Hamilton

licence to thwart

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Pleased To Meet You: It was four years ago today that Harry Howell, long-time New York Ranger Hall-of-Fame defenceman, died at the age of 86. Hockey’s goalscorers, he mused in 1967, “get most of the ink,” but he said that growing up in Hamilton, Ontario, he never envied them. He said he “always wanted to be a defenceman,” laughing, “maybe because I realized I wasn’t going to make it as a forward.” Howell played in 1,000th game that year; all of them were in Ranger livery, making him only the second player in NHL history (after Gordie Howe) to play that many with a single team. Here, Howell hinders Montreal’s Henri Richard, probably during the ’67 All-Star game at Montreal’s Forum. Canadiens won that game 3-0, with Richard scoring the opening (winning) goal and ending up as the game’s MVP. Both Howell and Richard were penalized by referee Vern Buffey that night, for separate second-period transgressions by tripping. (Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

slapshot expressionism

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Boards Meeting: “Puck Painting XV: Montreal Maroons” is a 2001 work rendered by Hamilton, Ontario, artist Liss Platt in puck rubber and paint on wood. It featured in the 2019 exhibition Power Play: Hockey in Canadian Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Windsor. “A long-time hockey player and artists who combines the speed, power, and gendered histories of hockey in her painting and performance art practices,” the legend on the piece narrated there. Platt’s method here: she painted pucks and shot them at a white goal-sized surface. From Platt’s website (you can find it here): “The puck rubber leaves different marks based on the speed and angle of the shot, and compositions are determined by building up the density of shots in particular areas of the painting’s surface. These works represent my foray into ‘action painting’ and beg the question “what ‘action’ is appropriate as an ‘art’ action?” The puck paintings are often created as a performance with audience participation.”

dental appointment: doc stewart takes to the boston net, 1924

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B List: The 1925-26 Boston Bruins line up, from left, Sprague Cleghorn, Sailor Herbert, Gerry Geran, Carson Cooper, Red Stuart, Norm Shay, Stan Jackson (I think), Hago Harrington, Dr. Charles Stewart.

Born in Carleton Place, Ontario, on a Wednesday of this same date in 1895, Dr. Charles Stewart was the second goaltender to take the net in the history of the Boston Bruins, making his debut on Christmas Day of 1924, after things didn’t quite work out with the team’s original goaler, Hec Fowler.

Stewart was a dentist, which explains his nickname, Doc, as well as the fact that he played in the Senior OHA for the Toronto Dentals, and (also) that he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Canadian Army Dental Corps towards the end of the First World War. In and around and after his hockey career, Stewart had a dental practice in Hamilton, Ontario.

The good Doc lines up with Boston for a 1926 game against Ottawa.

It was to Kingston that Bruins coach and manager Art Ross tracked Stewart in December of 1924. Hec Fowler’s demise is a whole other story: let’s just say that seven games into the Bruins’ debut season, he had worn out his welcome. As well as drilling and capping teeth in Hamilton, Stewart was playing for the local OHA Tigers that winter, and Montreal’s Gazette reported that while Ross was offering him $2,500 to make the jump from amateur to pro ranks, as well paying living expenses in Boston, and the rent on his Hamilton practice, Stewart was holding out for $1,000 more.

I can’t say for certain what they settled on, just that Stewart was in Montreal on the 25th to defend the Bruins’ net against the Montreal Canadiens. Boston lost, 0-5, though Stewart’s effort was roundly praised. He and his Bruins had to wait another five games, until January 10, to celebrate his first win — still only the second in Bruins’ history — when Boston returned to Montreal to eke out a 3-2 overtime decision.

The Bruins finished dead last in the NHL that year, but things did improve the following season, 1925-26, when Doc Stewart went 16-14-4 to help the team to a fourth-place finish in the seven-team NHL. (They still didn’t make the playoffs.)

Stewart played half of the Bruins’ regular-season games the following year, 1926-27, his last in the NHL. That was a season that saw Boston go all the way to the Stanley Cup final, though they lost in four games to the Ottawa Senators. Stewart’s time in Boston was over by then: he played no part in those playoffs. By that point, he’d been supplanted by Hal Winkler.

hammer of the habs (and leafs, and hawks)

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Chicago, Start and Finish: Born a butcher’s son in Hamilton, Ontario, on a Tuesday of this date in 1892, Dick Irvin did most of his growing up in Winnipeg. An outstanding centreman in his playing days, he served as the very first captain of the Chicago Black Hawks before a fractured skull put an end to his on-ice career in the late 1920s. As a coach, he won a Stanley Cup in Toronto along with three more in Montreal before making a return to Chicago for a single season in 1955-56. Dick Irvin died in 1957, at the age of 64; he  was elected to hockey’s Hall of Fame the following year.

today’s matinee: in 1933, the nhl played its first afternoon game

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Wing, Dinged: A year after they met in the NHL’s first afternoon game, Detroit and Chicago met in the Stanley Cup Finals. That’s Detroit’s Herbie Lewis taking the fall here, in the first game of the series, won (like the Cup itself) by Chicago. At right, numbered 2, is Chicago defenceman Taffy Abel.

