wartime

rabbit redux

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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.

fast times at maple leaf gardens

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Speedsters: The NHL’s fastest gather in Toronto in January of 1942. From left, they are: Tommy Anderson (Brooklyn), Max Bentley (Chicago), Sid Abel (Detroit), Lynn Patrick (New York), Jack Portland (Montreal), Flash Hollett (Boston), Syl Apps (Toronto).

From all over the (seven-team) NHL they came on a Friday night in January of 1942, joining together in Toronto for the benefit of a late, beloved local sportsman, raising money in a good cause and racing the rink in a show of speedy skating.

A crowd of 13,563 fans jammed Maple Leaf Gardens for the Robert (Moose) Ecclestone Memorial Night on January 30 of that wartime winter, raising some $11,000 (something like $200,000 in 2024 terms) to help the family of a popular former manager of senior hockey teams who’d died at 33 in an automobile accident in 1941.

The evening festivities featured a 20-minute exhibition game in which a collection of former NHL stars took on the Maple Leafs. The all-stars included former New York Rangers’ goaltender Dave Kerr along with former Leafs Red Horner, Hap Day (now the team’s coach), and King Clancy (who, in retirement, had taken up as an NHL referee). They were bolstered by four members of Art Ross’s Boston Bruins, in town to play the Leafs the following night: Bruins’ captain Dit Clapper, Jack Crawford, Busher Jackson and his brother Art Jackson had all been friends of the Moose.

The Leafs ran up a quick 3-0 lead on goals from Gordie Drillon (a pair) and Sweeney Schriner before 36-year-old Joe Primeau replied for the oldsters, set up by his old Leaf linemate Busher Jackson. The game ended in a 3-3 tie following two more goals from 44-year-old George Hay, a former NHL left winger with Chicago and Detroit and future Hall-of-Famer who was by then working a new job with the RCAF as a pilot officer.

Primeau was deemed the player of the game: he got a gold wristwatch for his efforts.

King Clancy, 39, was a casualty, suffering cut ankle tendons in a collision with Leaf defenceman Bob Goldham. He would recover, but not for a while, and not in time to referee the Leafs-Bruins game the next night, as scheduled. Norm Lamport had to sub in for Clancy in that game, which saw Milt Schmidt score in overtime to give Boston the 3-2 win.

As for the racing, each NHL team sent a speedy representative to compete in Toronto to determine who could get around the MLG ice fastest with a puck on his stick. The Montreal Canadiens had gone through a couple of round of sprints to pick their speedster. In the first, both Toe Blake and Cliff Goupille completed their turns of the Forum in 16 2/5 seconds. When they tried again a few days later, it was their biggest defenceman, Jack Portland (6’2” and 185 lbs.) who dashed to the win in 15 2/5 seconds.

In Toronto, each player took two whirls, with a flying start. They wore their NHL uniforms but not all of their regular padding. Another RCAF flyer/future Hall-of-Famer took care of the timing, Squadron Leader Harry (Punch) Broadbent.

Toronto’s captain Syl Apps and New York’s Lynn Patrick clocked the best times once everybody had taken a turn, with each stopping the watch at 14 4/5 seconds. In a skate-off, Patrick slowed to 15 seconds while Apps matched his earlier time for the overall victory, much to the delight of the Leaf crowd.

Speediest of the also-rans were Flash Hollett (Boston), and Sid Abel (Detroit), both of whose best times were 15 seconds. Jack Portland and Max Bentley (Chicago) both went around in 15 1/5 seconds, while Tommy Anderson of the Brooklyn Americans came in at 15 2/5.

This night of showy racing is sometimes cited as the NHL’s original skills competition, but in fact something similar had been tried before, across several seasons in the late 1920s, when Montreal’s Howie Morenz and Ottawa’s Hec Kilrea were the pick of the rink.

