Category Archives: 1900 – 1929

NORM BURMISTER

Norm Burmister was the only Collingwood born goalkeeper to make the professional ranks. He was born too soon. In this era of expansion, Normie would have no trouble catching a spot in the N.H.L.

He learned his trade on the West End mill ponds and made the Collingwood Junior O.H.A. club at the age of fifteen. One of his team mates was Reg Noble, Collingwood’s contribution to the National Hockey Hall of Fame. Another was Sailor Jim Herberts, one of the most colourful players with Boston, Toronto and Detroit, in the days when colourful hockey players were abundant.

He performed in the nets for several Collingwood junior teams until his career was interrupted by World War 1. He served in the Canadian Army for three years and on his return hitched up with intermediate and senior teams in Welland and Niagara Falls.In 1926 he turned in professional with the New York Americans and was sent to New Haven for seasoning.

His big chance came in 1928 when he was slated to move up into the “Big Time” with the Amerks. But cruel  fate stepped in and deprived Normie of his one big opportunity. Joe Ironstone was a hold-out and refused to come to terms with Big Bill Dyer, the racketeer owner of the New York team. Dyer immediately sent for Burmister, who was in training camp at Niagara Falls. On the day before he was to report, Normie broke his shoulder in a pick-up softball game. He never got the chance again and finished his professional career with New Haven in the Can-American League and Guelph and Stratford in the old Can-Pro League.

While with New Haven, he played with two other Collingwood boys, his brother Roy and Abbie Hughes. Roy and Abbie both made the N.H.L. with New York Americans.

ANCEL WILLIAMSON

Ancel was part of Collingwood’s greatest long distance running team back in the first ten years of this century. The other two members were the late Hec Lamont and Jack Rowe the dean of all Collingwood athletes.

Williamson also excelled at lacrosse, basketball and hockey but most of his team games were played in Vancouver, Seattle and New West Minister. We cannot gloss over Ancel’s career without bringing to mind the time he hitched up with Rowe and Lamont in an exhibition race in Collingwood against the great Tom Longboat. The race was run in the old Pine Street Rink in Laps over a five-mile distance. The three Collingwood runners were supposed to each run a mile and two thirds against the great Indian racer. Instead they kept popping out from behind pillars at one-hundred yard intervals. They beat the champion by a few steps. Tom Flanagan, Longboat’s crafty manager, was fit to be tied. It was Longboat’s Canadian barnstorming tour. Williamson won the Canadian Junior one-mile championship inTorontoin 1908 and just missed making the Olympic team. He won the Georgian Baycross-country run and then moved out to the west coast. In 1910, he played with the Vancouver senior lacrosse team, the British Columbia champions.

He moved on to New Westminister in 1911 and once again he was a member of a provincial title winning club. IN the next two yeas he was a member of Mann Cup winning clubs in Vancouver and New Westminister. He played senior baseball and basketball for New Westminister and a member of the Mount Lehman soccer team in the Fraser Valley League.

After being out of hockey for almost twenty years, he donned a pair of skates and played one season in the Vancouver Senior Hockey League.

While serving as a Sgt Major in the Canadian Army, he was good enough to win the army featherweight boxing title.

While serving in the Army, he played on two army lacrosse and hickey teams and it was here that he realized his greatest athletic thrill. He was assigned to the task of checking the great Newsy Lalonde.

JOHN “BUCK” WALTON

They called him a hockey policeman and there never was a better one than Buck Walton.

Never a fancy skater or a fast one, Buck made up for his lack of speed and finesse with his courage, stick handling and dogged determination.

He played on three Collingwood O.H.A. Intermediate “A” championship teams in 1918, 1919 and 1920 and on the runner-up team in 1921.

When the going got tough and the opposition started carrying the sticks high, the call went out for the “policeman”.

He never spared himself and he never made excuses. If he took a butt end in the corner there was no squawking from the “Buckaroo”

He just lowered his head and hit with everything he had. Buck took many beating but he handed out some pretty good lumps himself. No fast skating forward ever came in on Walton with his head down-at least not after the first time.

I remember the night, fifty-four years ago, when the Buckaroo took a bad on big Dick Simple, the great Midland star of that era. Dick stepped deftly aside and Walton took a Barnum and Bailey dive into the end boards. The crowd groaned as his head and shoulders crunched against the planks and his body slipped down to the ice. The legendary Rabbi Fryer skated over to the fans and called out “Get a dust pan and a broom!” Buck was on his feet in a minute, skated over to the bench, took a long drink of water, or whatever, and joined the affray again. Two minutes later he went from end to end and scored.

