His brilliant career cut short by a near fatal accident in his early twenties, Frankie Dance, will still go down as one of the cleverest hockey players ever produced in Collingwood.

Born in Collingwood, he was the youngest son of another Collingwood Hockey Hall of  Famer, Jack Dance, a member of Collingwood’s first  Intermediate champions in 1910.

He started playing hockey shortly after he learned to walk and came all the way up through the Collingwood Minor Hockey system from Pee Wee to Juvenile.

Frankie was a member of the Collingwood Clubs, winners of the 1949 O.M.H.A. Juvenile championship, a team that went through the entire season without losing a game.

He collected four more provincial medals with the Collingwood Greenshirts, winners of four straight O.H.A. Junior “C” titles in 1950-51-52 and 53. The same team went to the 1954 finals.

Frankie was the playmaker on the great little Greenshirt line with Jim Barrett and Allan Morrill. During that four-year championship span, the Barrett-Morrill-Dance line scored 444 goals, chalked up 347 assists for a total of 791 scoring points.

The passing plays of that line could be described as “poetry in motion”. With that combination there was no such thing as “giving the puck away”. Every move, every play, was made as if the whole operation has been planned on a drawing board a forehand. Dance would lay out that pass dead on the point from right to let with deadly accuracy. He did not even have to lift his head. He knew that either Morrill or Barrett would be on the receiving end and the shot on goal was automatic.

In a game played in Barrie in 1951, Frankie collected ten points with three goals and seven assists.

He graduated to the Intermediate ranks in 1954 and scored thirty-five goals. That Spring he fell from a hydro pole while working as a lineman with the Public Utilities. His life hung in the balance for weeks. His sheer courage helped in his remarkable recovery but the great young athlete’s career was over. His injuries left him crippled for the rest of his life.

His athletic ability was not confined to hockey. Frankie played a creditable game of baseball for Collingwood teams in the early fifties.

He was able to carry on his duties at the Public Utilities Commission for twenty-five years following the accident and was superintendent of the main pumping station at the time of his sudden death, on the job, on the night of Feb. 1st, 1978. Frankie was forty-seven.

If an athlete from Collingwood excels in five competitive sports and plays on a World championship hockey team, he certainly qualifies for a spot in his home  town’s Hall of Fame.

Bus Portland performed in the shadow his famous brother, Jack, but nevertheless he was one of the best all Collingwood. We remember a bright sunny day back in 1934 when Bus Portland stole a whole athletic show in the annual Ontario Athletic Commission Meet in Orillia.

All he did that day was win the pole vault, high jump, 12- pound shot put and the long jump, had it not been for a special rule. No athlete was allowed to compete in more than three events in high school athletic events sponsored by the Ontario Athletic Commission.

That same year he set a record in the Collingwood Collegiate Field Day by winning the senior medal with six firsts out of seven events.

He was just as good on the football field. Playing at centre half, he ran plunged and kicked the C.C.I. to a C.O.S.S.A. championship in 1934.

Bus had a very colourful hockey career but his greatest hockey thrill came in 1938 when he starred with the Sudbury Wolves, winners of the McReavey, Gordie Bruce, Fan Hexime and Johnny Godfrey, the Wolves sailed through the entire tournament without a loss. He played on Collingwood junior teams before turning pro with the Hershey Bars in the American League. That team won the American League title in 1936. His last year in hockey was with a winner in 1939 when the Detroit
Ford Holyboughs won the Michigan- Ontario championship.

They called him the “Hard Rock” and there never was a more suitable moniker to describe this rugged little policeman of the ice lanes in the days when hockey players had to be rugged to survive.

John Dance played in the shadow of such great Collingwood stars as Rabbi Fryer, Jack Burns, Frank Cook, Harold Lawrence, Angus McKinnon and the Foulis brothers but it was his back checking and bodychecking that gave the stars the chance to shine.

He played junior for several years before he made the Intermediate club in 1911, the year after the Shipbuilders won their first O.H.A. title.

The team missed out in 1911 and 1912 but it was Dance who knocked down the obstacles and led the team to the championship again in 1913.

