

Take off your skates, Schulz counsels from afar: “They’re weighin’ ya down!” No way: those skates cost him ten bucks. Jack’s the one who goes after Poletti, of course: it’s his job as the novel’s hero. Along with his nerve, he’s got a plan.

When he reached the thin ice of the pond, he dropped to one knee and, getting flat on his stomach, wriggled forward with extended hockey stick. He ignored the warnings of the other players.

“Grab my ankle,” he cried to them, and someone followed, lay down, and grabbed Jack’s ankle. Then another joined the human chain and another, and now there were four boys anchored to Schulz, who was kneeling on the thick safe ice of the cove.

Jack slid farther out near Poletti. Poletti thrashed against the heavy ice cakes, pushed them aside, and fought his way to solid ice. Jack stretched, Poletti strained. Then Poletti managed to grasp the end of the hockey stick which Jack extended toward him.

“O.K. Pull,” cried Jack. “Everybody hold on with two hands!”

Slowly painfully, Poletti came up out of the icy water onto ice that held under his weight, over the ice of the pond to the thicker ice of the cove, where he lay at last soaked, dripping, safe.

All’s well that ends & etc. Happy and proud, Jack joins Poletti for hot chocolate and hot dogs. What could be better? “A day that had started miserably,

with an assignment of goal tending and a painful bang on the shin, had turned out extremely well; by express invitation he was walking home with a big boy, a high school boy, a good hockey player.