The Chicago Black Hawks weren’t going anywhere on this date in March of 1933 — they already knew they’d be missing the Stanley Cup playoffs as they limped into the last weekend of the NHL regular season. Beset by injuries and under investigation, they might have been looking forward to the cease of hockey as a mercy that couldn’t come soon enough.

Still, that March 19, the Black Hawks did have one last home game to play, and they made history playing it. That Sunday, along with the visiting Detroit Red Wings, Chicago took part in the first afternoon game in NHL history.

About 6,000 spectators showed up for a game that faced-off at 3.30 p.m. instead of the usual 8.30. When it came to the gate, that was a better number than the last time the Hawks had played at Chicago Stadium, earlier in March, when they beat the Ottawa Senators in front of a crowd of just 3,000. Two days before that, at their previous (nighttime) Sunday game, the crowd that saw them fall to the Toronto Maple Leafs was 7,000.

A few other notes from the Detroit game: the first-place Red Wings prevailed on the afternoon by a score of 4-2, getting goals from Hap Emms, Ron Moffat, Doug Young, and Eddie Wiseman. Mush March scored both Chicago goals. By a Detroit account, the game was a “free-swinging battle” wherein “two fist fights and a free-for-all narrowly were averted;” referee Cooper Smeaton called 11 penalties. Chicago defenceman Roger Jenkins suffered a gash to a cheek that needed four stitches to close. Another Chicago blueliner suffered a worse fate: Billy Burch left the game with a compound fracture of the left leg after he went into the boards with Detroit winger Frank Carson.

It turned out to be the last game of Burch’s distinguished career. At 32, he was playing his 11th NHL season. Starting in 1922 with the late, lamented Hamilton Tigers, he’d was a fast forward in those years, winning the Hart Trophy as the league’s MVP in 1925. When the Tigers sank, he went to New York, where he prospered as the first captain of the expansion Americans. He’d be elected, eventually, to the Hall of hockey Fame; 1930swise, the news was that he was back on skates again by the fall of 1933, trading in stick for whistle as a referee in the minor Can-Am League.

Also in the house in Chicago that March afternoon was NHL President Frank Calder. He was on a mission to investigate the conduct of Chicago coach Tommy Gorman who, five days earlier, had pulled his team off the ice in Boston, forfeiting the game to the Bruins after a dispute over a goal Boston scored in overtime. The latter wasn’t sudden-death at the time, so there was still some time to be played, or would have been, except for the fracas that saw Chicago players attacking goal judge, and Gorman exchanging punches with referee Bill Stewart. In the aftermath, Stewart ejected Gorman, who took his team with him; that’s where the forfeit came in.

I don’t know that Calder took any further action, for all the fuss that was stirring in the days that followed. It’s possible Chicago was fined $1,000 for departing the ice; otherwise, the team’s punishment seems to have been to subside away into the off-season.

A year later, the Black Hawks found a better way to end their season’s story when they made it all the way to the Finals, meeting and beating the Detroit Red Wings to take Chicago’s first Stanley Cup. Mush March scored the goal that clinched the championship.

Hawks Asquawk: A Chicago crew of a slightly later vintage, circa 1938. From left, that’s Jack Shill, Carl Voss, Cully Dahlstrom, and Mush March making some noise.

harry howell, 1932—2019

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Harry Howell’s adjectives as a Hall-of-Fame NHL defenceman included smart and steady, efficient, and unostentatious, but it’s Roger Angell’s description of his late-career blueline style in 1967 that I hold dear: “Howell,” he wrote in The New Yorker, “has the reassuring, mistake-proof elegance of a veteran waiter managing a loaded tray in heavy dinner traffic.”

Born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1932, Howell died on Saturday at the age of 86. Appreciations of his life and times that you might want to attend: Scott Radley’s for The Hamilton Spectator and, at NHL.com, this one by Dave Stubbs.

Howell was 20 when he joined the New York Rangers in 1952. Three years later, he was appointed captain of the team, though he relinquished the role after two seasons, handing the C to Red Sullivan. “Handsome Harry voluntarily gave up the post,” The New York Daily News reported at the time, “agreeing that the weight of the job had affected his play.” It couldn’t have helped that the fans in New York had started to boo him and his relentless (if not exactly electrifying) competence.

“It was quite a relief,” Howell said, years later. “I added about ten pounds to my playing weight and I turned my game around right away.”

