(Artist: Victor De Pauw)
New York Americans
rabbit redux
Probably best to count Rabbit McVeigh’s account of his military service as more of a general, gestural recap rather than a finely tuned testimony. That’s not to doubt how harrowing the whole experience must have been.
“I went to the World War,” he told Harold Burr of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1931. “I was three years overseas, 24 months in the trenches and five more months in the hospital. On April 9th, 1917, at 6 a.m. I went over the top at Vimy Ridge. I was hit in the stomach and caught the flu. My body was a punching bag for doctors’ needles. Every inch of me became an inoculation. I came out of it pretty deaf. I wore kilts with the 16th Canadian Scottish Battalion.”
“And then,” McVeigh said, “I returned to Canada to play hockey.”
Burr described him as “a man who has seen many dread things and the memory still lives with him. ”
Born in Kenora, Ontario, on a Sunday of yesterday’s date in 1898, he was Charles, or Charley, McVeigh to begin with. It was his habit of leaping over outstretched sticks on the rush that in junior hockey McVeigh earned the nicknames Jumping Jack and Rabbit.
He arrived in the NHL at the age of 28, starting with the Chicago Black Hawks as a centreman before a trade (for Alex McKinnon) took him to the New York Americans in 1928. He played seven seasons with New York, often on right wing. His best offensive season came in 1929-30, when he scored 14 goals and 28 points in 40 games.
with a beaver on top
Glory For Goalers: The Vézina Trophy was first awarded (beaver and all) in 1927.
And so to the question of the winter: what’s with the beaver marooned atop the Vézina Trophy?
Well, it was a question, last month, when Jeff Marek of Sportsnet pronounced his puzzlement as he and Elliotte Friedman went to air with their 32 Thoughts podcast from Victoria, B.C., ahead of the network’s annual Hockey Day in Canada jamboree.
Around the 50-minute mark is where you’ll hear the discussion, if you’re tuning in.
“If you’ve listened to the podcast long enough, you know that I have these white whales, these questions that I’m obsessed with,” Marek confessed. “In 1926, they put a beaver on top of the Vézina Trophy, Elliotte.”
“I cannot figure out why there’s a beaver on top of the Vézina Trophy.”
Marek said he’d asked Phil Pritchard, VP of the Hockey Hall of Fame and renowned “Keeper of the [Stanley] Cup,” but even he (“Phil knows everything”) had no idea.
Friedman, who did not sound similarly obsessed, offered his humouring take: “Big Canadian symbol.”
“No,” Marek assured him, “this was before it was the national animal, though. This is years before it became the national symbol.”
That was all there was to it. But before moving on to the next item of hockey interest, Marek appealed for help in solving the mystery of the Vézina beaver.
First thing I’d say? I get it. I’m a fan of white whales, by which I mean, I guess, albino rodents: I have a whole menagerie of those. Marek’s preoccupation is an absolutely worthy one.
As an enthusiast of hockey oddments and eccentricities, I also endorse what I’m guessing might be his wish for a more or less outlandish origin story. I myself would like nothing more than to discover that Georges Vézina’s family, back in Chicoutimi, were prodigious beaver wranglers going back centuries. Or what if — even better — the goaltender himself kept a buck beaver as a pet in Montreal during the hockey season, and that this beaver was named Samuel Hearne?
Alas, I have no such revelations to unleash here. To be clear: I come to you with no definitive evidence related to the choices made in designing the trophy in the 1920s much less the origin of the Castor canadensis Vézina. What I can offer, and will, are some fairly straightforward general speculations leading to a narrower possibility regarding the origin of the Vézina beaver relating to a second prominent NHL trophy. The possibility, I think, is a strong one.
So here goes.
First, Elliotte Friedman is right.
War Effort: Poster advertising Canadian Victory Bonds in 1918 or a national Hire-A-Beaver campaign? (Image: Library and Archives Canada)
The beaver was indeed emblematic of all things Canada and Canadian in the 1920s, had been for years. When Marek says that the Vézina was minted years before the beaver was a national symbol, I think he’s probably talking about the official status that Canada’s Parliament granted our dampest and most beloved rodent as a representative of our sovereignty. The National Symbols of Canada Act received royal assent on March 24, 1975.
But as the government points out on its helpful symbols info page, the beaver has been a part of our identity for so much longer, to the point that in our enthusiasm for beavers, and for wearing them as hats, we nearly, as a developing British colony, wiped them out with the lustiness of our fur trading. Beaver pelts, it’s been said, were our first currency; also, as per Margaret Atwood, “Canada was built on dead beavers.”
In 1987, it’s not necessarily salient to mention, but still, back then when Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government was negotiating a free trade agreement with the eagle-associated United States, Atwood testified before a parliamentary committee about what she saw as the potential dangers of such a pact.
“Our national animal,” she memorably said that November day, “is the beaver, noted for its industrious habits and co-operative spirit. In medieval bestiaries, it is also noted for its habit. When frightened, of biting off its testicles and offering them to its pursuers. I hope we are not succumbing to some form of that impulse.”
Startling stuff, if not actually borne out by facts: beavers do not do this. Still, it’s a myth that goes back beyond medieval times, to the ancient Greeks and Roman; while it’s not one of his fun ones, Aesop has a fable about this. The thinking was that the beaver, much hunted for its store of valuable castoreum oil carried in a nether gland, would make the dreadful choice to surrender its testicles to save its life.
Back on the all-Canadian symbolism of beavers … well, I probably don’t need to go on, but I will.
A beaver adorned Canada’s very first stamp, the Three-Pence Beaver, issued in 1851.
Beavers have served long and honorably on the badges of many Canadian Army regiments, including the Royal 22e Régiment, the infantry’s storied Van Doos. Going back to peltries, the venerable old Hudson’s Bay Company may now just be a holding company, but featured on its coat of arms that hasn’t changed since the 17th century are no fewer than four beavers (flanked by two mooses).
As reader Matthieu Trudeau points out, another foundational Canadian company, the Canadian Pacific Railway had a recumbent beaver atop its arms from 1886 to 1968.
