Ice Warriors: The Pacific Coast/Western Hockey League 1948-1974

By Jon C. Stott

Technically it was a minor league, but for hockey fans west of the Mississippi, the Western Hockey League provided major-league entertainment for over 25 years.

The WHL was a determined and ambitious professional league, with some 22 teams based in major American and Canadian cities. Known as the Pacific Coast Hockey League prior to 1952, the WHL aspired to establish itself as North America's second major league, a western counterpart to the early eastern Canada-based National Hockey League. But it never quite managed to make the jump to the majors.

Ice Warriors is a play-by-play history of the Western Hockey League, recalling the league's beginnings as the Pacific Coast League, how it came to rival the NHL and what led to its disbanding in 1974. By interviewing former players, coaches and fans, and examining statistical records, Jon C. Stott captures the WHL's glory days and pays tribute to a time when hockey was played with heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heritage House
• Release date: Apr 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781927051047

Jon C. Stott

Jon C. Stott has been studying beer in a very non-academic, non-scientific way for over half a century and is the author of "Beer Quest West: The Craft Brewers of Alberta and British Columbia." His blog www.beerquestwest.com includes essays about breweries and brewers and tasting notes. After wintering in Albuquerque, avoiding the cold Canadian weather, he moved there permanently in 2013. He is the author of more than a dozen books.

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Ice Warriors

Jon C. Stott

For Andrew, Clare and Chris

My Three Stars

Table of Contents

Introduction: Discovering the Pacific Coast/Western Hockey League

1 Beginnings: 1948–49 to 1950–51

Professional Hockey Returns to the West Coast • 1948–49

The Southern Meltdown Begins • 1949–50

A Pacific Northwest Affair • 1950–51

2 Prairie Bound: 1951–52 to 1954–55

The Start of Prairie Dominance • 1951–52

The League Gets a New Name | Edmonton Wins Its First Championship • 1952–53

Tacoma Folds | Another Prairie Team Wins the Playoffs • 1953–54

An All-Canadian League • 1954–55

3 Eastward Expansion: 1955–56 to 1958–59

Newcomer Winnipeg Wins It All • 1955–56

Brandon: From Worst to First • 1956–57

The Saskapaul Experiment | A West Coast Winner • 1957–58

A Midwestern Threat | An American Champion • 1958–59

4 Retreating West and Heading South: 1959–60 to 1962–63

California Dreamin’ • 1959–60

The Portland Dynasty Begins • 1960–61

Winnipeg Departs | San Francisco and Los Angeles Return • 1961–62

Bud Poile Wins a Fourth Championship • 1962–63

5 Becoming a Large-Market League: 1963–64 to 1966–67

Back-to-Back-to-Back Championships for Bud Poile • 1963–64

Portland Wins Its Second Championship | Fielder Wins Another Scoring Title • 1964–65

Victoria Wins the Cup | The WHL Loses Los Angeles and San Francisco • 1965–66

The Attack of the Jolly Green Giants • 1966–67

6 The End of Major-League Dreams: 1967–68 to 1969–70

Giantless Totems Win | The WHL Arrives in the Desert • 1967–68

The Canucks Buy the Americans and Win a Championship • 1968–69

Vancouver Departs in Triumph • 1969–70

7 Struggling to Survive: 1970–71 to 1973–74

The Victory of Portland’s Over the Hill Gang • 1970–71

Young Legs Beat Old Legs • 1971–72

Financial Woes • 1972–73

The Final Season • 1973–74

Going Out of Business • Spring 1974 and After

Conclusion: A League for Its Times

Endnotes

Appendix: Pacific Coast/Western Hockey League Year-by-Year 227 Standings, Playoff Results, Individual Leaders and Award Winners

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Discovering the Pacific Coast/Western Hockey League

On January 25, 1952, my father took me to Victoria Memorial Arena to watch my first professional hockey game. The Victoria Cougars were facing the New Westminster Royals, the team they’d beaten the previous spring to win the regular-season and playoff championships of the Pacific Coast Hockey League (soon to be renamed the Western Hockey League), a minor professional league that had begun play in the fall of 1948. Three months into the new season, the Royals occupied the top spot in the league while the Cougars were tied for last place with the Calgary Stampeders.