Former Glories: Former Toronto star defenceman King Clancy and Hap Day had new jobs in 1942, as (respectively) an NHL referee and Leaf coach, but they suited up to play in memory of a man called Moose.

maple leaf majordomo

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Conn Smythe was born in Toronto on a Friday of this date in 1895 — 129 years ago. The man who made the Maple Leafs (that happened in 1927) is pictured here in Boston in 1936, when he was 41. By that point, under his watch, the team had got themselves a new rink to skate in and a Stanley Cup (in 1931-32) to brandish. The next one would come in 1941-42, by which time Smythe was on his way to another way. Having served as in both the Canadian Field Artillery and Royal Flying Corps (and spent time as a POW) in the First World War, Smythe orchestrated the creation of an artillery battery in the Second, which he led into battle after D-Day in 1944. Smythe was badly wounded in fighting near Caen. Invalided home, he was back in Toronto in 1945 when his Leafs won another Cup.

(Image: Leslie Jones, Boston Public Library)

ring around the rangers

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Looking Up: A quartet of New York Rangers, gathered ’round in February of 1943. From bottom left they are right winger Gus Mancuso, left winger Joe Shack, goaltender Bill Beveridge, and coach Frank Boucher. With a roster depleted by wartime call-ups, New York wallowed that year, finishing the ’42-43 season at the bottom of the six-team NHL standings.

there wasn’t much that didn’t happen

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“There wasn’t much that didn’t happen.” That’s how the Associated Press summed up the game that the Detroit Red Wings played against New York’s Rangers at Madison Square Garden in front of 12,043 fans on the Sunday night of November 22, 1942. “The wildest fuss” Manhattan had seen all season: that was another description.

Where to begin? In the first period, New York’s Lynn Patrick loosed a shot that struck Detroit goaltender Johnny Mowers in the lower lip, loosening four of his teeth and adding eight stitches to his visage. Unless it was Bryan Hextall’s shot: several New York papers credited him with the damage. The Rangers subsequently claimed that another of Hextall’s had beaten Mowers, only to pass clean through the cords of the net, but referee King Clancy didn’t see or credit any such thing.

In the third period, Detroit’s Jimmy Orlando hit New York’s Grant Warwick over the head with his stick. “Clouted” was the word one Brooklyn reporter chose; another one called it “a free-handed chop.” Warwick was knocked to the ice and out cold; New York captain Ott Heller punched Orlando. Warwick revived and proceeded to the penalty bench with Orlando: that’s what passed for concussion protocol in those fractious years. Back together again, left to their own devices on the sidelines, Warwick and Orlando got back to fighting. That’s what we’re seeing here, the aftermath, I think, though the antagonists themselves aren’t in view. That’s Lynn Patrick beneath the upraised stick, with Detroit’s Alex Motter behind him, and teammate Gord Davidson just ahead.

That was all pretty much regular business for the NHL as it was then. Something more remarkable? Rangers’ left winger Hub Macey from Big River, Saskatchewan, was 21 that year season, playing in his second major-league season. In the first period, he assisted on Scotty Cameron’s goal for New York, then in the second beat Mowers to tie the game at 3-3. The game ended in a 4-4 tie (as per wartime strictures, there was no overtime).

Macey wasn’t around to see the finish, though: he left the game after the second period to catch a train to Toronto to enlist in the Canadian Army. He did that and was soon posted to Kingston — in fact, he was back on the ice within a week, suiting up as a soldier-in-training to play with the Kingston Frontenacs in the Ottawa City Senior league alongside the RCAF Flyers, among others, the team that Milt Schmidt, Bobby Bauer, and Woody Dumart had joined in 1941-42, winning the Allan Cup. Macey’s Kingston team was bolstered by others with NHL pedigree, including Gus Giesebrecht, a former Red Wing, former Leaf Gus Marker, and erstwhile Maroon Glenn Brydson.

Macey did make it back to the NHL eventually, after the war: in 1946-47, he caught on with the Montreal Canadiens.

harry cameron: saw his duty, overdid it (in colourful fashion)

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Toronto’s Stanley Cup Champions: The 1913-14 Blueshirts, featuring, at the back, from eft to right: Coach Dick Carroll, Con Corbeau, Roy McGiffen, Jack Marshall, George McNamara, Jack Walker, Cully Wilson, Trainer Frank Carroll. Front: Claude Wilson, Frank Foyston, Scotty Davidson, Harry Cameron, Hap Holmes.