The Bank of Montreal lodged a beaver within its original coat of arms in 1837. When the bank officially registered its arms in 1934, it doubled its beavers — adding, too, a pair of what the bank describes today as “Indigenous figures.”
Toronto’s 1834 coat of arms.
And then there are cities, of course, lots of those, including Montreal and Toronto. When William Lyon Mackenzie designed the latter’s original coat of arms in 1834, Montreal had already had its first edition in place for a year, designed by the first mayor, Jacques Viger, featuring double beavers.
Interestingly, in 1921, when government officially authorized (with King George V’s approval) the Arms of Canada, a stout unicorn, rampant lions, and a bosomy harp all made the cut, but no beaver. (The harp lost its bust in later renovations.)
No-Beaver Zone: The Arms of Canada, officially authorized in 1921, shunned our best-loved sodden, ratty rodent. (Image: Library and Archives Canada)
Regarding the beaver deficit, Thomas Mulvey, undersecretary for state and a member of the design committee, addressed this at the time. You don’t have to like it, but I don’t know if you can fault the reasoning. “The Committee having charge of the recommendation of Arms,” he said,
considered fully the suggestion that the Beaver should be included, and it was decided that as a member of the Rat Family, a Beaver was not appropriate and would not look well on the device. One example of the objections raised is quite well known. The Canadian Merchant Marine displayed a Beaver on their House-Flag, and they have ever since been colloquially known as ‘The Rat Line.’ As your correspondent says, the Lion is not the representative of Canada except in so far as Canada is a part of the British Empire, and in this connection it was considered appropriate to have the Lion hold the Maple Leaf.
I don’t know if heraldry has coined a term for a self-harming animals, but it does have one for those posing in the position that Georges Vézina’s beaver has assumed, which is couchant, “lying down with head raised.”
An upright (begging?) beaver tops hockey’s John Ross Robertson Cup (Intermediate) from 1910.
I should say, also, before we go too much further, that hockey trophies did regularly adorn themselves with beavers in the sport’s early era. John Ross Robertson, newspaper publisher, MP, and president of the OHA, donated three trophies for amateur hockey in his time, including a John Ross Robertson Cup for intermediate hockey in 1910 that features a beaver on top. He is definitely non-couchant, I would note, affecting more of an upright, supplicating posture. (The 1899 senior-hockey JRR Cup features fearsome clambering lions.)
First presented in 1921, when the Dominion Bank prevailed, the Canadian Bankers Hockey Association Challenge Cup also boasts a beaver. He is couchant, but in an alert kind of way, as though he’s ready to leap at any moment to a safer perch.
The Canadian Bankers Hockey Association Challenge Cup, first awarded in 1921.
As of January, both of these beavered trophies are on display at Toronto’s Hockey Hall of Fame, just downstairs from the Great Hall where the Vézina (and the Prince of Wales) reside.
Turning to the specific case of the trophy that the NHL awards annually to the most puck-resistant of its goaltenders, here’s where I posit my theory that the Vézina beaver took its cue from the ornamentation of another NHL trophy that came to be in the mid-1920s.
Georges Vézina’s shocking death came in March of 1926, when he was 39. Already, by then, the NHL’s collection of silverware was in a full-on growth spurt.
The proud old Stanley Cup (b. 1893) was firmly established, of course, at the top of the food chain, and the O’Brien Trophy was still kicking around. Simple as it was in its early incarnation, the Stanley Cup had a grandeur to it, battered through it was. The O’Brien (1910), by comparison, was more exuberant — grandiloquent, even. Commissioned by Senator Michael J. O’Brien, the logging and mining magnate who helped launch the NHA, it was fashioned from silver from a Cobalt, Ontario, mine of his, as well as bronze reliefs, and wood, with hunkered hockey players on top.
When the NHA disappeared in November of 1917 and was instantly resurrected as the NHL, the new league stocked its trophy cabinet with just those two. There were no trophies, yet, recognizing individual achievement.
The first came along in in March of 1924, when Montreal physician Dr. David A. Hart (father of Canadiens’ director and soon-to-be coach Cecil Hart) donated a cup to celebrate the NHL’s most valuable player. Frank Nighbor, captain of the Ottawa Senators won the first of those. A year later, when Her Excellency The Lady Byng of Vimy donated her cup, honouring (and hoping to further encourage) gentlemanly hockey, Nighbor was the winner again.
In design, both of those cups were serviceable if fairly rudimentary.
Not so the next trophy to arrive on the NHL scene. In the fall of 1925, when the future King Edward VIII saw fit to bestow a trophy on the NHL, the one he sent over from London was a lavish one, said to be valued at C$2,500 — about $43,000 in today’s dollars.
What was he up to? Why the sudden interest in hockey?
Well, the then-Prince of Wales was Canada’s king-in-waiting, and that might have been reason enough to attempt to ingratiate himself with the population for sending over a hockey trophy. He was a keen sportsman, too, and actually had demonstrated a not so new keenness for hockey as recently as February of 1924, when he received the Canadian Olympic hockey team, who’d just won gold at Chamonix, in his residence at St. James’ Palace in London.
The Prince had an arm in a sling from an unspecified accident, so he had to shake with his left, which he did, whereupon he “started a general conversation about hockey on which he showed himself well posted,” the Toronto Daily Star remarked. He a was a skater, he said. He told them that he liked hockey, but whenever he was in Canada, it was the wrong season for attending a game. These were the Granites he was meeting, Dunc Munro, Hooley Smith, et al., so the Prince played to his crowd and told them that he though Toronto “must be a wonderful hockey centre.”
It’s worth remembering that the Prince of Wales was also in the 1920s a Canadian homeowner, having bought a ranch in Pekisko, Alberta (near High River) in 1919. He spent time there after seeing our Olympians, during a North American tour in the summer of ’24, which meant that he still didn’t get to a hockey game. This Canadian jaunt may well have focussed his thinking, though.
Did he ever get to an NHL game? I don’t know about that; I don’t think so.
H.R.Hockeyness: The Prince of Wales Trophy made its debut in 1925.