The fans forgave, or forgot, or learned to appreciate Howell’s game. In all, he skated in 17 seasons for the Rangers, and he remains the club’s all-time leader in games played, with 1,194. He ended his NHL years on the west coast, serving with stints with the Los Angeles Kings, Oakland Seals, and California Golden Seals. He played three years in the WHA, for the New York Golden Blades/Jersey Knights, the San Diego Mariners, and the Calgary Cowboys.

He was 35 in 1967 when he won the Norris Trophy as the league’s best defenceman, edging out Chicago’s Pierre Pilote and Boston’s 19-year-old rookie Bobby Orr. “I’m glad I won it this year,” Howell said when he took the trophy in hand, “because I think some other guy is going to win it for the next decade.” He was close: Orr would win the Norris in each of the next eight years. They would enter the Hall of Fame, as it happened, together, in 1979.

In January of 1968, the Rangers celebrated Howell’s stout service ahead of his 1,002nd NHL game. New York was playing Boston that night at Madison Square Garden, and would beat them by a score of 2-1. Ahead of the hockey, Howell, along with his wife Marilyn, and the couple’s two children (11-year-old Cheryl and seven-year-old Daniel), stood at centre ice to receive a shower of gifts. Other NHL teams had organized nights  like this, for it was a first for the Rangers. I promise you I’m not inventing any of this. As reported in the press that week, the inventory included:

A set of Ben Hogan woods and irons
A golf-club membership (“paid-up”)

A three-piece set of luggage

A cartoon of Howell (“laminated”)

Kent cigarettes (“cartons of”)
Cigars (“from 21 Club”)

Binoculars
A pool cue

A razor and a year’s supply of blades
Revlon cosmetics

A set of encyclopedias (32 volumes)

A hat
A dozen Gant shirts
Golf shirts
Two pairs of custom-made golf slacks
A ski outfit
A bespoke mohair suit
Thread (50 spools)

Roses for Mrs. Howell before every Rangers’ game played on a Wednesday night
Ten beauty-parlor appointments for Mrs. Howell

A vacation at Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel, near Liberty, New York
Dinner at a Hamilton, Ontario hotel
A month’s stay at Glen Oaks Village, in Queens, New York
A night at the Upstairs at the Downstairs nightclub, New York
A two-week vacation in Palm Beach, Florida
Swimming-pool privileges at Loew’s Midtown Hotel, New York
Dinner at Toots Shor’s restaurant, New York

A pair of children’s bicycles

A gas barbecue
An electric frying pan
An electric blender
A dishwasher (also “electric”)
A portable stereo (RCA)
25 record albums
A radio
A portable TV
An 8mm movie camera and lighting equipment
An 8mm projector and screen
A colour film of the evening’s proceedings
A hairdryer (“women’s”)

A Christmas tree (“seven-foot artificial”)

A year’s supply of cheese (“from Finland”) and hams (“Polish”)

A week’s rental from Avis Rent-A-Car
Four tires
Gasoline vouchers

The final gift, driven out on the ice by two of Howell’s former teammates, Red Sullivan and Lou Fontinato, was a 1967 Mercury Cougar.

(Top image: Frank Prazak, Library and Archives Canada)

little green

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Born on this date in 1899 (when it was a Tuesday), Redvers was the younger of the Green brothers who played in the early NHL; Wilfred was three years older. They were Sudbury boys who started out skating for their hometown Wolves before they found a way into the big time in 1923 with the Hamilton Tigers, where they were known, respectively, as Red and Shorty. Red (pictured here, for some reason, on bare concrete) played on the left wing, Shorty on the right. Shorty was the team’s captain in 1925, and he was at the fore when the players went on strike at the end of the season. They didn’t get the money they were angling for; instead, the NHL suspended the team and saw it sold to buyers in New York. Most of the former Tigers ended up there the following season, repackaged as Americans in star-spangled red-white-and-blue uniforms like the one Red Green is styling here.

Shorty ascended to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1963. For Red, his best night was back in Hamilton, in December of 1924, when he scored five goals on John Ross Roach of Toronto’s St. Patricks.

“The little fellow from the northland was tireless,” said the papers next day. Also: “Goalkeeper Roach never had a chance. These fleet Hamilton players were merciless. They just naturally beat the defense with the greatest possible ease, and when they let the puck go there was a zip and a sting behind it that spelled goal.” Final score: 10-3.

pat quinn, 1943—2014

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1971-72 O-Pee-Chee #122 Pat Quinn

Roy MacGregor’s requiem at The Globe and Mail is the one I’d send you to, here, followed by Steve Milton’s tribute at The Hamilton Spectator and this one that Rosie DiManno wrote for The Toronto Star. I’d quote Trevor Linden, who said earlier on Monday, “We have lost a great man. It’s a sad day for hockey and for everyone who loves our game.” Then I’d leave it at that.

(Photo: The Want List, hockeymedia, on flickr)