Harry Cameron was 24 in 1914, and he was in his second year with Toronto’s NHA Blueshirts. Playing at coverpoint alongside Jack Marshall at point, the Pembroke, Ontario, native was an anchor of the defence in front of Hap Holmes that steadied the team as it made its way through the six-team league to challenge for the Stanley Cup that year.

After getting past the Montreal Canadiens in a two-game NHA final, Toronto took on the PCHA Victoria Aristocrats for all the marbles in March of 1914. Victoria featured Bert Lindsay in goal (Ted’s dad) and Lester Patrick on the defence. Played in Toronto’s Arena Gardens, the three-game series saw Toronto win two in a row. They played the third game anyway and it was in the third period of that one, on Thursday, March 19, 1914, that Cameron took a pass from Marshall and (to quote the Toronto Daily Star) “laced it home, waist high” past Lindsay to secure the Blueshirts’ 2-1 win, bringing the Stanley Cup to Toronto for the very first time.

Along with the vaunted trophy, the Blueshirts pictured above had expected to take home a sizeable cash bonus for their troubles, as much as $800 a man — about $21,000 or so in today’s terms. As it turned out, gate receipts for the series were lower than expected, which meant that the players each collected just $297 (about $7,800).

There was some talk of the Sydney Millionaires of the Maritime Professional Hockey League challenging Toronto for their newly won Cup, but when that didn’t materialize, the team disbanded for the year. Cameron went to Pembroke for the summer, while George McNamara aimed for Sault Ste. Marie, where he worked as an electrician. Roy McGiffin was bound for California to work on a fruit farm. Heading home to Montreal, Jack Marshall, 37, announced his retirement. Most of the other players would be back in hockey with the return of winter, though not Blueshirts’ captain Scotty Davidson. When war broke out in the fall of 1914, he enlisted with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He was serving as a lance-corporal with the CEF’s 2nd Battalion (Eastern Ontario Regiment) when he was killed by a shellburst in France in June of 1915. He was 24.

Harry Cameron won a second Stanley Cup with the Toronto St. Patricks in 1922. The NHA had given way to the NHL by then, of course, and Cameron was one of the league’s early stars. He scored 18 goals in 24 games as a defenceman in successive seasons, 1920-21 and ’21-22. He played his last professional hockey in 1933. Harry Cameron died in Vancouver on a Tuesday of today’s date in 1953. He was 63.

Dick Beddoes remembered Cameron in the pages of the Vancouver Sun. “Twenty years ago,” he wrote, “his name was so familiar that mention of it automatically suggested a rushing defenceman who saw his duty and overdid it in the colourful fashion of Eddie Shore and King Clancy.”

goldie’s rush

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From The Front: News of Goldie Prodger’s shrapnel wound reached Canada in October of 1918.

The goal came late, with four minutes left in the game.

With the visiting Rosebuds tied 1-1 with the hometown Montreal Canadiens, Portland winger Smokey Harris shot the puck, which Montreal goaltender Georges Vézina saved: that’s where things got started. Vézina cleared it to the corner, where Newsy Lalonde picked it up, the Canadiens centreman. He left it for a defenceman who then, well — Goldie Prodger skated through just about the entire Portland team, is what Goldie Prodger did.

It was a “rough journey,” the Montreal Gazette noted, but Prodger kept going. He beat Harris at centre ice, then barged into defenceman Del Irvine: “his weight toppled the Portland player over.” He evaded the second Portland defender, Moose Johnson, with some ease, and by then he only had the goaltender, Tom Murray, to hoodwink. He paused, to test Murray’s patience. “As the Portland goaltender came out to meet him,” the Gazette narrated, “Prodgers [sic] skated around him and lobbed the puck into the nets.”

And that was it: with Montreal leading 2-1, they fell back into defence to see out the decisive game of the Stanley Cup Finals, which they duly did on the penultimate day of March in 1916, to outlast the PCHL Rosebuds and take the series 3-2 at Montreal’s Westmount Arena.

It was, of course, Canadiens’ very first Stanley Cup championship, and 25-year-old Goldie Prodger, who was born on a Wednesday of today’s date in 1891, was the man who clinched it.

