First World War

outstanding in his field

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Jolting Joe: “They say, as a puck-carrying defenceman, there never was another hockey player who came close to Joe Simpson in his prime.” That was Jim Coleman writing in 1973, on the occasion of Simpson’s death on Christmas day that year at the age of 80. Here he is in 1921 when he was starring for the WCHL Edmonton Eskimos. He was 28 by then, a decorated veteran of the First World War. Coleman suggested that his best years came before he went to war, and that may have been so, but the fact is, too, that in 1923 Newsy Lalonde told NHL President Frank Calder that Simpson was the greatest hockey player on the planet, bar none. Simpson eventually made it to the NHL, playing with and coaching the New York Americans in the later ’20s. (Image: McDermid Studio, courtesy of Glenbow Library and Archives Collection, Libraries and Cultural Resources Digital Collections, University of Calgary)

harry cameron: saw his duty, overdid it (in colourful fashion)

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Toronto’s Stanley Cup Champions: The 1913-14 Blueshirts, featuring, at the back, from eft to right: Coach Dick Carroll, Con Corbeau, Roy McGiffen, Jack Marshall, George McNamara, Jack Walker, Cully Wilson, Trainer Frank Carroll. Front: Claude Wilson, Frank Foyston, Scotty Davidson, Harry Cameron, Hap Holmes.

Harry Cameron was 24 in 1914, and he was in his second year with Toronto’s NHA Blueshirts. Playing at coverpoint alongside Jack Marshall at point, the Pembroke, Ontario, native was an anchor of the defence in front of Hap Holmes that steadied the team as it made its way through the six-team league to challenge for the Stanley Cup that year.

After getting past the Montreal Canadiens in a two-game NHA final, Toronto took on the PCHA Victoria Aristocrats for all the marbles in March of 1914. Victoria featured Bert Lindsay in goal (Ted’s dad) and Lester Patrick on the defence. Played in Toronto’s Arena Gardens, the three-game series saw Toronto win two in a row. They played the third game anyway and it was in the third period of that one, on Thursday, March 19, 1914, that Cameron took a pass from Marshall and (to quote the Toronto Daily Star) “laced it home, waist high” past Lindsay to secure the Blueshirts’ 2-1 win, bringing the Stanley Cup to Toronto for the very first time.

Along with the vaunted trophy, the Blueshirts pictured above had expected to take home a sizeable cash bonus for their troubles, as much as $800 a man — about $21,000 or so in today’s terms. As it turned out, gate receipts for the series were lower than expected, which meant that the players each collected just $297 (about $7,800).

There was some talk of the Sydney Millionaires of the Maritime Professional Hockey League challenging Toronto for their newly won Cup, but when that didn’t materialize, the team disbanded for the year. Cameron went to Pembroke for the summer, while George McNamara aimed for Sault Ste. Marie, where he worked as an electrician. Roy McGiffin was bound for California to work on a fruit farm. Heading home to Montreal, Jack Marshall, 37, announced his retirement. Most of the other players would be back in hockey with the return of winter, though not Blueshirts’ captain Scotty Davidson. When war broke out in the fall of 1914, he enlisted with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He was serving as a lance-corporal with the CEF’s 2nd Battalion (Eastern Ontario Regiment) when he was killed by a shellburst in France in June of 1915. He was 24.

Harry Cameron won a second Stanley Cup with the Toronto St. Patricks in 1922. The NHA had given way to the NHL by then, of course, and Cameron was one of the league’s early stars. He scored 18 goals in 24 games as a defenceman in successive seasons, 1920-21 and ’21-22. He played his last professional hockey in 1933. Harry Cameron died in Vancouver on a Tuesday of today’s date in 1953. He was 63.

