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PLAYING FIELD: Remembering Barrie's last national Cup win

It's been 70 years since storied Flyers squad coasted to Memorial Cup championship

They’re largely sepia-toned memories by now, but Saturday marks the 70th anniversary of the Barrie Flyers winning the second of the franchise’s two Memorial Cup titles.

In 1953, the Flyers travelled to Manitoba and downed the St. Boniface Canadiens in five games to win what remains Barrie’s last national crown.

“My father (was) an engineer on the CNR,” remembered local man Larry Smith in a recent Facebook post. “(He) went by train out west to take in the series … I remember he brought home an old Stetson cowboy hat that had most of the players’ autographs.”

Barrie was a dramatically different and smaller place 70 years ago. Though it was undergoing a massive boom that would see its population double in less than 10 years, just 12,514 people lived in Barrie in 1951, the most recent year a census was taken relative to the Flyers’ two Memorial Cup wins.

Even with all that change, the downtown area remains relatively similar aside from, of course, the Barrie Arena on Dunlop Street having been demolished.

One church spire that still lords over the area belongs to the Collier Street United Church. In the midst of both Memorial Cup title seasons, that church was known for its choir performances, including a young boy soprano who would come down from Orillia to perform solos.

His name was Gordon Lightfoot.

While the Flyers won the Memorial Cup crown at Shea’s Amphitheatre in Winnipeg, half a world away a young mountaineer named Edmund Hillary was gathering a climbing party in Kathmandu. Hillary would eventually get to the top of Mount Everest about three weeks later.

Many Flyers would go on to climb mountains of their own in pro hockey, though the 1953 team was likely a touch less accomplished in that regard than the one that came two years earlier.

Perhaps the most interesting career of any former Flyer was that of Don McKenney. He graduated to the Bruins a year after leaving Barrie. The Smith Falls, Ont., native registered 42 points (22 goals, 20 assists) during his rookie NHL season with the Bruins, tied for the team lead with former Flyer Leo Labine.

Born three years apart, and both hailing from the Ottawa area, Labine helped lead Barrie to a Memorial Cup two years before McKenney did the same.

McKenney died in December, aged 88.

After his long playing career, which included serving as Bruins captain and being a member of the 1964 Stanley Cup champion Leafs, McKenney coached at Northeastern University in Boston. When he retired from that gig in 1991, he had Barrie products Keith Cyr and Joel Bishop on his roster.

Cyr and Bishop were both recruited to play at Northeastern while playing for the old Jr. B Colts, who played out of the old barn on Dunlop Street — the same venue where McKenney had toiled for the Flyers four decades earlier.

“I think he had a soft spot for Barrie kids,” remembered Bishop, who now runs his own insurance brokerage in town and fondly recalled McKenney motoring around practice at Northeastern in ancient Lange moulded skates. 

“(McKenney) and his wife were great people, a very traditional couple from yesteryear.”

McKenney was teammates for many years in Boston with Doug Mohns, who had the longest NHL career of any player from the 1953 Flyers squad. A defenceman, Mohns played 1,389 games, more than half of them with the Bruins, but also had stints in Chicago, Minnesota, Atlanta and Washington.

Mohns died in 2014, aged 80.

Orval Tessier (54G, 50A) played a single season in Barrie and was the Flyers’ leading scorer during the championship campaign. Tessier would go on to play 59 NHL games, mostly with the Bruins, but he really made his mark behind the bench. Tessier won the Memorial Cup as a coach with three franchises — the Quebec Remparts, Cornwall Royals and Kitchener Rangers — and then a Calder Cup championship in the American Hockey League with the New Brunswick Hawks.

That run led to a promotion to the Blackhawks, where Tessier won the Jack Adams Award in his rookie season as an NHL coach.

He died last year, aged 89.

Another Jack Adams winner who played for the championship Flyers? Well, Don Cherry, of course, who played two seasons in Barrie before embarking on a long pro career as a defenceman and then as a coach. He won the Adams award in 1976, his second of five seasons behind the Bruins’ bench that preceded his broadcasting career.

Another Flyer who maintained strong local ties through his golden years was goaltender George Cuculick.

Cuculick, interestingly, became a star netminder at Michigan Tech University after leaving Barrie, where he was named an All-American.

The most notable oddity of the 1953 champions? Three players — Cherry, Skip Teal and Tony Poeta — would each play just a single game in the NHL.

Both Cherry and Teal suited up for the Bruins two years after leaving Barrie, while Poeta was called up as an emergency replacement for the Chicago Blackhawks during the 1951-52 season.

Teal died in 2008.

Owner/coach Hap Emms defined the run to the championship just as much with his cantankerous ways as anything his talented squads did on the ice.

He wasn’t called Happy for nothing. Included in Emms’s antics were refusing to play on Sunday and having a goal judge ejected from the Barrie Arena. In handcuffs.

Then, like now, you never really know whether hockey coaches are sincere in their objections or simply trying to gain an edge. Whatever the case, Emms’s Flyers downed the St. Mike’s Majors to earn a spot in the best-of-seven national final.

The Flyers were heavily favoured and played to form; the only blemish on their trip to Winnipeg was a 7-4 loss in Game 4, which the club avenged by handily defeating the Canadiens 6-1 to win the Cup.

The victory was the high-water mark of an almost decade-long run of Flyers success that began to tail off after the 1953 Memorial Cup triumph. Emms moved the team to Niagara Falls seven years later.

Barrie has been home to the major junior Colts for almost three decades but has yet to match the feat of its predecessor, losing in the Memorial Cup final in 2000 and in the OHL championship series in 2002, 2010 and 2013.