It was a year later that the Prince of Wales Trophy, tall and silvery, arrived on the scene.
It had its coming-out party in New York, where it debuted on opening night for the NHL at the old Madison Square Garden as the brand-new New York Americans took on the Montreal Canadiens in December of 1925. The winner of that game would claim the trophy, and keep it until the end of the season, it was announced. After that, it would be awarded to the NHL champion, annually. (The Stanley Cup remained hockey’s ultimate prize, with teams from the western leagues still in the running, for another year.)
The mayor-elect of New York, Jimmy Walker, presented the new trophy to the Canadiens when they beat the Americans by a score of 3-1. This might have been the Prince’s best chance to get himself to a hockey game but, no, he was otherwise occupied, in London, where he was presiding that day back at St. James’ Palace in his role as Grand President of the League of Mercy, something that the NHL of this era was definitely not.
The Prince of Wales Trophy would, in subsequent years, shift its identity. After the NHL took over the Stanley Cup for its very own in 1927, it became the reward for the team finishing atop the standings of the NHL’s American Division while the O’Brien went to the top team on the Canadian side. In subsequent years, its meaning changed no fewer than five more times
In the meantime, the Canadiens took the P of W with them back to Montreal. Leo Dandurand was the co-owner and managing director and so it was under his watch that the new trophy was sent to the engravers, to have the team’s name etched upon it … twice. Sounds like a bit of a liberty, but the Canadiens saw fit to recognize not just that single-game 1925 win, but also, retrospectively, their 1923-24 NHL championship.
In the spring of 1926, the Prince of Wales Trophy went on public display in downtown Montreal, in the window of Mappin & Webb, the fancy English jeweller and silversmiths, at 353 St. Catherine Street West, east of the Forum.
The Canadiens’ new silverware notwithstanding, this was a sad season in Montreal. Vézina had played just a single period in the team’s opening game in November of ’25. He was diagnosed soon after with tuberculosis and in early December, departed Montreal for his hometown of Chicoutimi. By the time Montreal got to New York in December, the team was on its second replacement, having just signed Herb Rheaume (who made his debut the night the won the Prince of Wales) to see whether he was an improvement over Frenchy Lacroix, who’d been trying to hold the fort.
Vézina’s wife, Stella, was soon writing to Dandurand with what seemed like hopeful tidings. “Georges was getting right down to obeying doctor’s orders,” was how the Montreal Daily Star reported the somewhat awkward upshot of her letter. “He was keeping to his bed and sleeping outdoors right along. Her husband had no fever at the time Mrs. Vézina penned her message, she said.”
He didn’t recover, of course. Georges Vézina died in hospital in Chicoutimi on March 27, 1926 at the age of 39.
And the beaver? Yes, getting there. At some point in the months that followed, Dandurand and the Canadiens decided to donate a trophy in his name. Maybe this was already in motion during the last months of his illness. This is where I think — and this, I emphasize, is only conjecture on my part — I’m proposing that the Vézina’s design was influenced by that of the Prince of Wales Trophy.
Again, there’s no public record of the decision-making process, nothing on who designed the trophy itself. A Montreal newspaper did describe the opulence of the Prince of Wales Trophy on view that month to passersby of Mappin & Webb:
The cup, emblematic of the National Hockey League championship, is of solid silver; stands, with base, over three feet, and is surmounted with silver fleurs-de-lys, under which is engraved the Prince’s motto, “Ich Dien.” The main body of the trophy is supported by four silver hockey sticks, which are “taped” with strips of gold. Resting on the base are four gold hockey pucks, while a block of crystal, rough-cut to represent a small lump of ice, is placed in the centre of the stand, underneath the cup. On the face of the trophy, in raised letters on a silver plate, is the inscription. “H.R.H. the Prince of Wales Trophy.” The Canadian arms in gold are inserted on the reverse, while a silver frieze of pine-cone design encircles the cup.
It really is something to see. The only thing missing in that description is the fact that the American arms appear, too, in gold, on the front of the trophy, complete with resplendent eagle and scrolled U.S. motto (in Latin), “E pluribus unum,”(“Out of many, one”) to go with the Prince’s German maxim, “I serve.”
Canada’s own Latin reminder, I will note, is missing from the Prince of Wales Trophy, “A Mari Usque Ad Mare” “From Sea to Sea.” I don’t know why that is, but I can speak to the absence of any castor canadensis: because, as discussed, the beaver was left off the Canadian arms for its rattiness, none features on the Prince of Wales Trophy among the profusion of thistles, maple leaves, galleons, lions, or fishes depicted there.
So here’s my thinking. As Leo Dandurand considered what a Vézina Trophy might look like, the Prince of Wales was on his mind. For all its lustre, it was lacking Canadian motifs. Did that catch his attention? The description of the Cup in the window forgets to mention that the P of W is topped by a silvery rendering of three ostrich feathers encircled by a gold coronet, another royal enhancement.
It’s just possible that Dandurand was in a conversation with those feathers when he decided on the design of the new Vézina. (If it was, indeed, him.) If he wasn’t going to match the Prince of Wales in extravagance, maybe it was enough to answer its symbols. I’m not going to call the Vézina’s design a repudiation of the Prince of Wales and its ostrich plumage, but if you were in a repudiating mood, how better to express it than with a puck and a beaver? Are there two better assertions of Canadian sovereignty?
There is, of course, the problem of scale: that is the question of the moment, for me, about the Vézina (Jeff Marek is welcome to join in any subsequent investigation): why is the beaver atop the Vézina dwarfed by the puck he’s summited?
The first public notice that was trophy was a reality came in May of 1927, at a post-season banquet in Montreal honouring another Hab superstar, Howie Morenz.
The Montreal Daily Star was there to report it: “Leo Dandurand told those present that the directors of the club had held a meeting and definitely decided the conditions under which the cup would be won. It will be called the Georges Vézina Memorial Cup, and will go to the goalkeeper in the National Hockey League, who is adjudged best. He must have the best all-round average.”