My father had tickets for seats just inside the blue line and four rows from the ice. When the play starts, always keep your eye on the puck, my father cautioned. This wasn’t a tip on how to see and better understand the complexities of the game. There was no protective wiring above the boards along the sides of the rink; a deflected puck could give one of the spectators a pretty good bruise—or worse. As we watched the players skate lazily around just before the opening faceoff, my father pointed out some of the Cougars. Number 13 is Eddie Dorohoy—he won the scoring championship last year; number 2 is the coach, Roger Leger; over there is the captain, Bernie Strongman. He’s got the letter ‘C’ on his sweater and he’s the only person who’s allowed to talk to the referee.

Then he pointed across the ice to what was, he told me, the home team’s bench. The white-haired, well-dressed man standing there was Lester Patrick, the Cougars’ owner. He’s going to coach tonight, my father explained, to see if he can shake the team up, get them playing better. He went on to tell me that Patrick was a legend in hockey; he’d invented many important rules and, when my father was a boy, had coached the Victoria team that won the Stanley Cup. They were called the Cougars too, he said. When I was your age, I used to try to sneak into the games, but I usually got caught.

The game that followed was very exciting. I wasn’t all that sure about the rules, but I knew to cheer when the red light went on behind the New Westminster goalie—the Cougars had scored. And I quickly learned why the crowd booed lustily when one of the Royals began skating toward the bench where the PA announcer sat—he’d received a penalty. With just under six minutes left in the game, it looked like the Cougars were going to win. Number 13, Eddie Dorohoy, scored one goal and assisted on two others, and Victoria was one goal ahead. But the Royals tied it up 3–3. The PA announcer said that the goal had been scored by Ollie Dorohoy (Eddie’s big brother, my father said), assisted by someone called Blinky Boyce. (The nickname, I learned 50 years later, didn’t refer to a nervous tick; one season he’d played on a line with someone called Winky, and a sportswriter applied the rhyming name to Boyce.)

The next morning, after I’d told my mother and sisters everything I remembered about the game, I carefully read the program my father had bought for me. All the players’ names, except one, were new to me: Jack McIntyre, the quiet, blond, curly-haired man who lived across the street could be seen on game nights standing at the bus stop waiting for the 6:30 bus to take him to the arena. A few days later, when I saw him outside walking with his little girl, I shyly went up to him and told him I’d seen him play. I was thrilled the next Friday when, just before Jack should have been arriving at the bus stop, the phone rang. It’s Jack from across the street. My wife’s sick and she can’t go to the game. Would you like her ticket?

After seeing my second game, I became a confirmed Cougars’ fan and, on Saturday night at eight o’clock, instead of listening to The Lone Ranger, I turned the dial to CKDA for Bill Stephenson’s play-by-play of a game the Cougars were playing in New Westminster. Stephenson, I would learn, wasn’t at Queen’s Park Arena; he was in the studio in downtown Victoria, recreating the game by using telexed reports and a recording of crowd noises. The next Saturday I didn’t even think of tuning in The Lone Ranger. For me, the famous masked rider of the plains had ridden into the sunset.

Over the next few years, I would attend Cougars’ games nearly every Friday, paying 60 cents to sit in row 20 at the back of the north end zone. On a summer boat trip to Port Angeles, Washington, I met Muzz Patrick, Lester’s son and the coach of the Seattle Bombers. Once, when his team was in Victoria, he took me into the dressing room, where he gave me a slightly cracked stick. Sometimes I’d go down behind the Cougars’ goal before the period began and try, in my schoolboy French, to talk with goalie Marcel Pelletier. I was thrilled when I saw him downtown one day and he said, Bonjour, Jon.

For over a decade, I followed the Western Hockey League (WHL), watching the Cougars, and, after I’d moved to Vancouver to attend university, the Canucks. I read the sports pages and the Hockey News consistently and carefully. Although, as I discovered girls, rock and roll and the pleasure of studying English, my interest lost the intensity of my late childhood years, I was pleased when the Cougars did well (not often enough), and I felt a certain pride when WHL players such as Andy Hebenton, Glenn Hall and Andy Bathgate graduated to the National Hockey League.

After I’d moved to Ontario in the early 1960s, my interest in the WHL became much more casual. I noticed when players I’d seen in person appeared on Hockey Night in Canada and was aware of the league’s constantly shifting geographical footprint: the withdrawal from small-market towns of Victoria and Spokane; the loss of the San Francisco-Oakland and Los Angeles franchises to NHL expansion; and the placing of teams in what were, to most Canadians, the winter golf destinations of Phoenix and San Diego.

Then, on a Christmas vacation in Seattle in 1970, I visited the league offices, where I enjoyed a fairly long conversation with then president Eugene Kinasewich. The outcome of our meeting was my being encouraged to submit a proposal for a brief history of the WHL to be used as part of the league’s upcoming 25th anniversary celebrations. I wrote a short essay, which became part of Ice Men, a glossy, stylishly designed program used by the four teams that had made the playoffs in the spring of 1973. The limited research I engaged in was, for me, a kind of rediscovery of the league. It rekindled my memories and gave me new information about the WHL and its players before and after my decade of fandom.

My essay concluded optimistically: So, as the Western Hockey League looks ahead to the future, there are many things to accomplish . . . many plans to be made . . . many dreams to be turned into realities.(1)

A year after Ice Men was published, the league disbanded, a victim of National Hockey League and World Hockey Association expansion and escalating expenses. My memories of Friday nights at the Victoria Memorial Arena and the Vancouver Forum took their places as just a few of the many and varied recollections of my increasingly long-ago youth.

Then, over three decades after the WHL folded, my interest in it revived. While surfing a sports news site, I came across two where are they now? articles about former WHL players. One was about Guyle Fielder, who played in that game I’d watched with my father in 1952, and the other about Bill MacFarland, who’d become president of the WHL after Kinasewich, and with whom I’d talked during the writing of Ice Men.

I quickly decided that I’d like to study the WHL in greater depth and contacted MacFarland, now a lawyer in Phoenix. He, in turn, put me in touch with Vince Abbey, who had been part of the ownership of the Seattle Totems from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. Abbey had saved many WHL documents: league minutes, media guides, game programs, player pictures and even a box of souvenir pucks from a game played between Seattle and the touring Soviet National Team. Over the next several months, I examined the materials Abbey had generously turned over to me. I read websites about old WHL teams, three or four books about these teams, old copies of the Hockey News and countless rolls of microfilm containing newspapers from various league cities. More important, I talked with over three dozen people associated with the league—players, coaches, owners, reporters—visiting them in their homes or talking on the telephone and finding out about their lives in hockey, their memories about their peers and their opinions about the WHL as they had experienced it.

This research became for me my third discovery of the Western Hockey League. I gained an appreciation of the love of and dedication to the game of the men I’d watched as a 12-year-old boy, and learned from them about the skills and artistry of their teammates and opponents. I came to understand how difficult it had been to run a minor-league hockey team, competing with other leisure activities for people’s entertainment dollars, budgeting carefully while trying not to diminish the quality of the product being offered. And I learned about the complex and difficult relationships that had always existed between the WHL and the NHL. In spite of the WHL’s many attempts to assert a degree of independence and autonomy, its fortunes were directly and indirectly influenced by the NHL during each of the minor league’s 26 years of existence.

Ice Warriors: The Pacific Coast/Western Hockey League 1948–74 is a combination of chronicle and memoir, a year-by-year record and analysis of the on- and off-ice history of the WHL, and a collection of essays about many of the men who played a role in that history. It presents a record of an important era in minor-league hockey, 1948–74, and in minor-league sports generally. And, I hope, it pays tribute to the men who were an essential part of that era.

