outdoors

parson in the penalty box

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Mac Attack: Dr. A.W. Mackenzie was headmaster of The Grove for nearly four decades, shaping the spirit, the values, and the campus of the school, north of Peterborough, Ontario, that was known in his day as Lakefield Preparatory School and thrives today as Lakefield College School. Ordained as a deacon in the Anglican Church before his arrival at Lakefield in 1894, Mackenzie was a devoted sailor and gardener as well as a schoolmaster. He was, too, and famously, an ardent hockey player. That’s him here in the Homburg hat, with the chisel-bladed stick, on the Grove rink in 1907. Alumnus John Macrae would recall that as a younger man the headmaster sometimes joined a game in Peterborough, “where his rugged style of play often landed him in the penalty box, much to the delight of the fans who, we are told, would set up a chant of ‘Parson in the penalty box, parson in the penalty box.’”

winterspiele, 1936: storm warming

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The thermometer had dropped to -7 on the morning of Saturday, February 8 at the open-air rink at Lake Riesser as Japan skated out to play its second (and final) game at the fraught 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in Germany. The Japanese had lost their opening Group D game 2-0 to Sweden; now, facing the eventual gold medallists from Great Britain, the Japanese had their chances in front of Jimmy Foster’s goal … just no goals. Final score: 3-0, GB. While the British and Swedes advanced to the second round of the tournament, the Japanese headed home. Seen here during the game is an unidentified Japanese player alongside one of the heaters that was provided to warm the team’s bench.

étude for skates and sticks

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Peter Gzowski spins out the story that may have inspired this 1944 W.A. Winter masterpiece in The Game of Our Lives (1981) and Trent Frayne had a rendition, too, in a 1953 feature, “How They Broke the Heart of Howie Morenz.” But Gzowski’s facts are off, slightly, and Frayne’s accounts may err on the side of romanticism, so best, probably, to go back to Morenz biographer Dean Robinson, who was born, like his subject, in Mitchell, Ontario, and can point out, if you go there with him as I did in 2017, the place where this all happened near where Whirl Creek joins the Thames River.

Here’s the pertinent passage from Robinson’s Howie Morenz: Hockey’s First Superstar, originally published in 1982, updated in 2016:

James Boyd, a retired dentist living in Kitchener, Ont., was a year older than Howie when the two were growing up in Mitchell. “We used to go down to the river on Saturday morning and scrape off a rink with scrapers we’d made at home,” recalled Boyd. “There’d be about six or eight of us, and by the time we’d finish, the snow would be about two feet high, and it would act as boards. We’d stay down there all day long. We might go home for some lunch, but we’d come right back again. We changed down at the river. At times we did build some benches, some roughshod benches, but mostly we just sat in the snow. Practically all of us wore magazines for shinpads. We’d pull our socks over them to hold them up.”

Darkness determined when the games would end, and for Howie there just weren’t enough hours in a winter day. His mom didn’t help matters by scheduling him for piano lessons. On those days, Howie would stash his skates under the bridge, and after school, instead of reporting to the home of Ida Hotham, his piano teacher, he would race down to the pond. It wasn’t the greatest of schemes, but it worked until his mother found it necessary to ask Miss Hotham why Howie seemed to be stalled at “One-Fingered Joe.” The teacher told Rose Morenz that her son had been getting along fine, but she hadn’t seen him in weeks. Howie never did learn how to play the piano, which in later years he said he regretted, but eventually he mastered the ukulele.

capital caucus

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Drop The Puck: Short on sticks but intent on learning the art of the face-off all the same? It’s not quite clear what was going on in Canada’s capital in March of 1906 with this group of attentive skaters, which is identified only as hailing from the Ottawa Ladies College. (Image: William James Topley, Library and Archives Canada)

outside chance

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Lone Star: On the ice at Chamonix in France’s Haute-Savoie, a meeting of the French and Belgian national teams in January of 1922. Two years later, Chamonix would host the first official Winter Olympic hockey tournament, featuring eight teams. Canada won gold ahead of the U.S. and Great Britain. France would finish in a tie for fifth place, while the Belgians came in tied for seventh. (Image: Agence Rol, Bibliothèque nationale de France)