It doesn’t sound like the trophy itself attended that event in May. It would seem to have been out and about not so long afterwards, though: in August of 1927, Vézina’s hometown paper weighed in with a review. “The Vézina Trophy is one of the finest works of art the league can boast and is a worthy tribute to the legacy of the famous Vézina,” declared the Progrès du Saguenay from Chicoutimi.
The first winner was, fittingly, the man who’d taken over Vézina’s net at the beginning of the 1926-27 season, Montreal’s own George Hainsworth. His ongoing excellence might be considered as another tribute to Vézina’s legacy: Hainsworth hung on to the trophy for a further two seasons after that.
jakie forbes: shone like a great searchlight
Vernon Forbes died on Monday, December 30, 1985, at the age of 88. In his years as an NHL goaltender he was better known as Jake or Jakie or Jumping Jake/Jakie, the latter for his acrobatic tendencies when it came to stopping pucks. He started his career doing that (as pictured here, in the early 1920s) for the Toronto St. Patricks. He subsequently starred on NHL ice for the Hamilton Tigers and New York Americans and (briefly) the Philadelphia Quakers before hanging up his pads. He made some history with those in 1924, back in Hamilton, when Forbes was the first to don a new kind of lighter, broader leg-guard, rendered in horsehide-and-kapok by local harnessmaker Pop Kenesky, that would quickly replace the traditional goaling pads shown here and duly revolutionized goaliewear.
“His old pads weighed 17 pounds each,” Kenesky said in 1969. “I made him some that weighed only seven pounds together. They started callin’ him Jumpin’ Jakie. He could almost jump over the net, he was so light.”
There’s no mention of pads new or old in an Ottawa Journal report of a meeting in Ottawa between Hamilton and the old Senators from December of 1924, but Forbes was a feature on the night. It was an historic one in that it marked the first time in the NHL’s eight-year history that two teams played a goalless game. A full 20-minute period of overtime solved nothing and the game ended in a 0-0 tie.
“Cocky and confident,” the Journal called Forbes. “Since the day of the old masters like Paddy Moran, Percy Lesueur, and Riley Hern to the present luminous lights of the braided cord such as Vézina, Roach, and Benedict,” the paper’s correspondent cooed, “no greater display of net-minding has been witnessed than that shown by Forbes.” Accompanying the report was a sketch, reproduced here, in which Forbes’ pads look like old-style cricket pads, kind of, mostly — don’t they? (This photo of the Tigers that same season would seem to show Forbes sporting his new Kenesky pads.) In December, in the 0-0 game, Alec Connell was the Ottawa goaltender, and he was also obviously flawless, but as the Journal explained, Forbes “shone like a searchlight in a coal mine” insofar as Ottawa had more shots and better chances at scoring. The Montreal Gazette picked up the Journal account of the game, retaining almost all of the acclaim, but dropping the coal mine: Forbes, in Montreal, was said to have “shone like a great searchlight.”
outstanding in his field
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)
starred & striped
Sen, Amerk, Eagle, Bruin: Of the four NHL teams for which the Jeff Kalbfleisch worked the defence in the 1930s, only Boston’s Bruins remain. Born in New Hamburg, Ontario, on a Monday of this date in 1911, Kalbfleisch’s NHL exploits are hardly ever sung, but he did do brief duty as well for the (original) Ottawa Senators as well as the New York Americans and St. Louis Eagles. He played in 41 NHL games in all, regular-season and playoff, without breaking through for a goal, though he did earn four assists. Kalbfleisch died in 1960 at the age of 48.
boston legend … howie morenz? in 1926, it’s true, montreal’s eternal star was briefly a bruin
Hurtling Howie: With his Canadiens eliminated from the NHL playoffs in the spring of 1926, he played in exhibitions for the New York Americans and Boston Bruins.
To note that Howie Morenz was a better New York American, on balance, than he was a Boston Bruin doesn’t change the fact that Stratford’s own Streak played his best hockey for the Montreal Canadiens, but it does register as a bit of a surprise, doesn’t it?
Yes, it’s true: while you won’t find it notated in any official hockey reference, there was a frenetic stretch in 1926 when Montreal’s young superstar ended up playing for three different NHL teams in four days, including the Americans and the Bruins. He wasn’t supposed to be playing at all that spring: in the many-chaptered book of Morenz’s painful medical history, this was the year he injured and re-injured an ankle that probably could have done with an early retirement that season.
All but forgotten in the hurry of years, the games in question were only exhibitions, which is why they don’t show up in any duly constituted ledger of hockey achievement, wherein Hall-of-Famer Morenz is correctly shown to have played out his foreshortened NHL time with the Canadiens (14 seasons), Chicago’s Black Hawks (parts of two seasons), and New York’s Rangers (one season).
Morenz’s brief Bruins career wasn’t enough to get him recognized this fall as one of Boston’s legendariest 100 players. He wouldn’t make any Americans’ pantheon, either, if there were such a thing (the Amerks, of course, reached their sad NHL end in 1942, after 17 seasons in the league). He does still have the statue in front of Montreal’s Bell Centre, so that’s a solace.
Here’s how it all went down in 1926.
Morenz was 23 that year. Montreal’s hurtling superstar was in his third NHL season. He had a new number on his back, incidentally: for some reason in 1925-26, Morenz switched for one year only to the number six sweater from his famous seven, which centreman Hec Lepine inherited. (Lepine was out of the league the following year, and Morenz was back to his old seven.)
In his rookie season, Morenz and his Canadiens had claimed the Stanley Cup by beating the WCHL’s Calgary Tigers. A year later, Montreal was back to defend its title, though on that occasion Lester Patrick’s WCHL Victoria Cougars prevailed. For 1925-26, the Canadiens might have been expected to challenge again for a championship, even with several key skaters having been subtracted from the squad, including the talented (and fearsome) Cleghorn brothers, Sprague and Odie.
The season did not, however, go as planned. Goaltender Georges Vézina was taken sick in Montreal’s first period of regular-season hockey that November. It was, shockingly, the last game he ever played: diagnosed with tuberculosis, the veteran star returned to his hometown of Chicoutimi, where his condition worsened as the winter went on.
That tragic recap is by way of background and goes some way to explaining how the Canadiens found themselves languishing at the bottom of the seven-team league’s standings as the calendar turned to March of 1926 and the end of the 36-game regular-season schedule. Archival records reflect that the players were making do on the ice as best they could in front of the contingency goaltending of Herb Rheaume; there’s no way of calculating the emotional weight they were carrying as their friend and teammate struggled for his life.
With the season winding down, the Canadiens played in Toronto on Thursday, March 11. Only the top three teams in the NHL would play in the post-season that year and Montreal had no chance, by then, of making the cut. They could, possibly, rise out of the cellar to surpass the St. Patricks, who they were set to face in two of their three final games that year.
The morning’s newspapers that same day broke the bad news from Chicoutimi that Vézina was close to death. A priest had administered the last rites and the goaltender (as the Montreal Daily Star reported) was “awaiting the sound of the last gong.”
The paper couldn’t resist framing the moment in sporting terms — and graphic detail. “Bright mentally, and fighting as hard against the disease which has him in its grip, as if he were still in the Canadien nets, his end is near, and physicians in attendance at his cot in the Chicoutimi Hospital, report that the slightest physical shock, which might result in the bursting of a small blood-vessel, would cause a fatal hemorrhage.”
The hockey went on, of course, as it usually tends to do. Morenz, interestingly, didn’t play, as the St. Patricks beat the visiting Canadiens 5-3 at the Mutual Street Arena, even though NHL records (erroneously) have him in the line-up for the game.
He stayed home to nurse his right ankle, injured originally in a February game against the Montreal Maroons when Babe Siebert knocked him down. The Gazette described the aftermath of that collision: “The Canadien flash came up with a bang against the Montreal goal post and remained on the ice doubled up. He had taken a heavy impact and had to be carried off the ice. Later examination revealed that, besides being severely jarred, Morenz had the tendon at the back of his ankle badly wrenched. With his departure from the game went the team’s one big scoring punch”
Morenz missed four February games after that before returning to the ice. But then in a March 9 game in Montreal against the Pittsburgh Pirates, he banged up the same ankle running into locomotive Lionel Conacher. Again he was carried from the ice.
When he missed the Maroons game, several newspapers reported that Morenz’s season was over. “His ankle is swollen up about twice its usual size and rest is the big thing for him now,” advised the Montreal Star.
Morenz himself didn’t get the message. He and his ankle missed the March 13 game against the Maroons, but returned to the ice for the Canadiens’ final game on March 16. They whomped the St. Patricks that night at the Mount Royal Arena by a score of 6-1. Morenz scored two goals, including the game-winner, and ended the season as Montreal’s top goal-getter (with 23), tied for most points (26) with linemate Aurèle Joliat.
The season may have been over, but Morenz was just getting going.
The Ottawa Senators, Montreal Maroons, and Conacher’s Pirates from Pittsburgh were the NHL teams that prospered that year: they were the ones, at least, that made the playoffs that would determine a league champion who would then take on the winner from the West for the Stanley Cup. (1926 was the final year for that model; in 1927 and ever after, only NHL teams played for the Cup.)
But just because the rest of the NHL was out of the playoffs didn’t mean they were finished. While there was still ice to be skated on, there was still money to be made: cue professional hockey’s busy barnstorming season. Extended series of post-season exhibition games were a staple of the 1920s and ’30s for NHL teams, and 1926 was particularly active.
First up for the Canadiens was a pair of games with their familiar rivals the Toronto St. Patricks. Two days after their final regular-season-ending game in Montreal, the two teams convened in Windsor, Ontario, to do battle again in pursuit of cash money offered by the owners of the city’s new rink, the Border Cities Arena. Windsor had a hankering for high-level hockey, and in the fall of ’26, the expansion Detroit Cougars would make the rink their home for the inaugural NHL season. In March, local fans packed the stands to the tune of 7,000 a night, witnessing the Canadiens beat Toronto 3-2 on Thursday, March 18 and 8-2 on Saturday, March 20 to take most of the prize money on offer. In the second game, Morenz put a pair of goals past Toronto netminder John Ross Roach.
He wasn’t finished. By Monday, Morenz was in New York, suiting up for Tommy Gorman’s New York Americans against Pete Muldoon’s WHL Portland Rosebuds a whole new raft of barnstorming games launched in U.S. rinks.
The Americans had just completed their first NHL season. With his star defenceman Bullet Joe Simpson out for the season with an ailing appendix, Gorman arranged to draft in Boston captain Sprague Cleghorn to take his place. There were conflicting accounts over the weekend on this count. It was reported that Morenz would play for the Rosebuds, also that Gorman had promised to line up Cleghorn and Morenz without having first consulted their respective managers, Art Ross and Léo Dandurand.
In the end, Cleghorn was ruled out with a bad knee and Morenz suited up for New York at Madison Square Garden. It’s not clear what he was paid for his one-and-done appearance in New York’s starry-and-striped uniform. The Rosebuds and Americans played a three-game series that week vying for $2,000 in prize money and a silver cup (supposedly) sponsored by the married (and 50 per cent Canadian) movie-star couple Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
Portland’s line-up was formidable, with Dick Irvin and Rabbit McVeigh leading the offense. They’d borrowed some players, too, from Vancouver and Calgary, respectively, in goaltender Hugh Lehman (a Stanley-Cup-winner and future Hall-of-Famer) and defenceman (and future Leafs’ coach) Art Duncan.
Morenz played centre and left on the night, lining up alongside Billy Burch and Shorty Green. Even on his aching ankle, he proved his mettle. “Morenz was decidedly the fastest on the ice,” Seabury Lawrence wrote in the New York Times. He scored both goals in New York’s 2-0 win. He later noted that he’d sweated off five-and-a-half pounds on the night, too, in Manhattan’s famously overheated rink, adding that he wouldn’t play an entire season in New York even if he were paid $10,000.
Morenz was back in Montreal colours the following night, Tuesday, March 23, when his Canadiens took on a revived Sprague Cleghorn and the Bruins at the Boston Arena. Art Ross, Boston’s 41-year-old coach and manager, got in on the fun, taking the ice as a winger for his team in the latter stages of Montreal’s 4-2 win. Morenz was kept off the scoresheet.
The two teams played again the following night at Providence, Rhode Island, one of the prospective sites for a team in the new minor American League. If anyone had any illusions that these exhibition were played in a friendly spirit, they would have set those aside after this 3-3 tie. “Bitter feeling developed between the teams shortly after the beginning of the second period,” the Boston Globe reported, and Art Ross (back on the bench for this game) threatened to withdraw his team from the ice after Canadiens captain Billy Coutu knocked Boston winger Carson Cooper unconscious.
The NHL championship was still to be decided: the Montreal Maroons didn’t wrest that from the clutches of Ottawa’s Senators until Saturday, March 27, and it would be a week-and-a-half later before they overcame the Victoria Cougars to claim the Stanley Cup.
Meanwhile, the barnstormers kept up their furious schedule, with several further cash prizes at stake in addition to the one at stake in New York. Portland won $1,200 of that by taking the second and third games against the Americans. In Windsor that same week, the WHL’s Saskatoon Sheiks lost out in the $5,000 two-game series they played in Windsor against the NHL’s Pittsburgh Pirates. Gorman’s Americans and the Rosebuds went to Windsor, too, the following week, playing another two-game, total-goal series and splitting their $5,000 pot. The Americans kept on going west after that: in April of 1926, they played a further five games against Tom Casey’s Los Angeles All-Stars at the year-old Palais de Glace arena. The NHLers won three, lost one, and tied another against L.A.’s finest, who featured former Seattle Metropolitans scoring star Bernie Morris and five-time-Stanley-Cup-winner Moose Johnson.
The Boston Globe‘s glad tidings in March of 1926.
But back to Morenz and his turn as a Bruin. That came on Friday, March 26, when the Bruins took on the Portland Rosebuds in Boston. Morenz played left wing and was joined in the line-up by his Canadiens’ teammate Billy Boucher. The Boston Globe wasn’t overly impressed: while the two Montrealers were seen to play fast hockey at points, the word was that they were conserving themselves for Montreal’s game the following night against the New York Americans in Providence. Final score: Rosebuds 2, Bruins 1. Rabbit McVeigh and Bobby Trapp scored for the winner, while Boston got its goal from Sailor Herbert. And just like that, underwhelmingly enough, Howie Morenz’s career as a Bruin was over.
The Montreal newspapers barely paid the game any attention at all. They were, it’s true, otherwise occupied, as the news broke overnight that Georges Vézina had died. That was the news in Montreal on Saturday, March 27, and it most likely the reason that the game Canadiens were supposed to play that night in Providence didn’t (so far as I can tell) go ahead.
Vézina was buried in his hometown on Tuesday, March 30, 1926. “The whole town was in mourning,” Le Droit reported, “and thousands of people attended the funeral.” He was, Le Soleil eulogized, “not only an incomparable hockey player, but also a model citizen, active, intelligent, industrious, and full of initiative.” There were floral tributes from Frank Calder of the NHL, the Mount Royal Arena, and the Toronto St. Patricks. Former teammates Joe Malone, Newsy Lalonde, Amos Arbour, Bert Corbeau, and Battleship Leduc sent telegrams of condolence. In Chicoutimi, the club whose nets Vézina had guarded for 15 years was represented by the team’s managing director Léo Dandurand, defenceman Sylvio Mantha, and trainer Eddie Dufour. No-one else? There’s a bit of a mystery there. “His teammates esteemed him highly, Le Progrès de Saguenay mentioned, cryptically. “A number of them were prevented by a setback from attending his funeral.”
And the hockey went on. At Montreal’s Forum, the Maroons and Cougars played for the Stanley Cup that weekend. Morenz and his teammates, meanwhile, skated out for one-and-two-thirds more games, too, taking the ice at the Mount Royal Arena on Sunday, April 4 and Monday, April 5. The rink was loaned for these occasions at no charge, as the Canadiens took on Newsy Lalonde’s WHL Saskatoon Sheiks in successive benefit games.
The first, on Sunday, raised money for Georges Vézina’s family. A crowd of 3,500 was on hand. Art Ross of the Bruins and Victoria Cougars’ manger Lester Patrick paid $25 each to referee the game, and Maroons president James Strachan gave $200 to drop the evening’s opening puck. The puck from the final game in which the goaltender had played in November of ’25 was auctioned off, as was the stick he’d used: Canadiens director Louis Letourneau secured the former for $200 and Canadiens winger Aurèle Joliat paid the same amount for the latter. All told, $3,500 was raised that evening — about $60,000 in 2023 terms.
Before the Vézina’s game began, the players stood bareheaded at centre ice while the band played “Nearer My God To Thee.” In goal for Saskatoon was George Hainsworth, who’d sign on to play for Montreal the following year. Along with Lalonde, Harry Cameron, Leo Reise, Corb Denneny, and Bun Cook featured for the Sheiks, who had a ringer of their own in the line-up in Ottawa Senators’ star defenceman King Clancy. The Canadiens prevailed on the night, winning the game by a score of 7-4 with Joliat scoring a hattrick. Howie Morenz scored their opening goal.
Monday night the teams met again for another worthy cause. The previous Tuesday, in the opening game of the Stanley Cup finals, Victoria winger Jocko Anderson had been badly injured in a collision with Babe Siebert of the Maroons. He was already playing with a broken hand that night; removed to hospital that night, he underwent surgery for a fractured right thigh and a dislocated hip. At 32, his hockey career was over.
A crowd of 3,000 turned out for Anderson’s benefit, raising some $1,500. Fans saw two partial games, both of which were refereed by Sprague Cleghorn and Léo Dandurand. To finish the night, a team of referees, active and retired, played a collection of former Montreal Wanderers for a two-period game that ended in a 2-2 tie. Art Ross led the old Wanderers, scoring both their goals, and they had 47-year-old Riley Hern in net, the goaltender who’d backstopped the team to four Stanley Cup championships starting in 1906. The team of refs featured Joe Malone, Cooper Smeaton, Cecil Hart, and Jerry Laflamme. The great Malone who, at 36, had been retired from the NHL for two years, scored a goal; he also tore a ligament in his right foot.
The Canadiens and Sheiks played another two-period game that night, with Montreal outscoring Saskatoon 8-4. The Sheiks were augmented by Ottawa defenceman Georges Boucher and his centreman brother, Frank, who’d soon be joining the fledgling New York Rangers. The unstoppable Howie Morenz scored a pair of goals on Saskatoon’s stand-in goaltender on the night, a local minor-leaguer named Paul Dooner.
Morenz’s tally for the post-season? After those reports in March said that he was finished for the season, he’d gone on to play almost-nine games for three different teams in 21 days, scoring nine goals.
Morenz still had a busy summer ahead of him. In June, he married Mary McKay at her parents; house in Montreal, at 2255 Rue Jeanne Mance. The Reverend J.G. Potter officiated; guests included Dandurand and his wife, along with Canadiens co-owners Letourneau and Joe Cattarinich; Cecil Hart, manager of the Stanley Cup champion Maroons; Canadiens captain Billy Coutu and Billy Boucher (and their wives); and brothers Odie and Sprague Cleghorn.
After the evening ceremony, the newlyweds caught an 11 p.m. train at the Bonaventure Station for points west: their honeymoon, the Montreal Star reported, would take them to “Stratford, Toronto, Niagara Falls, Chicago, and other parts.”
The Happy Couple: Montreal’s Star with the nuptial news in June of 1926.
grow ops: a quick history of hockey beards, playoff and otherwise
We’ve kept a close eye here at Puckstruck on the evolution of NHL grooming standards, combing through hockey’s history to investigate the league’s earliest moustaches while keeping an eye, too, on the hairstyles of the mid-century Boston Bruins as well as developments on Brent Burns’ face. And so, this past April, as the puck dropped on another season of hockey playoffs, Stan Fischler’s short video post for The Hockey News on the origin of playoff beards caught our interest. You can watch it here, or endure this quick synopsis: according to the venerable broadcaster and historian, the NHL’s favourite unshaven tradition began with the 1980 New York Islanders.
Fischler credits left winger Clark Gillies with the original idea. Heading into the playoffs that spring, Gillies pulled aside New York captain Denis Potvin and suggested that the team stow its razorblades. In Fischler’s imagining of the conversation that ensued goes something like this:
Potvin: Why?
Gillies: It’ll bring camaraderie to the team, we’ll be like the House of David, that baseball team where all these guys had beards.
Potvin: Okay.
And so it was. The Islanders stopped shaving and kept winning. “And guess what,” Fischler narrates: “by the time these guys reached the third round of the playoffs, they all were pretty bearded. They all looked great.” In the Finals in 1980, the Islanders took on the Philadelphia Flyers. “And what do you think happened? The bearded Islanders won the Stanley Cup. How do you beat that?”
Fischler isn’t the first to credit the Islanders in ’80 as the NHL’s original beard-growers: it’s a tale often retailed, reviewed, and re-told. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s accurate.
In fact, another New York team, the Rangers, were whiskering up before the Islanders, and deserve recognition in the annals of unkempt hockey players, if any team does. If indeed Gillies was the one to suggest that the Islanders stop shaving in 1980, chances are that he borrowed the idea from the Rangers five years earlier.
It was in the spring of 1975, in their third season in the NHL, that the upstart Islanders made the playoffs for the first time, with Al Arbour’s team matching up with Emile Francis’ Rangers in the best-of-three preliminary round. Two days before that series got started, the Rangers and Islanders met at Madison Square Garden to wrap up the regular-season schedule. Here’s Wes Gaffer writing about the Ranger coach after that game in the New York Daily News:
… Emile (Cat) Francis, who now finds himself the coach of a Ranger team sprouting incipient beards, a team calls itself hockey’s House of David. The House of David Rangers lost to the Islanders, 6-4, for the first time ever in the Garden.
Gaffer elaborated later in his dispatch:
No word on who the “non-signers” were. Giacomin does seem to have been the one to have dubbed the team the “House of David Rangers.” Defenceman Brad Park apparently preferred the “Raunchy Rangers.”
Elsewhere, Ranger centreman Derek Sanderson claimed credit for the whole caper. Sanderson had arrived in New York via a 1974 trade with Boston with his famous moustache intact, but early in April of ’75 he’d shaved it off after losing a bet. As the playoffs neared, a reporter asked him about the state of his stubble: was he growing a beard?
“The whole team is,” Sanderson repleid. “Nobody is going to shave until the playoffs are over. I was on the plane the other night and I got a little petition up and everybody agreed to it. The Cat went along 100 per cent. He didn’t argue.”
According to a Ranger spokesman, “eight or nine” players were in on the scheme.
“Maybe growing beards will link everybody in a common bond,” Sanderson mused. “Just some little thing to pull things together. Everybody could wear yellow slippers to bed. I don’t know.”
“Little things like that sometimes work. I’ve seen it happen before. Boston had great spirit like that. Boston was a very superstitious club. The Bruins always warmed up the same way, and they always went out in the same order. With Phil Esposito around, nobody could cross sticks. Bobby Orr touched everybody before he went on the ice.”
As it was, the Rangers’ beards had only limited success in 1975, with the Islanders taking the playoff series with a 4-3 win on April 11, freeing the Rangers to shave reach once more for their shaving cream. Clark Gillies scored the opening goal in that game that decided the Patrick Division showdown, with Denis Potvin adding a pair of his own before (a clean-shaven) J.P. Parise scored the OT winner to decide the matter.
So that’s worth noting. As, too, is this: whether Giacomin, Sanderson, Francis, or anyone else at the time knew it or not (probably not), the Rangers had another hairy precedent rattling around in their past, going all the way back to 1938 when (yes) Lester Patrick himself was running the show as New York’s coach and GM.