Back in 1915, he scored a winning goal in Hamilton that put Collingwood into the O.H.A. semi-finals round. He had been knocked out twice during the game. For twenty years, Buck Walton gave everything he had for Collingwood junior and intermediate teams.

Buck and Rabbi Fryer were lured out of retirement in the thirties and turned out to be bad decision.

In a play-off game between Collingwood and Camp Borden for the Georgian Baygroup title, referee Ernie Wortley fingered buck for five cheap penalties and the Buck lost his cool. He dropped his stick and went for the official, the first time he did that in his life. Fryer came to Buck’s assistance, although he really didn’t=t need it, and both players were suspended indefinitely by the O.H.A.

Two years later, Fryer made application and was re-instated. Buck refused to go hat in hand and said. “Let them keep the O.H.A. it’s only a pink tea party now, anyway. Next thing you know they’ll penalize you for spitting out your own teeth”.

He never was re-instated and I was always sorry about that. I tried to persuade him to apply for re-instatement just so he could retire with a clean slate. It was no dice. Buck was just too proud and that application for re-instatement sounded too much like begging to suit the Buck.

 

HAWLEY “HUCK” WELCH

Fifty years ago the late Lou Stapleton made this remark when he watched a gangling,
square-jawed fifteen year-old schoolboy trot out on a football field for the first time.

“That kid will be a great football player some day”. Lou couldn’t have made a
more exact prediction because that kid was Hawley “Huck” Welch, who, after a brilliant career with Hamilton and Montreal was inducted into Canada’s Football Hall of Fame in 1966.

He did everything the right way when he performed for the Collingwood Collegiate
that season but what impressed Lou most of all was the ease in which Huck sent
up those long, smooth sailing spiraling punts with his educated toe.

Huck left Collingwood in his sophomore year and moved off to Hamilton. It did not take Huck very long to get established in that hotbed of football. He helped Delta Collegiate win two successive Ontario Secondary Schools titles and the Tigers picked him up at the end of the 1927 season. He never looked back.

The Tigers won Grey Cups back to back in 1927 and 1928 and the deadly right foot
and broken field running of Huck Welch played no small part in the success of that great Tiger team. They still talk about the kicking duels between Welch and Ab Box of the Argos.

One Saturday afternoon Welch kicked three singles and Box kicked two. Hamilton won 3-2.

Ted Reeve wrote in his column. “Ab Box kicked the ball clean over Hamilton  Mountain and Huck Welch kicked it back.”

He moved over to the Montreal Winged Wheelers in 1930 when Warren Stevens
introduced the forward pass to Canadian football. He helped Montreal win the Grey Cup in 1931 and in 1933 crowned his great football career by winning the Jeff Russell Trophy as the most valuable player in Canadian Football.

He finished his career back in Hamilton in 1937.

Huck served with distinction as an officer in the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry in
World War 11 and we had the pleasure of watching Huck and an all-star Canadian
service football team beat the Americans in London=s White City Stadium in the
spring of 1944. As a matter of fact we managed to pick up a bit of that 5 to 1
money the Yanks were tossing around.

LAWRENCE”DUTCH”CAIN

He was the most artistic body checker ever to perform for a Collingwood hockey
team and must be ranked with the best hitting defensemen of anytime-professional or amateur.

Bon in Newmarket but a resident of Collingwood for forty years, Dutch was the kingpin on the 1935 Collingwood Shipbuilders, winners of the O.H.A. Intermediate “A” championship.

Dutch played hockey under the principle that a good body check should be heard and not seen. There never was a better demonstrator of that principle.

“The bigger they are, the heavier they fall!” said Dutch, and during his career he dropped tons of hockey beef over scorers of arena ice surfaces throughout Canada and the United States.

He weighed only 155 pounds but the answer to his great hitting ability was in the
timing. Dutch never ploughed directly into the path of an onrushing forward. All he needed was a piece of him.

Cain played junior hockey in his native Newmarket and was a member of the Owen Sound Greys, Memorial Cup champions of 1924-25. That was quite a team-Cain, Cooney Weiland, Butch Keeling, Teddy Graham, Hedley Smith and Fred Elliot. The team picture of the Greys is in the Hockey Hall of Fame. Weiland Graham and Keeling went on to stardom in the N.H.L.

In the following years, up until 1928, Dutch played with Eveleth and Calumet in the old Central League. Calumet won the title in 1927.

A few years ago Cain was inducted into the United States Hockey Hall of Fame in Minnesota. Dutch returned to Canada in 1928 to help South Porcupine win the Northern Ontario senior title and then played on championship teams in the Eastern League with Baltimore Orioles and the Bronx Tigers. He was selected as the most valuable player in the league in the season of 1934-35.

He moved back to Collingwood in 1932 and was about to call it a career when he was
lured back into uniform by the late Walter Robinson, then coach of the Collingwood Shipbuilders. Dutch teamed up with big Jack Portland on the defense. Portland
was a good pupil and went on to a ten-year career in the N.H.L. his last season in 1935 was a winner.

Teaming up with playing-coach Bern Brophy, he helped Collingwood win the Intermediate title for the sixth time since 1910. He died the day after the founding of the Collingwood Sports Hall of Fame.

NORM RULE

Norman Rule qualifies for Collingwood’s Sports Hall of Fame as a competitor and a builder.

This pioneer sportsman passed away in 1973 at the age of ninety-six, a member of Collingwood’s first hockey team organized eighty-nine years ago in 1894.

It was mainly through the organization ability of Mr. Rule that the first team came into being. He borrowed a pair of cricket pads and took over the goalkeeping duties behind such pioneer players as Ed Elworthy, Charlie Norris, a man who later became vice-president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce, Date Andrews, Reg Brown, later a wealthy business man in British Columbia, Fred Hopkins, who lost his life in Klondike Gold Rush in ’98, and Bill Toner, who had the honor of being elected Collingwood’s first hockey team captain.

Norman Rule could be classed as one of the town’s first all around athletes. He was a better than average ball player, an outstanding golfer and his name is on the Ontario Tankard Curling Trophy won by Collingwood in 1913.

His contribution to hockey alone rates him as a candidate for the Sports Hall of Fame but his real value came in the promotion and organization of sports in general. I have five individual trophies, all won by Norman Rule, stored at my home at the present time.

ARTIE CLARK

His playing weight hovered around 150 pounds but he hit like a heavyweight and
stickhandled in the fashion of the legendary Rabbi Fryer. Artie Clark was a
forward but his body checking ability had just as much effect on opposing
players as a hitting defenseman. Defensemen stopped them at the blue line-Artie
dropped them at centre ice.

His athletic capabilities were not confined to hockey. He was equally adept in the games of baseball, softball and lacrosse and he even played creditable game of cricket. He pitched, caught and played the infield in baseball. We can recall many ball games back in the twenties when Artie caught the first four innings and then finished the game on the mound. He just turned fifteen when he made the Collingwood junior team in 1920. In 1921, he was a member of the exceptionally good Collingwood junior club that almost beat Howie Morenz and the Stratford Midgets in a sudden death semi-final game in the old Toronto Mutual Street Arena. Stratford went on to win the Dominion title.

He was still with Collingwood when they lost out in the O.H.A. semi-finals to Aura Lee and University of Toronto in 1922 and 1923. He moved up into the intermediate ranks with Collingwood the following year and then helped
the Grimsby Peach Kings win the Ontario title in 1925. That was the year the Peach Kings stunned the amateur hockey circles by beating the Soo Greyhounds in the first round of Allan Cup play. He stayed with the Peach Kings another year
and turned professional with the old Chicago Cardinals in 1927. In 1928, he was up with the leading scorers with the Kitchener Millionaires in the International League and had another good year with Teddy Oakes’ Toronto Millionaires in 1929.

The following year he signed with the Cleveland Barons where he teamed up with three other Collingwood born players, Reg Noble, Bern Brophy and Mike Brophy. Artie had a season with Syracuse and finished an eighteen-year in Oklahoma City in 1935.

TOM COLLINS

One of the most colourful hockey players in the history of the town.

Tom played on  Collingwood’s second Ontario Hockey Association’s team for ten years around the
turn of the century.  He was a member of the 1907 Intermediate Ontario
finalists.  He played professional hockey with Portage La Prairie and
Minneapolis.  He was also a star lacrosse player.

VICTOR “VIC” ELLIS

At age ninety, Vic Ellis is the oldest living member in the Collingwood Sports Hall of Fame.

