While the manufacturing community was busy extracting pure iron from the coun- tryside surrounding Eveleth, Minnesota, in the 1930s, the NHL had started to mine a different mother lode.
Eveleth’s production of elite-level hockey talent is one of the great stories, if not mysteries, of American hockey history. How could this immigrant community of 5,000 residents send 11 players to the NHL in an era when it seemed as if the league was an exclusive Canadians-only club? Crazier still, how in 1938, could Eveleth High School graduates Frank Brimsek and Mike Karakas own two of the NHL’s six goaltending jobs? And how do we explain that when Karakas left the Blackhawks, his starting job went to another Eveleth resident, Sam LoPresti?
Today, Detroit claims the title of Hockeytown, but Eveleth was America’s true hockey town in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.
“We had two indoor ice rinks, and the city had tremendous interest in the sport,” said Tommy Karakas, Mike’s younger brother. “And baseball had a lot to do with the goaltenders. We played a lot of baseball, and [we] all had good glove hands.”
In those years in Eveleth, the men, as a rule, worked in the mines, and their boys played hockey. In 2011 former Chicago Blackhawks left wing Al Suomi, then 97, was the NHL’s oldest living player. In an interview with Hometownfocus.com website writer Brian Miller, Suomi recalled learning to play the game at age five, on what was called Fayal Pond: “You’d go out in the woods and chop a crooked branch to use as a stick,” Suomi said. “For pucks we used rubber balls, tin cans, even frozen horse turds. If we were using [a horse turd], we used to say, ‘Ya better keep your mouth shut.’”
Canadians didn’t quite know what to make of Eveleth’s prominence, given that the NHL was about 98 percent Canadian before the men from Eveleth began claim- ing roster spots. “We just considered Eveleth a province of Canada,” the late Toron- to Star hockey writer Jim Proudfoot once said. “In terms of climate, it was very sim- ilar.”
Eveleth was located about 100 miles from Canada and 60 miles from Duluth, where pure iron ore could be shipped around the world and molded into every- thing from automobile parts to steel casings. At one point, the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota was producing 80 percent of the world’s iron ore. It also seemed like it was producing the vast majority of America’s hockey talent.
Former Eveleth postmaster Gilbert Finnegan documented that in one season during the Depression, 147 Eveleth-born players were playing in various leagues and schools around the country. At a national Amateur Athletic Union tournament in Chicago in 1935, about 33 percent of the players on the eight teams were from Eveleth. One team at that tournament, St. Cloud Teachers College, used only Eveleth players to amass a record of 45–7–0 in three seasons from 1933 to 1936.
A key figure in frigid Eveleth’s status as a hockey hotbed was Cliff Thompson, who was one of the original inductees into the U.S. Hall of Fame in 1973. He coached both the Eveleth High School and Eveleth Junior College hockey teams, and both teams were perennially dominant.
His career record at Eveleth Junior College was 171–28–7. His record at Eveleth High School was 534–26–9. If you add both records together, Thompson won 90.9 percent of all of his games behind the bench in Eveleth.
In 1927–28, the Eveleth Junior College team, along with Harvard, Minnesota, Augsburg College, and the University Club of Boston, were among those being considered to represent the United States at the 1928 Olympics. For financial and other reasons, every team except Augsburg pulled out, and the U.S. Olympic Com- mittee decided not to have a representative.
In 1928–29, Eveleth Junior College was the No. 1-ranked college team in the country, ahead of No. 2 Yale and No. 3 Minnesota. Its toughest game that season was against Eveleth High School. Eveleth Junior College defeated the high school- ers 4–3, according to the research of the late U.S. hockey historian Donald Clark.
Thompson was at Eveleth High School from 1920 to 1958, and he won five state championships, including the inaugural state tournament in 1945. In one stretch, Eveleth won 78 consecutive games, including four consecutive state titles from 1948 to 1951. The overwhelming majority of Eveleth players who went on to play college or professional hockey were coached by Thompson.
Eveleth’s hockey history could have easily begun earlier, but the first recorded game for the town was against Two Harbors on January 23, 1903. Fan response to the game led to the creation of four outdoor rinks by 1914.
By 1920 the Eveleth team was competing in the United States Amateur Hockey Association. Eveleth enjoyed some of the best amateur hockey in the country until 1926, when high operating costs and raids by professional teams forced teams such as Eveleth to take a lower profile.
But during the early 1920s, hockey thrived in Eveleth. The Eveleth Reds even at- tracted some future NHL players from outside of town, such as Manitoban Ching Johnson, who would eventually have a Hall of Fame NHL career with the New York Rangers, and Perk Galbraith, who would sign with the Boston Bruins in 1926. Sault Sainte Marie native Vic Desjardins, one of the first Americans to play in the NHL, was also on that team.
Eveleth won the USHA Group 3 title that season with a 13–1 record. Though Eveleth lost the national title to Cleveland, they did defeat the American Soo for the McNaughton Cup. Interest in hockey was so intense during that period that an esti- mated crowd of 1,000 stood in frigid temperatures outside the Western Union of- fice to await results of the Eveleth playoff games in Pittsburgh and Cleveland.
The scene outside the Western Union office inspired the Eveleth mayor to push for the construction of the 3,000-seat hippodrome rink, which opened January 1, 1922. On game nights, the hippodrome would be jammed with spectators, many of the youngsters sneaking in through the coal chute, through windows, or through tunnels they had dug themselves.
“We’d tunnel under the frame of the building to get in and watch the game,” Suomi recalled about his youthful days in Eveleth. “The ground was usually frozen, but we were able to do it. Then we’d spend the rest of the game avoiding the cops. If they came our way, we’d hide or move to the other side of the building.”
An article by Chuck Muhich in the State Sport News in 1953 reminisced about how the hippodrome caretaker would sometimes turn on the lights to the building hours before game time only to find one section of the stands already filled with young boys. Frank Brimsek and Karakas could have been among those boys, watching the players who would one day make it to the NHL. America usually cele- brates Jim Craig’s brilliant performance at Lake Placid as the defining moment of U.S. goaltending history, but Karakas and Brimsek won Stanley Cup champi- onships long before Craig was even born.
0 comments: