Howie and the Habs light it up in Stratford
Howie Morenz, mid teens
Howie Morenz 1925
By April 1927, Howie Morenz had logged four National Hockey League seasons with the Montreal Canadiens. In his first of those four, as a rookie, he scored 13 goals and added three assists in 24 regular-season games. In six playoff games he managed seven goals and three assists as the Habs won their second Stanley Cup by beating the Calgary Tigers of the Western Canada Hockey League. Morenz’s third playoff goal was the series winner.
By the time he had played his 130th regular-season game with Les Canadiens he had chalked up 89 goals and 24 assists. In 16 playoff games he had scored 15 goals and picked up another four assists.
In the off-season, Morenz cherished his returns to Stratford and the Morenz home on Wellington Street. He enjoyed catching up with friends and former teammates in Stratford and in Mitchell, where he had lived until 1917 when his father got a job with a brass company and the family moved to Stratford.
As the 1927-28 NHL season approached, the Canadiens’ preparation took them on the road for some exhibition games. Featured on that trip were back-to-back dates in Stratford and Kitchener. At the time, both Ontario centres had entries in the short-lived Canadian Professional Hockey League, the Nationals in Stratford, the Millionaires in Kitchener. The Canpro was a minor professional league affiliated with the NHL.
The Stratford game was originally scheduled for Nov. 8 but for some reason was switched to Nov. 9. When it was learned that a convention of the Perth County Teachers’ Federation was opening in Stratford on the night of Nov. 9, the Habs-Nats meeting was returned to its original date.
With the likes of Morenz, Aurel Joliat, Art Gagne and Billy Boucher, the Canadiens had transformed from a team of size and weight to one of speed. That Morenz was their speed leader came as no surprise to residents in and around Mitchell and Stratford. From the frozen Thames River above the dam in Mitchell to the Waterloo Street rink in Stratford, the young Morenz unassumingly came to be known as the Mitchell Meteor and the Stratford Streak.
Word of his return to Stratford with the Habs spread like wildfire, and tickets for their game with the Nats sold quickly. Morenz no doubt knew all about the city’s new Classic City Arena, but by the time it was officially opened, in December 1924, he had his name on the Stanley Cup and was on his way to a 27-goal sophomore NHL season in Montreal.
As for the Canadiens’ game in Stratford, it didn’t hurt that defenceman Marty Burke would also be in their lineup against the Nationals. The Toronto native had spent the 1924-25 and 1925-26 seasons with Stratford’s entry in the Ontario Hockey Association’s senior A league. He would go on to an 11-year career in the NHL with the Canadiens, Pittsburgh Pirates, Ottawa Senators and Chicago Black Hawks. For half of those seasons, he and Morenz were teammates in Montreal and Chicago, and became close friends.
In time for their game with the Habs, the Nats signed Bobby (Shorty) Boucher, another of the four Boucher brothers to make it to the NHL. He came to Stratford from the nearby Canpro rival London Panthers. Like his brother Billy, Bobby Boucher had been with Morenz and the Canadiens when they won the Stanley Cup in 1924.
The headline on the Beacon-Herald’s game story on the day after the game was “Howie Morenz and his mates display speed in 5-0 victory.” The sub-head added “Experience, speed and condition of whirlwind Canadiens give them balance in game and score might have been more unbalanced had it not been for Dolly Dolson’s wizard game in the nets.” It was that wizardry that helped Hespeler native Clarence (Dolly) Dolson make it to the NHL with the Detroit Falcons.
In the story’s third sentence, the paper’s readers were told “To top it all, the brilliant Howie Morenz was the pivot of practically everything that happened when he was on the ice.”
On the scoresheet, a goal by Leo Lafrance at the 11-minute mark of the first period was all the Habs would need for the win. Albert Leduc drew the assist on that goal, and also on the one scored by Gizzy (Wilfred Harold) Hart on his first shift of the game, eight minutes into the second period.
This vintage 1902 Oldsmobile is thought to have been part of an organized new-car showing for Roy Brothers at his garage at 108 Downie St. in Stratford in 1925. Seated in the Olds are Howie Morenz, left, and his longtime Stratford teammate and friend Walter (Butch) Kelterborn. The pair were likely invited to take part in the showing by Brothers, a prominent city sportsman and active in hockey circles when Morenz and Kelterborn played. The new car under the canopy, right rear, is a 1922 four-door Oldsmobile. The building, left rear, just across Downie Street is the Majestic Theatre (now the Avon Theatre) at 97-99 Downie St. At the time of this photo, Morenz had won his first of three Stanley Cups with the Montreal Canadiens. Kelterborn, too, turned pro. He had stints with Niagara Falls, Windsor, Hamilton and Stratford in the Canada Professional Hockey League, as well as with Niagara Falls in the International Hockey League, with Stratford in the Ontario Professional Hockey League, and with the St. Louis Flyers and Buffalo Americans/Majors in the American Hockey Association. In retirement, he lived in Stratford, where he was a custodian at the Stratford Public Library. He was 13 days short of his 71st birthday when he died on Feb. 6, 1971. Photo: Vince Gratton
“Up to this time,” according to the Beacon-Herald report, “Morenz had been coasting along, but just before the period ended, the Stratford Flash took the puck behind his own net, came up centre, gathering speed all the time, and when he reached the defence he was a streak of red and white. He passed through the dazzled pair but just as he was about to launch a whip-like drive at Dolson, he slipped and careened feet-first in the goal, taking the net off the posts. Morenz cut a meteoric path down mid-ice in that magnificent flash, but the shortness of the rink would not allow him to stop and he was on top of the goal before he could apply the brakes.
“The next period saw Morenz out on the ice, a darting ghost-like figure, and before 30 seconds of play had terminated, the Montreal wizard unleashed an attack not unlike the first, but this time he pivoted at the defence and rifled a shot over Dolson’s head as the netminder crouched to take it.”
Two minutes later, Joliat made it 4-0 and with about four minutes left in the game Gagne completed the scoring. At the other end of the rink it had been goalie George Hainsworth stopping everything the Nats could throw at him. His performance took the wind out of the Stratford fans’ sails, but it was a shock to no one.
Hainsworth came into the game as the NHL’s top goalie in 1926-27 and as such was winner of the Vezina Trophy. And he kept the trophy through the next two seasons. In 1928-29 he played all the Canadiens’ 44 games and posted a record 22 shutouts in half of them. His goals-against average that season was 0.92. In 1930 he play 270 minutes and eight seconds without allowing a goal during his team’s playoff run.
In his Sport View column on Nov. 9, the Beacon-Herald’s sports editor, J. C. (James Courtland) Burns, declared “’Twas a good start.” He followed with this: “Last night’s opening gun of the professional hockey season was the first fired in the continent. And Stratford has been awarded the silverware for the first game. The game itself was ragged in spots but it gave the fans a glimpse of Howie Morenz and his Canadiens, and also a line on the Nationals who will be carrying the colours of Stratford in the Canpro race this season. Both teams were given the once-over and neither suffered. The Nationals looked a bit shaky in their new sweaters and all, but by the time they have another week on the ice, they will be going at it with plenty of speed and finish.”
The Habs’ encore the next night in Kitchener was another 5-0 win, over the new Canpro entry, the Millionaires. “Morenz and Hainsworth were the pick of the winners,” said a dispatch out of Kitchener. The game was the first in that city to be played on artificial ice. To help mark the occasion, John Hainsworth, a Kitchener resident and father of the Montreal goalie, was called upon for the ceremonial first puck drop.
Morenz and the Canadiens finished their 1927-28 season atop the NHL’s Canadian division but lost in the playoffs to the crosstown Maroons (with whom the Stratford Nationals were affiliated). Morenz led the league in goals, assists and points, and was named the league’s most valuable player for the first of three times in his big-league career.