He was from London, Ontario, where he was christened George. Though his surname was often pluralized throughout his career (and continues to be, in many of the standard references, including at NHL.com), his birth registration and other vital documents confirm that it was, properly, Prodger.

Goldie? He owed that sobriquet, a press profile from 1912 helpfully explained, to “his sunny complexion.”

That was the same year Prodger won his first Cup, playing for the NHA Quebec Bulldogs, whose formidable line-up also featured Joe Malone, Joe Hall, and goaltender Paddy Moran.

In May of wartime 1916, Prodger flocked to his country’s colours, enlisting with the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force. He was soon following Howard McNamara, his captain with the Canadiens, into the highly hockey-focussed 228th Battalion. Just how puck-minded was the 228th? Later that year, having recruited to the unit’s ranks some of hockey’s best talents, the 228th iced a team in the NHA alongside the Canadiens et al. (I’ve written about that whole fantastical finagle before, over here, if you’re interested.)

Prodger’s military career began with trip to the hospital: that August, probably while the battalion was in training at Camp Borden, north of Toronto, he broke an ankle playing baseball. That didn’t end up interfering with his skating: once hockey season got going in late December, he would play in all 12 of the 228th’s NHA games.

Along with many of his teammates, Prodger did eventually make it overseas, in 1917. The battalion was converted from an infantry to a railway construction unit; Prodger, for this part, was soon promoted corporal and then company sergeant-major. He took time to write home to remind friends just how vital hockey was, as the Ottawa Journal reported in a morale-boosting column:

Even if we are at war [Corporal Prodger rationalized] with an enemy that threatens our very existence, it is no reason why the great winter sport should be allowed to die. In fact, just such diversions are required at this time to keep the minds of those at home away from the horrors of war.

In 1918, as noted in the clipping from that October presented above, Prodger was added to the casualty list again, suffering a shrapnel wound in the back in (I think) France while attached to an Australian field artillery battery.

Battle Bulletin: Casualty report from Montreal’s Gazette in October of 1918.

He recovered, again. Following his CEF discharge in 1919, Prodger headed back to the ice, though not before some dramas played out, both medical and contractual. Another baseball injury befell him that fall, and this one got complicated when he came down with blood poisoning and had to have a finger amputated.

Meanwhile, in the fledgling NHL, Prodger’s rights were owned by the Quebec Hockey Club. He wanted to play in Toronto, and for a while it seemed as though he would sit out the season rather than report to Quebec. In December, Quebec traded him to his old team, the Canadiens, in exchange for Eddie Carpenter. But Prodger didn’t want to play there, either, so he waited until mid-January when Montreal’s George Kennedy worked a deal to send him the Toronto St, Patricks for Harry Cameron.

After finishing the season with the St. Pats, a trade took him to Hamilton the following season, and it was there with the Tigers that he played the rest of his NHL career, five seasons, through to 1925.

Goldie Prodger died in October of 1935 at the age of 44.

Habs Have It: Goldie Prodger and the rest of the 1915-16 Stanley Cup champions.

 

stop them, bullet joe!

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Bullet Joe Sawyer was the star goaltender for the Montreal Mounteds, see, but then he went to war and lost his nerve, as happens, and when he got back to guarding goals, it just wasn’t the same. With all those pucks piling up behind him, Montreal just had to let him go, which is how he ended up suiting up for their rivals, the Red Ants, in their big game against — yes, that’s right — the Mounteds.

Staggering to this feet, though he tottered and sagged against the goal post, Bullet Joe faced the surging forms in front. He tossed aside the stub of his hockey stick as useless, and extended gloved hands, spreading the fingers wide. A woman’s hysterical, high-pitched scream carried above the human battery of sound. “Stop them, Bullet Joe!”

Electrifying. I’ll let you guess how Harold Sherman’s novelette “Bullet Joe, Goalie” ends, and who gets the girl — yes, there’s a girl.