A lifetime of competition in many branches of sport, especially in golf and curling, has filled his home with so many cups and trophies that it now appears he has a corner on the silver market.

Born in Kimberly, Ont., Vic starred on baseball and soccer team before baseball and soccer teams in 1911, winners of the Grey County soccer cup.

Vic played on Collingwood baseball and softball teams for thirty years and was a member of the Collingwood senior baseball team of 1922, O.A.B.A. finalists and champions of the Georgian Bay League.

A school teacher in Collingwood for twenty years, Vic was the driving force behind the organization of the one-hundred member Tuxis Boys and Trail Rangers in the 1920’s.

A member of the old Collingwood Golf and Country Club and the Blue Mountain Golf Club for the past fifty-five years, he has been a perennial member of the Men’ Golf team and fifteen years ago won the Blue Mountain Handicap Trophy. In July 1943, he shot a hole in one for the first and last time in his golfing career.

However, this versatile athlete gained most of his fame as a expert exponent of the game of curling.

A past president of the Collingwood Curling Club, Vic has dominated the “roaring game” for sixty years.

Just two years ago he skipped the winning rink in the Markdale Mixed Curling tournament and in 1979 led a Creemore rink to the Quebec International Bonspiel Championship and the Marc-Hellaire Trophy.

This is a major curling feat at any time, but at eighty-seven, it was nothing short of a phenomenon.

Back in 1936 he skipped a rink in the Ontario Tankard competition and during his lifetime of curling won at least thirty trophies, including the Norman Rule Cup, the Currie Cup, the C.S.L. Trophy, the Enterprise-Bulletin Shield and the Chamber of Commerce Cup.

In 1956 he skipped the first Collingwood rink to ever score an eight end. It was a mixed team with Mary Colling, Evelyn Kean and Johnny Walker.

A lifelong member of the Smokey Island Hunt Club, Vic never missed a deer hunt in six decades.

His involvement in service clubs, charitable organization and the Masonic Order is legend. He has the distinction of presiding over all three branches of the Masonic Order in Collingwood. W Master of the Manito Lodge, “Z” of the Manitou Chapter and was first President of the Manito Shrine Club. Vic also served as president of the Collingwood Progress Club, chairman of the Victoria Order of Nurse, president of the Collingwood Curling Club, director on the General and Marine Hospital Board and a moving force behind the development of the Senior Citizen Club and the Meals on Wheels service.

His contribution to society was finally recognized two years ago when he was selected as the Citizen of the Year. His induction into the Sports Hall of Fame was delayed because of the rule that no person is eligible until after retirement. We had to waive that rule in the case of Victor A. Ellis – he is never going to retire.

FRANK COOK

Frank Cook was the greatest goalkeeper of his time stated Bill Hewitt, secretary of the O.H.A. for 60 years, when Frank died on June 6th, 1931, in his forty-second year.

Born in Midland in 1888, he was a member of the Midland Junior O.H.A. champions in 1907, lured to Collingwood in 1909 to lead the Collingwood Shipbuilders to their first Intermediate championship in 1909-10 against London. Three years later, Frank backstopped Collingwood to another Championship in 1913 followed by 3 consecutive titles in 1918, 1919 & 1920. In total, Frank played on six O.H.A. Intermediate title winning teams between Midland and Collingwood.

Near the close of the 1919 season, Cook and Rabbi Fryer, were both offered pro contracts with Montreal Canadians.

“It may be your last chances to make the big time” said Darcy Bell, manager of the Collingwood team.

“We can’t leave Collingwood with the team in the finals” said Cook and the Rabbi agreed.

After retiring in 1924, Frank rose from his sick bed to backstop the Collingwood Oddfellows win the 1931 Senior Town League title. The opposition scored three goals off him in seven play-off games.

It was, perhaps, a sentimental gesture, but it stuck in the hearts of Collingwood fans forever. From that day, the names of Cook and Fryer have been spoken in reverence.

Lou Marsh thought he was born twenty years too soon and said. “Had he chose to turn pro he would have been rated as one of the best N.H.L.”

As it was, Frank Cook dominated the amateur hockey scene for seventeen years from 1907 to 1924.

Less than 3 months following Frank’s return to the ice in 1931, the town was collectively shocked to learn of Frank Cook sudden passing, truly Collingwood’s greatest goalie and one of the town’s most respected citizens.