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.

Whit Hammond makes Collingwood’s Hall of Fame as a lacrosse player, speed skater and hockey player.
Eighty years ago he was one of the brightest stars in Canadian lacrosse but at that time he was raising no cheers from Collingwood fans. Wearing the colors of the Owen Sound Crescents he sank many a ball a Collingwood net and we were happy to see him move to Collingwood in 1908.
A fierce competitor at all times, he was a driving force behind Collingwood hockey teams for many years.
He played goal for the Shipbuilders in 1908, the first Collingwood team to reach the O.H.A. Intermediate finals.
His speed skating feats are legendary and as a speed skater he was indirectly responsible for starting a Canadian fighter on the road to the World Heavyweight Boxing title. That may sound like a kooky kind of a statement but it is true. Back in 1900, Whit Hammond and Noah Brusso of Hanover, Ontario, were considered to
be the best speed skaters in the country but they had never met in a race.
Brusso was charged with “ducking a match race with Hammond” and Brusso replied by accepting a match race with this remark. “If Whit Hammond beats me I will hang up my skates forever.” Hammond beat him in three straight heats for a trophy filled with silver dollars at Hepworth. Noah Brusso was true to his word.
He did hang up his skates and put on a pair of boxing gloves and changes his name to Tommy Burns.
It was a wise and profitable choice for the Hanover speed skater. A few years later on Feb. 23rd, 1906, he defeated Marvin Hart for the World heavyweight crown-the only Canadian ever to reach the pugilistic pinnacle.
Whit Hammond was one of the great athletes of his time. He died in Collingwood in 1959.

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.