Dick Beddoes remembered Cameron in the pages of the Vancouver Sun. “Twenty years ago,” he wrote, “his name was so familiar that mention of it automatically suggested a rushing defenceman who saw his duty and overdid it in the colourful fashion of Eddie Shore and King Clancy.”

antwerp, 1920: canada gets what she goes after

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Golden In Belgium: Winnipeg’s Falcons line up at Antwerp’s Palais de Glace on Monday, April 26, 1920. From the left, they are (trainer) Gordon Sigurjonsson, (club president) Hebbie Axford, Wally Byron, Slim Halderson, Frank Fredrickson, (Canadian Olympic Committee representative) W.A. Hewitt, Konnie Johannesson, Mike Goodman, Huck Woodman, Bobby Benson, Chris Fridfinnson, (secretary) Bill Fridfinnson. (Image: courtesy winnipegfalcons.com)

The King of the Belgians hoped that Antwerp’s shell-pocked roads would be repaired in time for the summerside Games of the VII Olympiade. In place of an athlete or a mythological god, the statue at the stadium when the main event launched that July depicted a Belgian infantryman hurling a grenade. In a city that had been under siege in 1914, then occupied by German troops through to the Armistice in 1918, it’s no surprise that the First World War shadowed every aspect of the 1920 Olympics. Canada’s Games got underway earlier, in April, with the first ever hockey tournament in Olympic history. Winning gold a hundred years ago, Canada’s team set a standard for Olympic hockey dominance that would last for three successive Games. After they’d finished up on the ice, the hockey players spent a week touring Belgium’s battlefields.

Wearing the maple leaf that year were the Winnipeg Falcons, who’d earned their place in the Olympics as national senior amateur champions. Rooted in Manitoba’s Icelandic community, the team had been a fixture of Winnipeg’s hockey landscape for more than a decade. In the spring of 1916, the roster had enlisted, almost to a man, with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, going on to serve in the infantry on the Western Front or, as in the case of 1920 team captain and future NHL star forward Frank Fredrickson, to take to the skies with the Royal Flying Corps. Another NHLer-to-be, defenceman Bobby Benson, had been shot in the knee on his previous visit to the Continent, when he was in the fight in northern France.

Having defeated the University of Toronto for the Allan Cup in March, the Falcons kept on going, training east to Saint John, New Brunswick. The weather was fair for their nine-day crossing to Liverpool aboard Canadian Pacific’s S.S. Melita, with Frank Fredrickson the only casualty: he cut his head falling out of his bunk. The team took light training on deck, jogging and calisthenics, and entertained their fellow passengers with “musical entertainments.”

Along with the hosts, the other teams that gathered in Belgium came from France, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, the United States, and Sweden. The skilled U.S. squad was Canada’s main challenger; most of the Swedes were bandy players who’d never seen a competitive hockey game before, let alone played in one.

Antwerp’s rink then was the downtown Palais de Glace, demolished in 2016. In 1920, it featured a full and energetic orchestra, with room for an audience of some 1,500, many of them accommodated at rinkside at café tables. “Spectators dined and drank as they watched the various nations play hockey,” wrote W.A. Hewitt, Foster’s father, who accompanied the Falcons and reported on the proceedings for several Canadian newspapers. The nets were unconventional — “like a folded gate” — and the rink was narrower than what the Canadians were used to. Still, Hewitt reported, “The Canadians declare the ice in excellent shape.”

The Falcons impressed the locals even when they practiced. After one work-out, curious Belgians surrounded winger Mike Goodman, also an accomplished speedskater, asking to examine his skates in order to understand just how their motors worked.

Olympic hockey that year was seven-aside, no substitutes permitted, and games played out over two 20-minute periods rather than three. Under the tournament’s knock-out format, Canada’s road to gold lasted just three games. Having swamped Czechoslovakia 15-0, they took on the talented Americans next. Soldiers from the local British garrison cheered on the Canadians, while U.S. occupation troops backed their team as the Canadians prevailed, 2-0. Next day, they wrapped up the championship by overwhelming the plucky Swedes, 12-1. Before the game, the Falcons ran a clinic for their opponents, tutoring before they trounced. Still, the lone goal Sweden scored came as something of a shock: Canadian goaltender Wally Byron was so surprised to see a puck pass him that he fell to the ice.