This wasn’t a playoff thing: back then, in November of ’38, the NHL season was just getting underway when Harold Parrott launched his Brooklyn Daily Eagle column on the Rangers’ home-opener against the Detroit Red Wings with this:
Before the start of tonight’s Ranger homecoming game on Garden ice, you may have to look twice to make sure the combatants aren’t from the House of David, instead of from Lester Patrick’s stable of skaters.
Captain Art Coulter and Murray Patrick, young defencemen, haven’t shaved in three weeks. As you might suspect, there’s a reason. A good one: money, dough, a bonus.
In this case, the idea was hatched during the Rangers’ training camp at Winnipeg. According to Parrott, Lester Patrick had, “in an unguarded moment,” commented on a particularly close-cropped haircut that his captain, Art Coulter, was sporting, calling it (and I quote) “silly” and predicting that the style wouldn’t last. “Those ideas pass quickly,” he’s reported to have said. “Why, I would give a bonus who’d have the nerve to go through a season without shaving.”
Another version of the story had Coulter telling his coach that no-one paid him to grow his hair long. Patrick said (“jokingly”) that he’d pay $500 if Coulter would let his beard grow all season.
That was in Winnipeg. When, a few days later, the team moved on to Saskatoon, Lester’s younger son Murray (a.k.a. Muzz) decided he wanted in on the action, and the challenge was on: the first player to shave would lose out on the purse.
As Doc Holst of the Detroit Free Press told it, Patrick was surprised to learn, a few days later, that the players had taken him seriously. “One of Lester’s prides,” Holst wrote, “is his reputation for never going back on his word to players.” Hence the coach’s problem: “They look like a couple of heathens and I don’t know what to do about it,” the coach told the reporter. “Maybe I can get President Frank Calder to make beards illegal in the National Hockey League. It would be awful if Murray and Art started a fad for beards.”
To wrap up the pre-season, the Rangers played the New York Americans across western Canada, running up a six-game winning streak as they beat the Amerks twice each in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and Edmonton. When the Rangers won their NHL season-opener on the road in Detroit, Lester Patrick himself must have wondered whether the beards were lending the team some luck.
The Rangers won their next three games, too, but Patrick’s patience didn’t last. By November 22, he’d ended the challenge by opening his wallet, paying his two hirsute holdouts $100 apiece to shave their beards.
He can’t have been happy to pay the price — nor to see his smooth-faced team take its first loss of the season as they did that same Tuesday night, in Boston, losing 4-2 to Eddie Shore and the Bruins.
Chin Muzak: A bearded Rangers’ captain Art Coulter (right) inspects Murray Patrick’s heathen look in November of 1938.
lorne star
New York State of Play: A right winger out of Stoughton, Saskatchewan, Lorne Carr made his start in the NHL with the New York Rangers in 1933, but it was with their rivals, the Americans, that he made his initial mark in the league later that decade. After seven seasons with the Amerks, Carr shipped out in 1941 to the Toronto Maple Leafs. He played five seasons with the Leafs, inheriting Charlie Conacher’s number 9 and putting up some impressive offensive numbers in the somewhat diminished wartime version of the NHL. In 1943-44, Carr collected 36 goals and 74 points in 50 games, finishing third in league scoring behind Boston’s Herb Cain and Doug Bentley of Chicago. He was a First Team All-Star in 1943 and in ’44. He helped Toronto claim two Stanley Cup championships, in 1942 and 1945. Lorne Carr died on a Saturday of today’s date in 2007. He was 96.
new york, new york
The Devils You Don’t Know: No Islanders or Devils in 1932; New York’s hockey teams were Americans and Rangers. The latter had the better season that year, getting to the final, where Lester Patrick’s team lost to the Toronto Maple Leafs. Eddie Gerard’s Americans, meanwhile, finished dead last in the regular-season standings and, thereby, out of the playoffs. Against the Rangers, the Amerks went 2-4. (Artist: Leo Rackow)
the cat came back
The diminutive right winger Johnny (Black Cat) Gagnon played most of his hockey for the Montreal Canadiens in the 1930s, often on a line with Howie Morenz and Aurèle Joliat, but midway through the 1939-40 NHL season, Montreal sold his contract to the New York Americans. He and his new team were back at the Forum on Saturday, March 2, 1940. As seen here, there were gifts for him, pre-game, including this handsome cellarette (a liquor cabinet) presented by a deputation of fans from Gagnon’s hometown, Chicoutimi. That’s Le Canada journalist Paul Parizeau on the right, lending a hand, holding his hat.
Once the furniture had been cleared from the ice, New York surged to a 2-0 lead before Montreal tied the game, then went ahead in the second on a goal by Louis Trudel. It was left to Gagnon to come through as the spoiler and tie the game. Set up by Pat Egan and Tommy Anderson, he beat Montreal goaltender Mike Karakas with a slapshot, no less, as described by Montreal’s Gazette.
Ten minutes of overtime solved nothing and the game finished in a 3-3 tie. In fact, the overtime went on longer than it meant to, with the bell failing to chime to end the game, and referee Mickey Ion oblivious to the time. Finally, New York coach Red Dutton jumped on the ice to signal that it was all over.
The following night in New York, the teams met again. By the end of that night, it was almost over for the Canadiens, as the Americans prevailed 3-0 to push Montreal to the brink of mathematical elimination from the playoffs with five games to go in the regular season. Montreal would be the only team to fail to make the post-season grade that year, as they finished dead last in the seven-team NHL, nine points adrift of the Americans.
Johnny Gagnon died on a Wednesday of today’s date in 1984. He was 78.
(Image: Conrad Poirier, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
beyond the d
The Puck Stops Here: The defensive department of the Chicago Black Hawks makes a stand ahead of the opening game of the 1935-36 NHL season. On the d, that’s Alex Levinsky on the left with partner Art Wiebe. Waiting in the nets: Mike Karakas. Chicago stood fast once the puck dropped, downing the New York Americans 3-1.
puckstruck 