Kids liked to draw him. I wish I could tell you the name of the artist whose work this is, above, but I can only guess at the signature. Colin Caslow? Corbo Cartat? Whoever he was, the kid, his scrapbook from the later 1940s came to me, which is how I know that the players he didn’t sketch for his cover include Teeder Kennedy and Max Bentley, Harry Watson, Turk Broda, Bill Ezinicki. I can’t tell you why. What was it about Ray Timgren, just 20 in 1948, rawly rookie-ing his way into a team on a run of winning three Stanley Cups in a row?

He looks troubled. It could be that he wasn’t at all, what happened might have been that when Corbo was drawing him, lying on his front on the rug by the fireplace, biting his tongue in concentration, doing his best with his pencils to render a Timgren that was as Timgrenesque as possible — well, expressions on faces are hard to draw, and sometimes no matter how carefully you work a guy with no worries skating around pushing a puck with nothing in particular on his mind ends up looking like someone who’s been told that children are disappointed in him for a whole bunch of different reasons, as a result of which their mothers have been writing to Conn Smythe to complain.

Golden Boy was his nickname, I see, probably because of his hair which, in his hockey card from 1951 if not in real life, appears as gilded as his gloves.

Turofskys liked to take his photo. That is, as a Leaf during the years that brothers Lou and Nat Turofsky were busy pointing their cameras at the team, he’s well represented in The Hockey Hall’s Digital Archives. There’s a good one of him and his teammates admiring radios at the Barilko Bros. Appliance Store, Bashin’ Bill’s there himself, and Turk Broda and Fleming Mackell, too.

Overall, in photos, Timgren looks smallish, sunny, not-troubled. If you had to guess, you’d say his intentions were good. On the ice he cruises in front of the Boston net, or fights for a place by Montreal’s Gerry McNeil. His number was 22. In the photo where he’s holding a telephone to Tim Horton’s ear, his hair does have the shine of treasure. There’s one where he’s laughing about Joe Klukay’s haircut; in another he’s pretending to tape a stick for a fascinated audience.

At Sid Smith’s wedding he poses happily with the groom and Howie Meeker and several miscellaneous buddies. There’s one where he’s drinking pop from a bottle in the dressing room and Broda and Bentley and Cal Gardner are there with him, you can see their street-clothes hanging on hooks in the background, possibly they’ve just won a Stanley Cup, could be, but I think it’s fair to say, without prejudice, that Timgren’s is the fourth-best smile in the bunch.

Posed in a classic tripod stance for his Beehive photo, he looks as serious as you’re going to see him, as though having his photo taken for the St. Lawrence Starch Company is the most serious business in Southern Ontario. A few more clicks, though, and he brightens right up.

I wonder if this is the photo that young Corbo was looking at when he did his drawing. I think probably it is. The expression is thoughtful with a hint of optimism — he looks like he knows where he’s going with that puck. Other than the ice, I prefer the folkloric style of Corbo’s drawing to the shadowy realism of the photo. The maple-sugar ice is hard is pretty great, though.

The potted Timgren biography that’s posted at the Hall of Fame’s catalogue of players wouldn’t on its own send you rushing out to draw him for the cover of your scrapbook. Reliable is one of the adjectives he inspires there, along with solid and defensive and (his offensive talent) decent.

Later, I guess, when he was a public school vice-principal in Toronto, he liked to say, “Do it now!” According to Wikipedia, anyway.

Flashy comes up, adjectivally, when you’re reading in old newspapers about Timgren in his day. Sometimes, too, you see the phrases top line performer all the way and left-wing shotmaker and known more for his back-checking than scoring.

He won two Stanley Cups with the Leafs. In 1949-50, his best scoring year, he had 25 points playing on a line with Joe Klukay and Max Bentley, The Three Feathers Line was its nickname, because they none of them weighed more than 155 pounds, except for Klukay, who did. The following season, when the fall came, Danny Lewicki filled in for Bentley, who was back home in Delisle, Saskatchewan, harvesting his wheat crop for most of training camp.

In 1949, the year Timgren got his start in the NHL, the sportswriters voted Pentti Lund from the New York Rangers as the league’s top rookie. Leafs supremo Conn Smythe couldn’t believe it; he said he wouldn’t trade Timgren for 17 Lunds. True to his word, he never did, though in 1954 he did send him to Chicago for a single Jack Price. Timgren went back to the Leafs, later, but not for long. He was out of the league at 26.

(Update, 11/25/21: Hockey’s Hall of Fame has refigured its web archives since his post was published, which is to say,  player profiles and galleries have been removed from public view, rendering the links that were here useless. So they’ve been removed and/or edited.)

(Parkie courtesy of hockeymedia at flickr.com)