Once they’d finished their sombre battlefield tourism, the Canadians set sail aboard S.S. Grampian. It was mid-May when they docked on the east coast. Fêted in Montreal and Toronto, the Falcons were welcomed home to Winnipeg with a parade and a banquet and gifts of gold watches. “On the ice as on the battlefield,” a proud editorial asserted, “Canada gets what she goes after.”

(A version of this post appeared in Canadian Geographic in April of 2020.)

did the bugle sing the last post in chorus? lionel duley, the goaltender in the photograph

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The story of the Newfoundlanders who stopped on their way to war in 1917, played hockey in Windsor, Nova Scotia, and sat for a photograph, is one I wrote about more than a year ago — you can read it here. The photograph (that’s it again below) is a favourite of mine (the studio setting; the sticks and dated puck; those sweaters!). It’s also heartbreaking in the way that peaceable wartime groupings like this one always are when — because — we know the history of how bad it would get for these boys.

Last April, on a visit to the First World War battlefields of northern France, I walked the trails at Beaumont Hamel, where Newfoundlanders died by the dozens on the first day of the Somme in 1916. Afterwards, I stopped for lunch a few kilometres to the west, in Auchonvilliers, where the Avril Williams Tea Room doubles as a museum of World War I artefacts and memorabilia. There’s a copy of the photo of the Newfoundland Regiment hockey players hanging there, in the big main room, amid the armour and the ordnance, overlooking the battle maps, the regimental badges, the battalion histories. I studied the faces one more time, searched them all. And I read the names aloud.

White. Bennett. Strong. Winter. Williams. Strong. Duley. Newman. Churchill. Mews.

Caribou Crew: Soldiers from the Newfoundland Regiment, starters and spares, pose in hockey garb, and not, in 1917, in Windsor, Nova Scotia. Back, left to right: Rex White, Sydney Bennett, Jack Strong, Duke Winter. Middle: Hayward Williams, Charlie Strong, Lionel Duley, Stan Newman. Front: Ernest Churchill, Harry Mews. (Image: The Rooms, Provincial Archives Division, St. John’s, Newfoundland)

Duley was Lionel Thomas Duley, a St. John’s bank clerk who took his oath and joined the Newfoundland Regiment in 1916, attesting six days after the slaughter at Beaumont Hamel. He’s the goaltender in the Windsor photograph, taken the following year, when he was 19. The next time I saw his name written was a few days later, 120 kilometres to the north, across the French border into Belgium, when I went to see his grave in the Tyne Cot Cemetery near Zonnebeke. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission maintains thousands of cemeteries and memorials around the world; Tyne Cot, the final resting place for the remains of 11,961 servicemen from across the British Empire (and four Germans), is the largest of them all. Fourteen Newfoundlanders lie at Tyne Cot, along with 966 Canadians.

Drawing on records held in Newfoundland’s Archives at The Rooms in St. John’s you can chalk out an outline of Lionel Duley’s life.

I’ve been by the family house in St. John’s, the one he grew up in, where he was living when he left for the war, although I didn’t know it at the time I was passing by. 51 Rennies Mill Road, across from Bannerman Park.

His father, Thomas J. Duley, was an Englishman, born in Birmingham, who landed in Newfoundland. He married a daughter of Carbonear, Tryphena Soper — Phenie, she was known as. Together they had five children, Cyril, Nelson, Margaret, Gladys, and Lionel. I’m not sure of the proper order to put them in. I think Cyril was the eldest; he served in the Newfoundland Regiment, too, as a captain, survived Beaumont Hamel and then bad wounds later in 1916. Sister Margaret is often called Newfoundland’s first novelist: she wrote four books, including the novels The Eyes of the Gull and Highway to Valour.

