Nick Wasnie

hart beat

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They Were The Champions: Montreal’s 1930-31 championship lines up outside for the Forum. Back row, from left: Trainer Ed Dufour, Gord Fraser, Sylvio Mantha, Marty Burke, coach Cecil Hart, Battleship Leduc, Nick Wasnie, Armand Mondou, Jimmy McKenna. Front, from left: Pit Lepine, Georges Mantha, George Hainsworth, Aurèle Joliat, Howie Morenz, Wildor Larochelle.

They used to say that Cecil Hart had never played, that all his hockey savvy and successes came without the benefit of actually having plied with pucks, on skates. That’s not quite true: Hart, who was born in Bedford, Quebec, on a Wednesday of this date in 1883, did indeed play, inlcluding some senior hockey in Montreal. It is the case that Hart’s truly singular suite of achievements in hockey did occur when he wasn’t wearing skates, near benches, or in offices of business.

He was the NHL’s first — and still only? — Jewish coach, and a direct descendent of Aaron Blake, one of the first Jewish settlers in Canada, who made his home in Trois-Rivières in 1761. Cecil’s father was David A. Hart, Aaron’s great-grandson, a distinguished physician and surgeon and the man who, in 1923, donated the NHL’s first trophy recognizing individual excellence.

Back to Cecil. Away from the sporting world, he was an insurance broker — though he seems never to have been too far away from the sporting life. Baseball was, apparently, his first love. He was a pitcher and a shortstop as well as an ace organizer: in 1897, at the age of 14, he started a team, the Stars, that would soon come to dominate Montreal’s amateur leagues, while featuring rosters that included Art Ross and the Cleghorn brothers, Sprague and Odie.

Hart was coach and manager, scorekeeper, publicist, travel agent for the team, which eventually added a hockey program. Frank Calder, the NHL’s first president, was still a newspaperman in Montreal when he first met Hart in 1906. “Cecil thought more of his Stars than of his right hand,” he recalled later.

It was Hart who, in 1921, brokered the agreement whereby Leo Dandurand and partners Joe Cattarinich and Leo Letourneau bought the Montreal Canadiens after the team went on the market following George Kennedy’s death. Dandurand and Cattarinich were in Cleveland at the time, watching horses race: Hart was the one who offered $11,000 on their behalf — about $156,000 in 2020 coinage — to get the deal done.

Cecil Hart, ca. the early 1930s.

Hart was a director of the Canadiens in 1923 when he sealed another historic Montreal bargain, travelling to Stratford, Ontario, to sign a hurtling 20-year-old named Howie Morenz to a Canadiens contract.

Hart would, in 1926, succeed Dandurand as coach of the Canadiens, but not before he spent a year building Montreal’s other NHL team, the one that would eventually be named the Maroons, when they first got their franchise in 1924. Hart only stayed a year, and so he wasn’t in the room where it happened when, after just their second season, the Maroons won the Stanley Cup, but the foundation of that championship team was very much of his making: he was the man who’d brought on Clint Benedict and Punch Broadbent, Dunc Munro, Reg Noble, and coach Eddie Gerard.

Hart’s first stint as coach of the Canadiens lasted six seasons, during which his teams won two Stanley Cups, in 1930 and ’31. He left the team in 1932 after a disagreement with Leo Dandurand. In 1936, he returned to the Montreal bench on the condition that the team bring back Howie Morenz. They did that, of course; that was also the year that Morenz died at the age of 37.

Hart coached in parts of another two seasons before Canadiens president Ernest Savard deposed him in early 1939. Savard insisted that he hadn’t fired his coach; Hart was merely being granted “a leave of absence” while team secretary Jules Dugal took over as coach. Hart’s record of 196 regular-season wins remains fifth-best on the list of Canadiens coaches; he’s eighth in points percentage. His teams won another 16 games in the playoffs, wherein his winning percentage stands at .486, 13th in team history.

Cecil Hart died in July of 1940. He was 56.

Trophy Case: The original David A. Hart Trophy, first presented in 1924. At that time it was suggested that if a player won the Hart three times it would be his to keep, a scenario by which Howie Morenz would have acquired it for his mantelpiece in 1932. While that proviso seems to have been forgotten along the way, the original trophy was retired in 1960 to the Hockey Hall of Fame and replaced by a new one, re-named the Hart Memorial Trophy.

 

 

scotch guard

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c-gardiner

Heir Time: Charlie Gardiner and son Bobby defend the Chicago net circa 1930. (Image: Classic Auctions)

The Chicago Black Hawks got a new goaltender to start the 1927-28 season. The only problem, for him and his team? When he tried to enter the country from Canada, American immigration officials refused to let him in: the United States had already taken in its annual quota for hockey netminders.