Although the book bears my name on the title page, it could not have been written without the help of many people. To all those people who gave so generously of their time and so patiently answered my many, many questions, I am grateful. At 68 years of age, I’ve had the joy and privilege of talking with the heroes of my youth. A special thank you goes to Bill MacFarland, who took countless phone calls over many months, and to Vince Abbey, who invited me into his home, shared his memories and then allowed me to root through many boxes in his basement for materials I could use in my research. Frank Liebmann, Paul Delaney and Morris Mott, who are also historians of the old Western Hockey League, were very generous in supplying me with what was very valuable information. To Fraser Seely, who encouraged me to submit my proposal to Heritage House publisher Rodger Touchie, thank you for helping me realize an idea that was very important to me. To Rodger Touchie, Vivian Sinclair and Jennifer Hedges, who have supported me with grace and patience, thank you for agreeing to publish what has been a labour of love. And finally, to my children, Andrew and Clare, and to Chris—I couldn’t have done it without you. Putting together this book has been a wonderful experience—thank you, all.

Lester Patrick Cup

Originally called the President’s Cup, the Lester Patrick Cup was awarded to the playoff champions of the Western Hockey League. Vancouver won the WHL playoffs four times; Edmonton, Seattle and Portland, three times; Victoria, San Francisco and Phoenix, two times; and Winnipeg, Brandon, Saskatoon, Calgary, New Westminster, Denver and San Diego one time each. (Courtesy Vince Abbey)

Chapter 1

Beginnings

1948-49 to 1950-51

Professional Hockey Returns to the West Coast • 1948-49

On January 14, 1948, hockey administrators from the 10 teams of the Pacific Coast Hockey League (PCHL), an amateur organization that stretched from San Diego, California, to Vancouver, British Columbia, met with managing director Al Leader to plan the future of their four-year-old league. Although it had operated under the governance of the Amateur Hockey Association of the United States (AHAUS), it was, in essence, professional, with players earning as much as $100 a week, and many of them receiving under-the-table perks. Now the owners wished to make the league officially professional.

They had considered doing so two seasons earlier; however, as Leader explained many years later, the fact that the National League recognized the territory in Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver as belonging to Lester Patrick made it impossible to get a [professional] franchise without paying substantial fees they wanted for the territory, which our owners thought was unjust, and they just refused to pay it.(1)

However, by 1948 there were many advantages to turning the league professional. Because neither the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (CAHA) nor the AHAUS honoured the contracts players held with teams in the other association, athletes were able to move back and forth across the border, skating for the clubs that offered them the best terms. By turning professional, the league would have better control of players on its teams. Moreover, its teams could develop affiliations with clubs in the higher-level United States Hockey League (USHL) and American Hockey League (AHL), and, more important, with National Hockey League (NHL) teams. They would be able to acquire better players and present a superior product to paying customers. Owners of the Los Angeles and San Francisco franchises believed that having minor-league rather than amateur status would be advantageous should they wish at some future time to apply for NHL franchises.

Some northern team owners, particularly Ken McKenzie, a veteran hockey administrator and owner of the New Westminster (British Columbia) Royals, a small-market team playing in a small arena, objected. He felt that the larger payroll he would have to assume, along with the 17 per cent government tax that had to be paid on revenues from professional sporting events, would result in his losing money. Private deliberations proceeded throughout that January day and, in the late afternoon, Leader announced the organization’s unanimous decision: beginning in October 1948, the PCHL would operate as a professional league. Specific arrangements with the NHL would be worked out before and during that league’s annual meeting in June.

The PCHL would operate two five-team divisions: the San Diego Skyhawks, Los Angeles Monarchs, Fresno Falcons, Oakland Oaks and San Francisco Shamrocks would play in the Southern Division. The Portland Eagles, Tacoma Rockets, Seattle Ironmen, New Westminster Royals and Vancouver Canucks would make up the Northern Division. During the regular season, each team would make one road trip through the other division and the winners of each division’s post-season playoffs would compete for the league championship. The 1948–49 season would open with 29 minor-league teams playing in three leagues: the AHL, considered the strongest minor league; the USHL, the second-best; and the PCHL.