Thomas was a jeweller and an optician and sold luxury goods on Water Street in St. John’s, T.J. Duley & Co. the business was called, The Reliable their slogan. I’ve been by there, as well — there’s a marijuana dispensary on the premises today.

Lionel did his schooling at the Methodist College in St. John’s. He was clerking for the Canadian Bank of Commerce when he presented himself for a medical check-up in April of 1916 at the Church Lads Brigade Armoury on Harvey Road. By July, Private Duley was duly enlisted, attested, assigned the regimental number 2945. His height was recorded as 5’7”; his pay was the regular rate of $1.10 a day, half of which he assigned to his father’s care. Promoted twice in those early months of training, he was Corporal Duley by the time he departed St. John’s aboard Florizel for Nova Scotia and the Windsor sojourn — puckstopping included — that delayed his arrival at the war.

It was April of 1917 when he sailed on the transport Northland for Liverpool. With the rest of the Newfoundland reinforcements he went from there to Scotland as part of the 2nd (Reserve) Battalion. He was promoted again, receiving his commission as a second lieutenant in May. He was in France by January of 1918, joining 1st Battalion just as they were ordered from positions they’d been occupying in northwest France, near Arras, and shifted to the Ypres Salient in Belgium.

It was at the end of September that Second Lieutenant Lionel Duley was killed. The Battalion had, by then, been incorporated into the 28th Infantry Brigade of the 9th (Scottish) Division positioned west of Ypres for the offensive across Flanders fields to seize Passchendaele Ridge from the German Army. On the second day of the advance, Sunday, September 29, the Newfoundlanders were on the move near the village of Keiberg. 2/Lieutenant Duley was leading his platoon forward when he was hit in the thigh by machine-gun fire.

Regimental records held at The Rooms describe the horror of it but briefly. “Before he could be taken back [he] died, probably from shock and severe loss of blood,” an officer wrote later. It was about 11 o’clock in the morning, 43 days before the Armistice. Subsequent paperwork testifies that his body was found by a fellow subaltern, 2/Lieutenant R.E. Evans, who buried it and erected a cross, taking note of the exact map reference. “This is not a military cemetery,” a memo in the file takes pains to record, “but at the place where he was found dead with some of our men also lying dead beside him. They were all buried together.”

Tyne Cot Cemetery isn’t far. The first British and Canadian war dead were buried there in 1917 while the guns were still thundering, before anything was decided. I’m not entirely sure when 2/Lieutenant Duley’s remains were moved, just that his family got confirmation in 1921 that he was resting there, in Plot 53, Row H, Grave 8.

I left a pebble on the top of the stone. I spoke his name.

Lionel Duley.

He was 20 years old when he died.

why be a mere spectator?

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“More men are being recruited or authorized here at the present time than at any period since the war started, and far more, of course, than ever before in the city’s history.” That was the word in the Montreal Gazette in January of 1916, just as the 148th Overseas Battalion, one of the Canadian Expeditionary Force’s newest infantry battalions, was getting ready to start recruiting. Here, from the archives, are a couple of the posters that went up to aid in that effort. Above, somewhere in France, out beyond the artillery, a lone soldier wonders why he isn’t being reinforced. The answer is right there in front of him, wafting out of the barrel of his Ross rifle: hockey.

If, as a Canadiens fan seeing this on a wall outside the Montreal Arena, the guilt didn’t get you, maybe would the promise of a real game and/or a challenge to your manhood do the trick? The poster below tweaks the taunting a little, revealing the laggardly fan at home, slippers on, browsing the sports pages in his recliner as the spectre of that other poster rises accusingly from the pipe he’s fortunate enough to be smoking.

