Hab At It: A team of Canadiens-inspired pee-wees (names, unfortunately, not included in the archival record) on the ice at the Gerry Murphy Arena in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories on Thursday, March 31, 1955. (Image: NWT Archives / Henry Busse fonds / N-1979-052)
Just Add Ice: Toronto’s Moss Park Girls’ Hockey Team lines up for a late-season photograph on April 15, 1922. The names of players and coach are, unfortunately, missing from the record. (Image:City of Toronto Archives, Arthur Goss, Arthur, Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 52, Item 998) City of Toronto Archives
http://www.toronto.ca/archives
Bench Strength: Abby Hoffman, all-star blueliner, with the OHA St. Catharines juniors in March of 1956. (Image: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 3184)
Now 74, Abby Hoffman tore through an athletics career that saw her win Pan-American gold running the 800 metres and representing Canada in track and field in four Olympic Games from 1964 through to 1976. In 1956, when she was nine years old, she was making front-page news in her hometown on the hockey rink when officials in the Little Toronto Hockey League determined that she was … a girl.
“She begged us to do something about getting her on a hockey team,” her mother, Dorothy, recounted. “She went down to the THL when the season started and she was taken on a boys team, even though she had to present her birth certificate. Later I got a call from a very nice gentleman who said he would like ‘our boy’ to play on one of the teams. We didn’t have the heart to tell him the boy was a girl and spoil her chances of playing.”
“Ab” Hoffman played defence for the St. Catharines Tee Pees; it was when she was selected to play in the league’s all-star game that it the league discovered that she was Abigail. This was page-one copy in The Toronto Daily Star this week in ’56: she had played “more than a dozen games over the past four months with her team without arousing the suspicions of league officials, her coach, her manager, or her 15 teammates.”
“League officials,” the Canadian Press advised, “at first debated her eligibility to play … but decided to let her continue.”
By the following week, newspapers across Canada were reporting on Hoffman’s whirlwind weekend.
She collected an assist in her team’s 5-0 win over St. Michael’s.
Having sold $30 worth of tickets to the LTHL all-star game, she learned she’d earned a brand-new batch of hockey equipment.
On the Saturday night, she attended her very first NHL game, witnessing the local Maple Leafs dispatch the New York Rangers by a score of 5-2.
Sunday, she was out on the Maple Leaf Gardens ice, skating as the mascot for the OHA Junior A St. Catharines Tee Pees and giving a solo skating exhibition between periods, as well as climbing to the arena’s famous gondola for a radio interview.
She also prompted the league to set up a three-day hockey school for girls. Five days after the Hoffman story broke, LTHL chairman Earl Graham reported that “an appeal for would-be girl hockey players produced 40 applicants, ranging in age from six to 15.”
The following Friday was the all-star game. Hoffman’s team prevailed 1-0 over their Hamilton opposition. She didn’t score, but according to a Canadian Press dispatch, “little Abi [sic] outskated and outchecked her nine-year-old opponents with the gusto of a major leaguer.”
Winners Take It All: Posing in Toronto on a Saturday of this same date in 1928, the players and coach of the Permanent Centre team manage to hold it together after winning their house-league championship. (Image: Arthur Goss, City of Toronto Archives,Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 52, Item 1338)
Strategy Sesh: With the chimneys of the International Nickel Company — Inco — doing their work in the Sudbury background, members of Copper Cliff’s midget team gather to talk hockey at their school in March of 1946. (Image: John F. Mailer, National Film Board of Canada/Library and Archives Canada)
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