The league’s decision to turn professional in the fall of 1948 and, three years later, to add teams in Alberta and Saskatchewan marked the first time that professional hockey had been played on the Pacific coast and Canadian prairies since 1936. Fourteen of the PCHL/WHL cities that would host professional hockey between 1948 and 1974 had a distinguished hockey history. From 1915 to 1926, teams from the Pacific Coast Hockey Association and the Western Canada Hockey League had competed against NHL clubs for the Stanley Cup, with Vancouver, Seattle and Victoria each winning the coveted trophy. Several minor leagues had operated after 1926: the Prairie Hockey League (1926–28), the California Hockey League (1929–31), the Western Canada Hockey League (1932–33) and the North West Hockey League (1933–36).

The Pacific Coast Hockey League had operated professionally between 1928 and 1931 and then had been re-formed as an amateur league in 1936, operating until 1941, when operations were suspended because of the Second World War. Play resumed in the fall of 1944, and between then and the spring of 1948, there were teams in San Diego, Los Angeles, Hollywood, Oakland, Fresno and San Francisco, California; Portland, Oregon; Spokane, Vancouver, Tacoma and Seattle, Washington; and Vancouver and New Westminster, British Columbia.

The announcement of the PCHL’s turning professional received little attention in the sports pages of the Californian newspapers; however, it certainly did in the Vancouver papers. Duke McLeod reported in the Sun that League Directors believe that . . . not too long from now, the loop . . . will become a distinct threat to the NHL and AHL as a ‘big-time’ professional hockey organization.(2)

Although such a possibility was not openly discussed until the late 1950s, such long-range plans may well have been in the owners’ minds from the start. After the PCHL’s announcement, NHL president Clarence Campbell had told McLeod: Old-time franchises have been kept alive year-by-year, and . . . right now the NHL recognizes the owners and nobody else, as professional hockey promoters in these parts.(3)

Campbell was referring specifically to Guy Patrick (Vancouver), Phil Lycette (Seattle) and Bobby Rowe (Portland) who had kept their pre-Second World War rights to professional hockey in these three cities simply by sending an annual renewal form to the NHL. The difficulties suggested by Campbell’s statement were quietly and privately resolved before the June 1948 NHL meetings.

One of the most vehement defenders of the old rights-holders was Frank Fredrickson, a hall-of-fame player for Victoria and Boston in the 1920s. In a letter to Sun columnist Don Carlson, he wrote: And now the Pacific Coast League wants to have the NHL grant usurpers free entry into a professional hockey league in cities where the destiny of hockey was pioneered by the Patricks and that with their own capital.(4)

From the perspective of over half a century, it is now possible to surmise that the usurper with whom Fredrickson was most upset was the Vancouver Canucks’ flamboyant owner Coley Hall who in 1945, learned that a fledgling hockey league was about to grant a franchise to a Vancouver businessman who had operated a rival team in the senior baseball league. Mr. Hall put the squeeze on a drinking buddy and signed an exclusive lease for the Forum, the only suitable hockey arena in the city.(5)

After the meeting of January 14, a second, and in the long-term history of the league, equally important announcement was made. Managing director Al Leader would become the league’s first president, a position he would hold until May 19, 1969 and then, briefly, in 1974 in the few weeks before the formal dissolution of the league. Leader had grown up playing amateur hockey in small Saskatchewan towns before moving to Seattle in the early 1930s. In the years before the Second World War, he played, coached and refereed, and became increasingly active in the administration of amateur leagues in the Pacific Northwest, and in 1944 became the administrator of the reactivated PCHL. In his 21 years as president, he quietly and efficiently handled the routine business of the league; dealt justice to errant players, coaches and, occasionally, owners; found support for struggling franchises; located new host cities when old ones fell by the wayside; and firmly defended the league’s rights at meetings with the higher-ranked AHL and NHL. He earned the respect of owners, coaches, players and the media, a rare accomplishment in professional sports. And all the while, he worked toward achieving his ultimate vision of the league’s destiny: its acquisition of major-league status either as a division of the NHL, a separate-but-affiliated league or, if need be, a rebel league.

At a league meeting held early in May 1948, the league formalized its early decision to turn professional.