Hockey’s not your thing? In 1928, readers of Top-Notch Magazine could take their pick of torrid tales: also included in this mid-winter issue were stories of cowboys (“Blazing Six-Guns”) and canny courtroom stenographers (“All is Not Wasted That Leaks”). There’s even something for fans of big, striped-game hunting. I haven’t read that particular story all the way through, it’s true, but I like to think that the title suggests that this is a grasslands tale told from the point-of-view of the wily quarry as he outsmarts the bumbling human hunter, gets his gun, teaches him not to be such a bloodthirsty idiot. It’s called “Zebra Guile.”

herb gardiner: in 1927, the nhl’s most useful man

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It was on a Friday of this same date in 1891 in Winnipeg that Herb Gardiner was born in 1891. If you haven’t heard of his stardom as a defenceman on the ice in Calgary and Montreal, well, here’s an introduction to that. Gardiner, who died in 1972, aged 80, was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1958. A quick browse across his biography shows that the adjectives stellar and two-way and consistent were sometimes applied to his efforts on the ice, along with the noun rock. Also? That he won the Hart Memorial Trophy as the NHL MVP in 1927, edging out Bill Cook on the ballot, as well as the impressive likes of Frank Frederickson, Dick Irvin, and King Clancy.

Browsing the Attestation Papers by which Gardiner signed up to be a soldier in Calgary in 1915 at the age of 23 and the height of just over 5’ 9”, you may notice that the birthdate given is May 10, which is two days late, must just be an error, since a lie wouldn’t have made any difference to Gardiner’s eligibility. Listing the profession he was leaving behind to go to war as surveyor, he started a private with the 12th Battalion of the Canadian Mounted Rifles, went to England, was taken on strength with the 2nd CMR, who went unhorsed to fight in France in 1916. Gardiner was promoted corporal that year and then lance-sergeant, and we know that he was wounded in June, probably near Hooge in the Ypres Salient in Belgium. The nature of the wound is inscribed in Gardiner’s medical record as “GSW Nose” — i.e. Gun Shot Wound Nose. That’s as much as I know about it, other than it seems that he was brisk in his recovery, and kept on winning promotion as 1916 went, to company sergeant-major, then temporary lieutenant. The following year he spent a lot of time in hospitals with (as per the medical file) bronchitis, pleurisy, catarrhal jaundice. He was invalided back to Canada, eventually, where he was playing hockey again for various Calgary teams before he was demobilized in 1919.

Most of the starring he did in those post-war years was on defence for the Calgary Tigers of the old Western Canadian Hockey League, where he played with Red Dutton and Rusty Crawford, Harry Oliver, Spunk Sparrow. In 1926, when the league disbanded (it was the WHL by then), Cecil Hart of the Montreal Canadiens bought Gardiner’s contract.

Gardiner took Georges Vézina’s number 1 for his sweater in Montreal, which is a little surprising, but there it is: the team didn’t retire it from circulation after the iconic goaltender’s death in March of 1926. (Herb Rheaume, Vézina’s successor in Montreal’s net, inherited the number before Gardiner arrived; the following year, 1926-27, Montreal’s new goaltender was George Hainsworth, who wore 12.)

Gardiner played his first NHL game in November of 1926 at the age of 35 in the old Boston Arena on a night when another WHL import was getting his start on the Bruins’ defence: 23-year-old Eddie Shore. Boston won that contest, 4-1, and even in the Montreal papers it was Shore’s debut that rated most of the mentions, his rugged style, and some pleasantries he exchanged with Canadiens’ Aurèle Joliat. Oh, and goaltender Hainsworth was said to be hindered by the fog that blanketed the ice. “The heat in the rink,” the Gazette noted, “was fearful.”

Along with Hainsworth and Joliat, Canadiens counted Howie Morenz in their line-up that year, and Art Gagne and Pit Lepine, along with a talented supporting cast. Gardiner joined Sylvio Mantha and Battleship Leduc on the defence — and that was pretty much it, other than Amby Moran, who played in 12 of Montreal’s 44 regular-season games. Gardiner, for his part, was not so much busy as ever-present, relied on by coach Cecil Hart to play all 60 minutes of each game. With the four games Canadiens played in the playoffs, that means he played 48 games — italics and respectful props all mine — in their entirety that year.

“And sometimes it was 70 or 80 minutes,” he recalled years later. “We played overtime in those days, too. But it wasn’t as hard as it sounds. I never carried the puck more than, say, eight times a game. And besides, I was only 35 years old at the time.”