It was his greatest year. He skated interference for the big scores and took many a thump that was meant for the top scorers, Fryer, Burns and Lawrence, but his goal came in the big clutches.

Three times on the way to the final round, Dance came through with game winning goals. Collingwood won the first game of the provincial final against London Acadians 6-5 and Dance poked in the winner. London won 2-1 at home and tied the round. The third and deciding game played before six thousands fans in Toronto went to the Shipbuilders 3-2. Dance scored one goal and set up the winner.

Collingwood did not win another championship until 1918 and once again John Dance bore the brunt of the enemy attack. He hung up his skates in 1919 but he took them down again twelve years later. With his old teams mates, Frank Cook and Jack Burns, he came back to help the Odd fellows win the Collingwood Senior Hockey title. He was forty-three years old at the time.

John Dance died on April 14th, 1965, in his 77th year.

Back at the turn of the century a Collingwood hockey coach watched a wiry red headed nipper weave back and forth through thirty or forty kids on a west end mill pond.

He wore a pair of beaten up spring skates and he carried a home made hockey stick. With that stick he performed miracles with a wooden puck. He only relinquished possession of that wooden missile when he felt like a rest.

That was the last time Ernie Fryer ever played on a mill pond. He was quickly injected into the line-up of the Collingwood Shipbuilders and for the next three decades he wrote his name across the record books of the Ontario Hockey Association.

He played his entire hockey in Collingwood with the exception of the two-season stint in Northern Ontario and a season with a senior club in Toronto.

He captained and spearheaded the Collingwood Shipbuilders to five Intermediate “A” provincial titles in 1910-13-18-19-20. He and Frank Cook turned down a pro offer from the Montreal Canadians mid-way through the 1920 season.

They said at the time that they could not leave Collingwood with the Shipbuilders on the way to a third straight championship. Of course, the amateur rate of pay was pretty good in those boom days of the early twenties.

The late Lou Marsh once said, “Rabbi Fryer was the greatest amateur player Iever saw. Everything he did in a hockey rink came natural.” Fryer was a legend in his time and he was still good enough to command star rating at forty-eight years of age. I saw him play his last game in Midland in 1934. He scored two goals and drew five penalties. He was his own policeman right to the end. When the final bell sounded, a thousand fans jumped the boards to shake his hand. The rest of the team was dressed and back in the hotel before Fryer left the rink. It was the first time I ever saw anything but fire in his eyes, but there were tears that night. It was the Rabbi’s finest hour.

We have no hesitation in inducting Ernest Fryer as the first member of Collingwood’s Sports Hall of Fame. He died November 15th, 1969. We will never see his like again.

Larry Gibbons makes the Sports Hall of Fame as an aggressive all-around athlete.

Born in Collingwood, he grew up fast and always looked three or four years older  than his team mates and opponents when he performed for the minor hockey and ball teams.

He came through the Collingwood Minor Hockey system and looked like a Juvenile  when he played bantam, much to the consternation of the other kids and their parents.

Larry drew the attention of the scouts when he played a major part in helping the Collingwood Bantams reach the finals in the Bantam Division of the O.M.H.A.

After a season with the Collingwood Junior “C” club, he was drafted by the Toronto Marlboros and sent to the Markham Junior “B” club for the 1965-66 season where he was named to the Metro Junior “B” All-Star team.

Drafted in the second round by the Chicago Black Hawks while still Midget age, he was assigned to the St. Catherine’s Black Hawks in the Junior “A” loop for two seasons in 1967 and 68.

Although he never made the N.H.L. he played eight years in the Black Hawk organization.

Larry joined the Greensboro Generals in the Eastern Hockey League in the 1968-69 season and was with the same team when the Generals won the Southern Division championship in 1970.

He jumped back to Senior “A” hockey with Oakville in 1971 and was voted the league’s most valuable defenseman.

After another season with the Greensboro club in 1972 he went to the Flint Generals in the International League where he set a team record in scoring for defensemen in 1973.Flint won the Northern Division championship.