Well, not quite. But something like that. Charlie Gardiner did sign on with Chicago in 1927, and did find himself refused entry into the U.S., not because of his profession but due to his Scottishness.

Sounds like a tale for these times. Here’s how it went:

The year Chicago debuted in the NHL, 1926-27, they got their goaling from man known as “Eagle Eye,” long considered one of the best in the puck-thwarting business: Hughie Lehman. At 41, he was the league’s oldest goaltender, though that didn’t seem to slow him down: he played all 44 regular-season games that inaugural Chicago season, as well as both playoff games before the Hawks bowed out to Boston.

The season over, Chicago’s coach, Pete Muldoon, handed in his resignation to Chicago’s energetic owner, Major Frederic McLaughlin. Muldoon’s  replacement, soon found, was Barney Stanley, erstwhile star of the Western Canadian Hockey League, and a man who also had a Stanley Cup championship to his name as a member of the 1915 Vancouver Millionaires.

Stanley’s previous job was as playing-coach of the Winnipeg Maroons of the American Hockey Association. That may have had something to do with the shopping Major McLaughlin did in the spring of 1927. In April, he paid $17,000 for Maroons’ stalwarts Cece Browne, Nick Wasnie, and Charlie Gardiner. The first two were left and right wingers, respectively, 31 and 25 years old. Gardiner, 22, addressed Chicago’s pressing need for a new goaltender.

“As it is well known,” The Winnipeg Tribune advised in reporting the transaction, “Hughie Lehman has had much trouble with his eyes. He is also anxious to retire from the game.” Not that the rookie would be left on his own: Lehman would stay with the team until Gardiner found, quote, his feet in the big time.

Along with the former Maroons, Chicago’s roster featured veteran captain Dick Irvin, speedy  ’When the fall came, Barney Stanley convened his players in WinnipegThis  towards the end of October for three weeks of pre-season training at the Amphitheatre. That didn’t go as smoothly as it might have: the team’s most dangerous scorer, Babe Dye, broke his leg and was forced to stay on in hospital when the team packed up to head south. November 15 they were due to open their season away to the Bruins, but they had a pair of exhibition games scheduled ahead of that, in Minnesota. They’d have just a day’s stop in Chicago before carrying on to Boston.

But before the Black Hawks could cross the border, the word from Washington came that Charlie Gardiner wouldn’t be admitted. I’m fairly certain that’s how it happened — from what I can glean from contemporary press reports, he wasn’t actually turned back at the frontier.

The trouble for the goaltender, as opposed to the rest of the Canadians on the Chicago roster? Though he’d grown up mostly in Winnipeg, he was born and spent his first seven years in Edinburgh, in Scotland. The Chicago Daily Tribune reported the hitch that had federal officials halting his migration:

Gardiner is a Scotchman, and the Scotch immigration quota has been exhausted for the next five years. Major Frederic McLaughlin, president of the Black Hawks, however, is trying to have Gardiner admitted under a six month permit. Gardiner has lived in Canada several years but he hasn’t become a citizen there.

While McLaughlin pursued the pertinent paperwork, the rest of the Black Hawks went on to Minneapolis to take on the AHA Millers. Tiny Thompson was the goaltender there, and he outduelled Hugh Lehman at the other end as the home team won by a score of 1-0.

Meanwhile, McLaughlin tried his case with Washington. His argument was that Gardiner should be admitted under the same conditions that applied to singers and (quote) other foreign entertainers under the provisions of the U.S. Contract Labor clause. Commissioner of Immigration Henry Hull took a look and it wasn’t long before a board of review determined that the goaltender had intended no fraud in trying to enter the U.S. The Black Hawks paid a $500 bond and Gardiner promised to renew his status at the end of the hockey season.

So he was in. No longer an alien, the goaltender who would soon enough be beloved in Chicago made his way to Duluth. His first NHL action on American ice came on Friday, November 11, 1927, when the Black Hawks met AHA defending champion Hornets in an exhibition. Gardiner’s NHL career would be outstanding, of course, though fleeting. He’d play just seven seasons, captaining the Black Hawks to their first Stanley Cup in 1934, before, weeks later, dying of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 29.

But on this night, in Duluth, he was just getting started. Dick Irvin scored a goal for Chicago in a game that ended in a 1-1 tie. Gardiner’s work was brilliant, said the man from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and his covering deft.