By February of 1927, Elmer Ferguson of The Montreal Herald was already touting Gardiner as his nominee to win the trophy for league MVP that was named for the father of Montreal’s coach. Another hometown paper called Gardiner “the sensation of the league.” When in March sportswriters around the NHL tallied their votes, Gardiner had garnered 89, putting him ahead of the Rangers’ Bill Cook (80) and Boston centre Frank Frederickson (75). I like the way they framed it back in those early years: Gardiner was being crowned (as The Ottawa Journal put it) “the most useful man to his team.” For all that, and as good as that team was, those Canadiens, they weren’t quite up to the level of the Ottawa Senators, who beat Montreal in the semi-finals before going on to win the Stanley Cup.

With Hart in hand, Gardiner asked for a pay raise in the summer of ’27. When Montreal didn’t seem inclined to offer it, he stayed home in Calgary. He was ready to call it quits, he said, but then Canadiens came through and Gardiner headed east, having missed two weeks of training. He wouldn’t say what Montreal was paying him for the season, but there was a rumour that it was $7,500.

So he played a second year in Montreal. Then in August of 1928 he was named coach of Major Frederic McLaughlin’s underperforming Chicago Black Hawks, the fourth in the club’s two-year history. Gardiner had served as a playing coach in his days with the Calgary Tigers, but this job was strictly benchbound — at first.

As Gardiner himself explained it to reporters, Montreal was only loaning him to Chicago, on the understanding that he wouldn’t be playing. The team he’d have charge of was a bit of a mystery: “What players they will have; what changes have been made since last winter, and other matters pertaining to the club are unknown to me,” he said as he prepared to depart Calgary in September.

The team trained in Winnipeg and Kansas City before season got going. When they lost five of their first six games, Gardiner got permission from Montreal’s Leo Dandurand to insert himself into the line-up, but then didn’t, not immediately, went to Ottawa and then Montreal without putting himself to use, and remained on the bench through Christmas and January, and Chicago was better, though not at all good, moping around at the bottom of the league standings.

He finally took the ice in February in a 3-2 loss to New York Rangers, when the Black Hawks debuted at their new home: due to a lease kerfuffle back in Chicago, the team was temporarily at home at Detroit’s Olympia. Gardiner played a total of four games for Chicago before Montreal, up at the top of the standings, decided that if he was going to be playing, it might as well be on their blueline, and so with the NHL’s trade-and-transaction deadline approaching, Canadiens duly ended the loan and called him back home.

Well out of the playoffs, the Black Hawks finished the season with (best I can glean) Dick Irvin serving as playing-coach, though business manager Bill Tobin may have helped, too. Major McLaughlin did have a successor lined up for the fall in Tom Shaughnessy. Coaches didn’t last long with McLaughlin, and he was no exception. While Gardiner oversaw 32 Black Hawk games, Shaughnessy only made it to 21 before he gave way to Bill Tobin, whose reign lasted (slightly) longer, 71 games.

Gardiner finished the season with Montreal, who again failed to turn a very good regular season into playoff success. In May of 1929, Canadiens sent Gardiner to the Boston Bruins, a clear sale this time, in a deal that also saw George Patterson and Art Gagne head to Massachusetts. Gardiner was finished as an NHLer, though: that fall, the Philadelphia Arrows of the Can-Am League paid for his release from Boston and made him their coach.

Sont Ici: A Pittsburgh paper welcomes Canadiens Herb Gardiner and goaltender George Hainsworth in 1927, along with (between them) Gizzy (not Grizzy) Hart, who in fact played left wing rather than defence. Canadiens and Pirates tied 2-2 on the night after overtime failed to produce a winner.

plaster cast

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All Aboard: A trio of Montreal Canadiens forwards show their bandaged stuff as they take to the rails for a road trip in February of 1943. Top is right winger Joe Benoit, whose 30 goals led the team that year, along with centre Buddy O’Connor and left winger Dutch Hiller at the bottom. Canadiens squeezed into the playoffs by a single point that year before falling in the first round to the Boston Bruins. (Image: La Presse)