Whatever the battalion’s marketing department’s view of hockey fans might have been, the 148th didn’t see a contradiction in welcoming as many of them as possible to the Arena on the night of January 27, 1916, for a “patriotic benefit” pitting veterans of the famous Ottawa Silver Seven against a team of former Montreal greats. The teams had previously played in Ottawa, drawing 3-3 a few nights earlier. Montreal older-timers included defenceman Dickie Boon, who’d captained the Montreal HC to successive Stanley Cups in 1902 and ’03, along with a parcel of other future Hall-of-Famers in Russell Bowie, Ernie Russell, and goaltender Riley Hern. Ottawa’s line-up of retired greats featured House Hutton, Harvey Pulford, Alf Smith, and Rat Westwick.

“Those who journeyed to the Arena to see a burlesque on hockey,” the Gazette reported, “were surprised as the players of both teams played as they did in their palmy days.” Powered by Bowie’s four goals, Montreal prevailed by a score of 6-2. The seven-a-side exhibition raised $1,500 on the night, which was divided between the 148thand another incipient battalion, the 150th.

“At the conclusion of the game,” the Gazette noted, “the officers of the regiments for whose benefit it was played journeyed to the dressing rooms to thank the players for their kindness in staging the game.” Players and officers alike later repaired to the St. Regis Hotel for an informal dinner. Guests, including Stanley Cup trustee William Foran, listened while they supped, to a musical program, “while speeches were made by nearly all present.”

 

mclaughlin’s all-americans: making the chicago black hawks great again

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Newlyweds: Irene Castle and Major Frederic McLaughlin, circa 1923, the year of their marriage.

(A version of this post appeared on page D3 of The New York Times on June 12, 2017.)

Long before President Donald J. Trump turned a protectionist eye to the iniquities of Canadians, another opinionated American tycoon decided that he had had enough. Eighty years ago, the cross-border irritant wasn’t Nafta or softwood lumber. As Major Frederic McLaughlin saw it, Canada was flooding American markets with too many hockey players.

In 1937, his short-lived America-first campaign was all about making the Chicago Black Hawks great again.

Canadians have long and fiercely claimed hockey as their own, a proprietary technology that also happens to be a primary natural resource. But the game’s south-of-the-border veins run deep, too. The first organized American game is said to have been played in the 1880s at St. Paul’s, a prep school in Concord, N.H.. The first fully professional league was based in Michigan, in 1904, though most of the players were Canadian.

When the N.H.L. made its debut in 1917 with four Canadian teams, it counted a lonely three Americans among 51 players.

“The climate is not suitable for hockey in the United States,” Lester Patrick (b. Drummondville, Quebec), the longtime Rangers coach and manager, explained in 1928. Unfair as it might be, Canadian boys donned skates at age 3.

“They start skating from the ankles, then with the lower leg up to the knee and at maturity they skate from the hip,” Patrick said. “It is an evolutionary process of time.”

“The Americans,” he held, “start too late to develop a full-leg stride.”

None of that mattered, of course, when it came to the potential profitability of American markets. The N.H.L.’s sometimes rancorous rush south saw Boston’s Bruins as the first United States-based team to join, in 1924. Pittsburgh’s Pirates and New York’s Americans followed in 1925 before the Rangers debuted in 1926, along with teams in Detroit and Chicago.

In Chicago, McLaughlin emerged as the majority shareholder. The McLaughlins had made their fortune on the Lake Michigan shore as coffee importers. In the 1850s, most American coffee drinkers bought raw beans and roasted them at home. W.F. McLaughlin was one of the first to sell pre-roasted coffee. When he died in 1905, his elder son took the helm of McLaughlin’s Manor House Coffee with Frederic, the younger son, aboard as secretary and treasurer.

Harvard-educated, Frederic found fame in those prewar years as one of the country’s best polo players. In 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to the restive Mexican frontier, McLaughlin served in the Illinois National Guard.

A year later, the United States went to war with Germany, and McLaughlin joined the Army’s new 86th “Blackhawk” Division, taking command of the 333rd Machine Gun Battalion. Trained in Chicago and England, the division reached France just in time for peace to break out in 1918.