Present at the meeting as an unofficial representative of the NHL was Lester Patrick who was still the owner of professional hockey rights in Victoria and was currently the vice-president of Madison Square Gardens, parent company of the New York Rangers, and who would become, within a year, the owner of an expansion PCHL franchise in Victoria. Before the meeting, in an interview with Duke McLeod, he made the very important point that the National Hockey League will never grant [to the PCHL] territorial rights to Los Angeles and San Francisco . . . Those cities are too big and too rich for the NHL to give away. This meant that the NHL reserves the right to move into coast territory (including Vancouver) at any time to extend its own league or create a new one.(6)

Patrick’s remarks indicated a fact that would be evident throughout the PCHL/WHL’s 26-year history: the league would be, in effect, controlled by the NHL, which could usurp its cities at will. Even the 22 players each PCHL team could control by placing them on its reserve list were subject to being claimed by the NHL in an annual draft, during which players from lower leagues could be taken by teams in higher ones.

The threat of NHL usurpation no doubt dampened the spirits of both Los Angeles Monarchs’ owner Charles Cord, a wealthy southern California automobile dealer, and officials of Music Corporation of America, owners of the San Francisco Shamrocks, each of whom may well have viewed ownership of a minor-league team as a stepping stone to the majors.

For old-time hockey men like Ken McKenzie (New Westminster), Eddie Shore (Oakland) and Frank Dotten (Seattle), the NHL’s attitude would not be an issue. Neither would it be for Harry Shipstad and Oscar Johnson, owners of the Portland Eagles (who would be renamed the Penguins for the 1949–50 season) and a highly successful touring ice show. For these people running minor-league hockey was a business, not part of a strategy to move to higher levels of professional sport.

Over the summer, the 10 PCHL teams began preparing for their first professional season: hiring or rehiring front office personnel, coaches and players; firming up arena leases; and, in some cases, signing affiliation agreements with NHL and AHL teams. Four coaches—Alex Shibicky (New Westminster), Les Cunningham (San Francisco), Bob Gracie (Fresno) and Tony Hemmerling (Oakland)—returned to their teams, while Dave Downie moved from Tacoma to Seattle. Muzz Patrick (Tacoma), Dutch Hiller (Los Angeles), Rudy Pilous and Morden Skinner (San Diego), Jimmy Ward (Portland) and Bill Cowley (Vancouver) were newcomers.

Before the season began, Coley Hall announced that he intended to build his own team and would not seek affiliations with clubs in higher leagues. However, nine other clubs received players from other leagues and four teams signed affiliation agreements. New York sent coach Muzz Patrick and seven players from St. Paul of the USHL to Tacoma. Cleveland and Buffalo of the AHL supplied hockey personnel for San Francisco and San Diego respectively. Eddie Shore, who owned the Springfield Indians of the AHL and Fort Worth of the USHL, used Oakland as a training ground for his younger athletes.

When the training camps began at the end of September 1948, few predictions about the PCHL’s first professional season appeared in newspapers. Clubs awaited the arrival of players from NHL and AHL camps. More important, last year’s players, now free agents, dickered with prospective employers into early October. Two such examples occurred with the New Westminster Royals. Ollie Dorohoy and Ron Pickell had played the 1947–48 season with the Seattle Ironmen. Dorohoy signed with the Royals, but on the last day of training camp, Pickell decided to remain an amateur. (Perhaps he could make more money that way.) Suddenly, the Royals found themselves without a goaltender and local newspapers wondered whether, given the quality of the players in the Royals’ camp, the team could ice a competitive squad. Bob Bergeron and Armand Amy Dufault, two members of the New Westminster team who had played in the Quebec Senior Hockey League, told owner Ken McKenzie about Lucien Dechene, a goaltender against whom they’d played back east. They were so enthusiastic about his ability that they even offered to pay his airfare to British Columbia. Dechene arrived in time for the opening game and went on to become one of the best goaltenders in the history of the league.

McKenzie also signed Walter Babe Pratt, a big, tough, very talented and very fun-loving defenceman who had played a dozen seasons in the NHL with Boston, Toronto and New York, winning the Stanley Cup with the latter two teams and, in 1944, the Hart Trophy as the NHL’s most valuable player. He had spent the 1947–48 season with Hershey and Cleveland of the AHL and was considered to be on