The Nats also finished their 1927-28 regular season in first place with 25 wins and five ties in 42 games. They then knocked off the third-place Millionaires to take the league title. Dolson played 41 of the Nats’ regular-season games and finished with 11 shutouts and a goals-against average of 1.22. In five playoff games he posted two more shutouts, was beaten for just three goals and had a GAA of 0.58. Borden (Bud) Norfolk had a 2-0 win in the other regular-season game for Stratford.
Two days short of a decade later – on Nov. 6, 1937, the Canadiens returned to the Classic City Arena, but for an occasion more sombre than celebratory. There was a Morenz in their lineup, but it was 10-year-old Howie Morenz Jr. The team was in town to play a memorial game in honour of his father, who had died in a Montreal hospital nine months earlier, on March 8, having never recovered after a career-ending leg injury in a game at the Forum on Jan. 28.
Three thousand fans turned out for the Saturday night affair in which the Canadien Whites, led by Pit Lepine, Joffre Desilets and Toe Blake, ran up a 7-2 score on the Canadien Reds, who had in their lineup Joliat, Johnny (Black Cat) Gagnon and Paul Haynes. Having played three seasons (1931-1934) with Stratford’s Midgets, the city’s entry in the Ontario Hockey Association’s junior circuit, Desilets was a particular favourite. So was Howie Jr. Before the game, he presented Stratford’s YM-YWCA director James H. (Mac) Macqueen with the Howie Morenz Junior Trophy, which was to be awarded to a player or players in the city’s peewee hockey league. Then, wearing a Canadiens sweater, he centered a line with his father’s Stratford junior teammates Frank Carson and Butch Kelterborn. The updated version of the Morenz-Carson-Kelterborn combination raced up and down the ice until Howie fired the puck into the net. The crowd roared.
In that crowd was a strong contingent from Mitchell, including the town’s band and clerk Bud Blowes, a juvenile teammate of Howie. They were among those thanked by William Morenz, as he stood with his arm around the shoulders of his grandson and choked back tears.
Stratford resident Sky Easson, former president of the Ontario Hockey Association, emceed the formalities, which included a welcome and words of appreciation from the city’s mayor, Tom Henry. He said it was Howie Morenz who had given Stratford recognition “from coast to coast.” The Canadian National Railways band joined their musical colleagues from Mitchell in providing music throughout the evening, which included the national anthem and the Last Post, the latter performed in a darkened arena.
Jack McCully, who officiated the game with Frank Carson, gave Howie Jr. a cheque for $25, representing the balance of the flower fund which had been raised in Stratford at the time of his father’s funeral. A couple weeks later, in his own handwriting, Howie Jr. sent a letter of thanks. Proceeds from the night in Stratford went to the Morenz fund and in late November, Frank Calder announced the total for the Morenz family had reached $26,595. He also said trustees had been appointed to administer the fund until Marlene, the youngest of the Morenz children, reached 25 years of age.
By this time, the sports editor at the Beacon-Herald was St. Marys native Milt Dunnell. He began his game story with this: “Howie Morenz is dead, but his Mitchell and Stratford admirers have not forgotten. They turned out, 3,000 strong, at the arena on Saturday night, to honour the memory of the blazing star who splashed the name of his native town and the city that sent him to professional hockey across the sports pages of a continent. Three thousand is a small crowd, perhaps, compared to the hundreds of thousands whom Morenz thrilled during his hockey career, but it was a crowd such as could be assembled nowhere else in the hockey world. It was a crowd composed mostly of persons who knew the great star and claimed him as their own.”
In the years since, members of the Morenz family have often travelled back to Stratford and Mitchell to attend events commemorating the last player to wear the Montreal Canadiens’ No. 7.
Howie Morenz Jr. died in Streetsville on Oct. 9, 2015, at age 88. Howie Morenz III died in Ottawa on May 1, 2023 at age 62.