Alan Livingstone MacLeod - From Rinks to Regiments: Hockey Hall-Of-Famers and the Great War

Copyright 2018 Alan Livingstone MacLeod

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, audio recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher or a licence from Access Copyright, Toronto, Canada.

Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd.

heritagehouse.ca

Cataloguing information available from Library and Archives Canada

978-1-77203-268-0 (pbk)

978-1-77203-269-7 (epub)

Edited by Lesley Cameron

Proofread by Stephen Harries

Cover and interior design by Jacqui Thomas

Front cover and title page image: 228th Battalion Hockey Juniors

Back cover images (top to bottom): Percy LeSueur (191112 C55 series), Moose Goheen (195960 Topps All-Time Greats), Harry Punch Broadbent (191213 C57 series), Alex Connell (193334 V252 Canadian Gum series)

Unless otherwise indicated, images displayed in this book are the authors own, or else are of hockey memorabilia or archival items in his personal collections or are photographs in the public domain.

The interior of this book was produced on 100% post-consumer recycled paper, processed chlorine free, and printed with vegetable-based inks.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

22 21 20 19 18 1 2 3 4 5

In memory of John Junior Hanna,

New York Rangers (195861),

Montreal Canadiens (196364),

Philadelphia Flyers (196768).

Not a Hall-of-Famer, but an enduring hockey

hero to a long-ago Cape Breton boy.

Preface

On October 7, 1959opening day of the 195960 National Hockey League (NHL) seasona twelve-year-old boy penned a letter to Clarence Campbell, president of the NHL. He politely asked Mr. Campbell for a list of the rosters of the six NHL teams, the names and uniform numbers of every player. Within a few days, an envelope bearing the NHL logo arrived in the kids mailbox. Mr. Campbell had complied with the boys request. The kid would repeat his request on the following years opening day and again on the one after that.

From the vantage point of the adult the boy would eventually become, the kid looks like someone who must surely have been one of the most devoted hockey fans of his time. He knew by heart the names and uniform numbers of every NHL playerall those who skated for his beloved Montreal Canadiens, every one of the despised Toronto Maple Leafs. He knew them all.

He was a newspaper delivery boy and used the proceeds of his labours to buy a subscription to The Hockey News, the hockey bible. The News was printed on newsprint in tabloid format and generally arrived by mail on the same day every week during the winter. The boy keenly anticipated the mailmans arrival.

It wasnt just Clarence Campbell who received the kids letters. He wrote to le Club de hockey Canadien and asked for signed photographs of all the playersthe magnificent Beliveau and all the others. It would never happen today, but the boy got what he asked for. A package arrived by return mail containing black-and-white photographs of all Les HabsBeliveau, Rocket Richard, Dickie Moore, all of them.

The boy spent the summers of 1958 and 59 with his grandmother on the outskirts of Saint-Lambert on the opposite side of the St. Lawrence River from Montreal. One day during his 1959 stay, he learned that a group of Canadiens were to play a charity softball game against a local team. He figured out which bus would get him to the scene of this wondrous event. He took his autograph book. Several of the Canadiens signed itincluding future Hall-of-Famers Doug Harvey and Dickie Moore.

In 1960, a bright light among the Shirriff dessert people came up with an ingenious plan for gaining an edge over their competitors at Jell-O. They decided to launch a promotion aimed at inducing hockey-loving boys to switch their dessert allegiance from Jell-O to Shirriff. In time for the 196061 season, the company included plastic discs featuring the images of NHL hockey players in the packaging of their jelly desserts 120 hockey coins in all, twenty for each of the six teams of the NHL at that time.

The kid asked the nice ladies along his paper route if they might be persuaded to buy Shirriff desserts for their families and save the hockey coins for him. The ladies agreed. In short order he had all 120 hockey coins. He didnt realize it at the time, but his powers of persuasion were as great as they would ever be.

Jean Beliveau/196061.
Shirriff Dessert Hockey Coins

Lester Patrick/196061.

Topps All-Time Greats series

In the autumn of 1960, the folks at the Topps bubble gum company produced a hockey card set featuring something entirely unique. Twenty-seven of the cards in the set featured all-time greats of the game, men whose playing days had occurred decades earlier, some before the turn of the century. Few of the players were familiar to the boy, but their names were evocativePaddy Moran, Dickie Boone, Dit Clapper, Cyclone Taylor. The first card in the series was assigned to a man whose name arises many times in this bookLester Patrick. Eventually, every one of those twenty-seven players would be inducted in the Hockey Hall of Fame.

When he saw this series of hockey cards, the boy realized the game had a history. And judging by the names of the all-time greats, the uniforms they wore, and the brief biographical notes on the back of the cards, the history was likely to be intriguing.

A few years later he spotted an ad in The Hockey News for a book called Official N.H.L. Record Book 191764. It was sold for a measly buck twenty-five. He sent away for it, and when it arrived, he pored over it, learning more about the all-time greats.

The kid is now grown tall, but he still consults the old record book. He still owns the 196061 All-Time Greats cards, the signed Montreal Canadiens images, the Shirriff hockey coins.

Many worthy mothers got rid of their boys hockey cards when the lads grew up and seemed no longer interested in the items that were once so precious, but the paperboys mum was special: she kept the whole lot. A time came when her son wanted to see them again. The boyhood relics, every one of them, were waiting for him.

Doubtless there were many other kids across the country who learned from the 1960 All-Time Greats cards that their favourite game had a history. Perhaps they learned that for several of the greats born in the 1890s, their history as players would intersect with history of a very different sort: the cataclysm of the Great War.