He starred with the Dallas Black Hawks when that team won the Central League title and the Adams Trophy in 1974.

After another full season with Dallas, Larry moved back with the Flint Generals in the International League and retired at the end of the 1975-76 season.

For three summers he directed the Detroit Red Wings Hockey School in Bracebridge and for two more summers conducted the Wasaga Stars School at Wasaga Beach.

He coached the Alliston Juniors to the Ontario semi-finals before calling it a hockey career.

Larry was an exceptionally good football player and was named the most valuable player with the Collingwood Collegiate Seniors in 1965.  He had considerable placed well up in the Ontario Schools Ski Racing programme.

Always a lover of horses, he became a certified farrier and was assistant manager of the Ontario Harnessmens’ Association for two years. Involved as an owner, trainer and driver of Standard Bred horses since 1972, Larry owned and operated the Intosh Harness Supplies Ltd. and Custom Blend Horse Feeds, coupled with a busy mail order horse supply businesses and the operation of the Tack Store at Windsor Raceway.

His uncle, Alex MacMurchy, a well known former long distance runner, was one of the first athletes to be inducted into the Collingwood Sports Hall of Fame.

Sonny Robinson was a valuable member of those great Collingwood Jr.’C’ Greenshirt
teams, in 1951 -52 and 1952 – 53, which won back-to-back OHA championships.

Robinson, was the leading scorer for the a Greenshirts in the 1953-54 season before
moving on to play for the Intermediate ‘A’ Meaford Knights for two years, going
to the all-Ontario finals both times. The hard working centre man came
back to Collingwood to play for the Intermediate ‘A’ Shipbuilders in 1956 and
played for eight more seasons.

Robinson’s contributions weren’t restricted to the ice surface as he served as a volunteer at several different positions, including president and a house league coach
with the Collingwood Minor Hockey Association for 1957-79. He was responsible
for setting up a power skating school during his tenure with the CMHA.

Clarence ‘Sonny’ Robinson was inducted in the Collingwood Sports Hall of Fame in 1996.

Collingwood has been the birthplace of many colourful sports characters over the past seventy-five years and the Sailor must rank high on the list.

We have always thought that he never received the recognition he deserved and apparently Connie Smythe thought so too.

When Jimmy died in 1968, Smythe said, “Herberts was the most underrated player in the N.H.L. because too much attention was paid to his fun loving antics. But he was one of the best of his era and a natural hockey player.”

He had a ten-year career with Boston, Toronto and Detroit and several years with International League clubs. He also took a fling at refereeing in the British Hockey League but his antics were just a little too much for the staid English hockey promoters.

He was a star right from the start in his rookie year with the Bruins as he scored seventeen goals and picked up ten assists in a 30-game schedule. This was a most remarkable feat when you realize that the goal production for the whole Boston team that season of  1925 was only forty-seven goals.

The  season of 1925-26 was his best. Playing between Carson Cooper and Hugo Harrington he scored 27 goals in 36 games and finished third in the standing behind the great Nels Stewart and Cy Denneny. In 1927 he finished fourth in the
scoring race and the Bruins made the Stanley Cup finals for the first time. The Ottawa Senators defeated the Bruins that season two games to nothing with two games tied. The Sailor’s contribution was three goals.

Jimmy moved on to Toronto in the middle of the 1928 season but although Smythe valued his ability, he  refused to put up with his frolicsome behaviour and his utter disregard for training rules. He finished his N.H.L. career with Detroit where he succeeded in helping Jack Adams to acquire a cluster of ulcers. He once upset the whole scoring structure of the league by claiming two points for one goal. In a game against New York Ranges he managed to recover his own  pass and score. According to Jimmy’s calculations an assist counted a point and so did a goal. Since he was the passer and the scorer it just had to be two points for Herberts. Of course, he didn’t get away with it, but he had the official scorer puzzled for awhile.

Herberts had that race gift of showmanship that kept his name in sport pages. A Detroit writer panned him once for failing to show up for a game. Jimmy was as mad as wet hen. Not for the panning. He was ruffled because the writer misspelled his name.