Postwar, McLaughlin returned to Chicago society as a prized catch among bachelor millionaires. But he gained national attention after secretly marrying Irene Castle, a ballroom dancer and movie star revered as America’s best-dressed woman.

As president of Chicago’s N.H.L. team, he reserved naming rights, borrowing from his old Army unit’s tribute to an 18th-century Sauk warrior. From his polo club, the Onwentsia in Lake Forest, Ill., he plucked the distinctive chief’s-head emblem that still adorns Black Hawks sweaters.

“Oh, boy, I am glad I haven’t got a weak heart,” McLaughlin is reported to have said at the first hockey game he ever attended, in November of 1926, just a month before Chicago’s NHL debut. His newly minted Black Hawks were in Minneapolis, playing an exhibition that featured Canadian men named Moose and Rusty and Tiny.

McLaughlin and his fellow investors bought a ready-made roster to get their franchise going: 14 players who had spent the previous winter as the Western Hockey League’s Portland Rosebuds, men named Dick and Duke and Rabbit from Canadian towns called Kenora and Snow Lake and Mattawa.

While owners in New York and Boston hired old Canadian hockey hands to run their teams, McLaughlin decided he would do the job himself. Asked whether his team was ready to compete for a championship, he said, “If it’s not, we’ll keep on buying players until it is.”

The Blackhawks started respectably enough, making the playoffs in their inaugural season. Coaches came and went in those early years, while McLaughlin cultivated a reputation for ire and eccentricity. Still, after only five N.H.L. seasons, Chicago played its way to the finals. Three years later, in 1934, the Black Hawks won the Stanley Cup.

Key to Chicago’s winning formula was McLaughlin’s decision to replace himself with a veteran (Canadian) coach and manager, Tommy Gorman.

“I’m sending myself to the cheering section,” McLaughlin grinned, announcing his midseason surrender in 1933. “I’m convinced that I’m just an amateur in hockey. It’s been a case of the blind leading the blind as far as my influence on the team goes.”

The joy of victory did not linger. Gorman resigned, and Charlie Gardiner, the team’s beloved goaltender, died at 29.

Charged with the reconstruction was a former Black Hawk defenseman, Clem Loughlin, a son of Carroll, Manitoba. Hired in the fall of 1934, he was Chicago’s 11th coach in nine years. The team remained largely Canadian-staffed during his regime, with several talented American exceptions, including Doc Romnes and the goaltender who arrived in 1935, Mike Karakas.

A photograph promoting Loughlin’s 1936-37 squad bore the slogan “Lightning On Skates.” When the season opened, Chicago’s still mostly Canadian roster struck for a pair of listless ties. Then they started losing in earnest. By Christmas, they had won only two of 16 games.

The new year brought no relief. Coach Loughlin threatened a shake-up and then shook, releasing center Tommy Cook, an eight-year veteran accused of “failure to keep in playing condition” and “lax behavior.”

The remaining Hawks won a couple of games before reverting to type. Mulched in Montreal, trimmed in Toronto, they returned to Chicago to lose again and solidify their hold on last place in the league’s American division.

That’s when McLaughlin announced that he had an answer, or at least a vision. Having already lobbied the N.H.L. to replace Canadian referees with Americans, he divulged his plan to shed the yoke of northern tyranny: within two years he would have only American boys skating for the Black Hawks. And he would be changing the team’s nickname to Yankees.

“I think an all-American team would be a tremendous drawing card all over the league,” McLaughlin said.

He was also said to be annoyed that his Canadian veterans rejected the daily calisthenics he insisted they needed.

“We’ve found out you can’t make athletes out of hockey players,” he declared, “so we’ll try to make hockey players out of athletes. Give me a football player who can skate and we can show this league a lot of hockey.”

