Posted on May 14, 2013 under Storytelling with 3 comments
Every small community in Canada at one time or another has had a rink. Some of them survive to this day while others have fallen to the wrecking ball. If you are from Antigonish, are a baby boomer and played hockey or liked to skate in your youth, you have at some point in your life enjoyed the charms of the old Memorial Rink on the campus of St. F. X University. Our local rink was built after WW1 in 1921. If you close your eyes, I’m sure you can see it clearly and possibly even smell it. It was an architectural oddity yet it was the heartbeat of the campus and the community for a very long period of time.
I didn’t know who Ferlin Husky was until I attended my first skating party, one of many mating rituals for young people back then. From the enchanting little room at the entrance to the rink, some poor person had to play the same 30 or so songs at every skating party. After about the hundredth time that I heard “Wings of a Snow White Dove”, I was ready to hitchhike to Cantwell, Missouri and strangle Ferlin.
Back then, hockey was not the 24/7 obsession that it is today and most minor hockey was conducted on the weekends. The youngest played the earliest on any given Saturday morning. If you lived in town, you would gear up at home and walk to the rink. Sometimes this involved walking with your skates on as nobody tied skate laces quite like Mom. There were no such things as skate guards back then. It’s not surprising that none of the MacDonald boys made it to the NHL.
If you arrived before Frank did, and it was bitterly cold, you simply walked next door to the boiler room and hung out there. It wasn’t quite Hades but gave some indication of hell fire. It had its own unique smell on the inside and on many days you could taste the toxic mix of ammonia and sulphur as you walked through campus. And of course, when they burned coal, the evidence could be found on sheets hung out on the clothesline.
Most people use two by fours to build things. Frank used them as ice dividers. Long before a pampered generation had access to full size rinks using the entire ice surface, the ice surface at the Memorial was a maze. It was an amazing stroke of genius on Frank’s part. How could he possibly teach 100 kids at the same time? He divided the ice into sections using lumber. At any point in time, four games could be happening simultaneously with Frank masterminding the entire process. Later in the morning as the bigger kids showed up, boards were removed progressively and only the oldest got to use the entire surface. If you wonder why so many of the old timers can stick handle so well, it probably came from learning how to handle the puck in very tight quarters.
Frank was also building other things with those two by fours: character.
There were dressing rooms that smelled like several dozen hockey bags, filled with unwashed equipment, which was exactly the case. Some guys never washed their stuff. No wonder no one wanted to go into the corners with them. There were actually several dressing rooms and some were accessed by a tunnel which connected the rink to the adjacent gymnasium … another interesting architectural anomaly. The public washrooms were also found through this tunnel so between periods of big hockey games, you had players and fans marching side by side down this semi darkened dreary hallway. Scary stuff. The only thing scarier was the washrooms themselves. Let’s just not go there.
Of course, the university played their games there as did the high school team, the senior Bulldogs, minor hockey and the County League. I think I went to one County League game where hockey broke out after several brawls … and that was just among the spectators. The smell of sweat was intermingled with the smell of liquor at many a hockey game.
And there were legendary games, none more so when St .F. X played the Toronto Marlies back in the mid ‘60’s. The Marlies were the farm team for the Toronto Maple Leafs and they were a power house filled with future NHLers. St .F. X. beat them with some of the greatest hockey ever witnessed in the venerable old shrine. I can still see Chi Chi firing a blazing wrist shot. It was one of the few sporting events I ever attended with my father and one that will be treasured forever.
You may remember that there wasn’t a concession stand in the rink. When the horn sounded to end a period there would be a mad stampede to one of two local food joints abutting the campus: the Gag and the Wagon Wheel. These two institutions are stories unto themselves.
The atmosphere at playoff games was electric. The bleachers were as close to the action as physically possible. There was no Plexiglas around the sides and just an excuse for a wire fence at either end behind the net. You could literally touch the players and there were times that bodies flew into the stands. And of course, smoking was in vogue those days so it was not uncommon when a game went into overtime to see a blue haze hover over the ice surface. Classic stuff, for sure.
And how about the big old clock at the South end with the large hands ticking off the minutes and seconds.
There was no Zamboni back in those days. There was an old contraption that was filled with boiling water and dragged around the surface by two of the rink’s custodians. Of course, this was after the ice had been scraped clean with hand operated snow plow shovels. I kept myself in booze money during university by being a rink rat. Was there any finer occupation? Anything for a buck and a chance to be spotted by a young female. This was yet another desperate attempt by a nerdy teenager to be noticed by the fairer sex.
The snow was collected and pushed through a door in the rink boards and then outside through a snow door. Many an enterprising youth, short on cash, found his way into hockey games between periods through those venerable snow doors.
And for sheer pleasure, there was always the possibility of a game of wildcat hockey. You showed up when you knew the ice wasn’t being rented, or merely snuck in through an unlocked door while the staff was having an extra-long lunch break. Anyone who showed up played. Even a few brave priests, who taught at the University, laced them up from time to time. You just threw all the sticks in the middle and when there were two piles of sticks sorted, the teams were determined. There’s nothing much better than just playing for the sheer joy of the game.
But alas, all good things must pass and eventually the vagaries of time took their toll and the rink was torn down and replaced by a science building. I am sure that if you go there today and listen intently; perhaps you will hear the ghosts of the old Memorial Arena. And if you look up in the North East corner, you just might catch a glimpse of George and Louie.
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