He already had a so-called “hockey factory” up and running, with five prototype Minnesotans and Michiganders in training on the ice and at Chicago’s Y.M.C.A. These were men in their 20s named Bun and Butch and Ike. Plucked from quiet amateur careers, none of them had yet shown particular signs of stardom. In command was Emil Iverson, a former Danish Army officer who’d coached college hockey in Minnesota and — briefly — the pre-Gorman Hawks.

Meanwhile, the Hawks went to New York, where they hammered the Americans, 9-0. The Americans, as it happened, were almost entirely not — Roger Jenkins of Appleton, Wis., was the only exception. Chicago’s goals were all scored by importees.

Ridicule was brewing in Canada. John Kieran, a columnist for The New York Times, reported that the north-of-the-border consensus was that an all-American team would dominate at “the same time that the Swiss navy equals the combined fleets of the United States, Great Britain and Japan in total tonnage and heavy armament.”

Coach Loughlin stood by his boss. “It isn’t as silly as it sounds by any means,” he said. “I contend that most hockey players are made, not born.”

By March, the future had arrived. With the Hawks out of the playoffs, McLaughlin decreed that his five factory-fresh Americans would debut against Boston.

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It went well — for the Bruins, who prevailed by 6-2. The Rangers and the Detroit Red Wings wired Frank Calder, the president of the league, to protest Chicago’s use of “amateurs” while other teams were still vying for playoff positions.

Boston Coach Art Ross called McLaughlin a “headstrong plutocrat.”

“I have been in hockey 30 years,” he railed, “and never in its entire history has such a farce been perpetrated on a National Hockey League crowd.”

He demanded Chicago refund the price of every ticket —“that’s how rotten the game was.”

“I don’t know whether our constitution will allow the cancellation of an owner’s franchise,” Ross continued, “but if it does, I’ll do everything I can to see that the board of governors do it.”

Unsanctioned by the league, the Hawks went to Toronto, where loudspeakers blared “Yankee Doodle” as “the cash customers prepared for a comedy,” one correspondent reported. Ike Klingbeil of Hancock, Mich., scored a Chicago goal in a losing effort, though a Canadian critic deemed his skating “stiff-legged.”

The new-look Hawks got their first win at home, outlasting the Rangers, 4-3. That night at least, the Times allowed that McLaughlin’s experiment might not have been so far-fetched after all.

The Hawks themselves weren’t entirely contented. A New York reporter listened to a Canadian veteran on the team grumble about the new Americans. “We score the goals and make the plays and they do nothing but a lot of spectacular heavy back-checking,” he said, “but they get all the headlines and all the praise.”

Chicago lost its final two games, finishing a proud point ahead of New York’s even-worse Americans. When the playoffs wrapped up, the Stanley Cup belonged to a Detroit team featuring one American among 21 Canadians with names like Hec and Mud and Bucko.

Come the off-season, the Major gave Clem Loughlin a vote of confidence, right before the coach decided he preferred a return to wheat-farming and hotelkeeping back home in Canada.

Chicago’s five experimental Americans were released. None of them played another N.H.L. game.

The team’s new coach was appropriately unorthodox, for McLaughlin: Bill Stewart, born in Fitchburg, Mass., was best known to that point as a Major League Baseball umpire who carried a wintertime whistle as an N.H.L. referee.

McLaughlin’s wife sued him for divorce that summer, which may have distracted the Major from his all-American plan. In any case, Stewart announced that it was on hold, and the team would continue as the Black Hawks.

When the new hockey season opened, the team started slowly. By March of 1938, they surprised most pundits when they beat the Maple Leafs to win the Stanley Cup.

The trophy itself was absent from the final game, so the champions had to wait to hold it high. Eight of Chicago’s 18 players that season were Americans, men named Doc and Virgil and Cully, who had learned their hockey in Minnesota towns called Aurora, Minneapolis and White Bear Lake.

No N.H.L. champion would count more Americans until last year, when the Pittsburgh Penguins had 10.

(Note: Chicago’s NHL team was Black Hawks for the first 60 years of its history; Blackhawks became one word in 1986.)