Hi everyone! It’s Friday once again, and as usual, I’m here to take you for a ride down memory lane. This week, we’re going back to December 2, 1969 for the Seals debut of 37-year-old future Hall-of-Fame defenseman Harry Howell. The former Ranger stalwart had undergone back surgery in the off-season, but the Seals knew they could use a defenseman of his pedigree, so they took a chance and acquired him in a cash deal with New York. The struggling L.A. Kings defeated the Seals 4-3, and Howell picked up his first point, an assist, and his first two penalty minutes. It took the Seals a few more weeks to turn things around, but in the end, they qualified for the playoffs, and Howell was a big reason for the team’s second-half surge. He finished the year with four goals and 16 assists in 55 games. You can read about Howell’s debut in the articles section.
I hope all of you had a great week and are gearing up for a nice relaxing weekend. I’m happy to say that the snow is finally completely melted from everyone’s lawn and we can finally start thinking about spending time at the park with the kids, taking leisurely afternoon walks around the neighbourhood (in a t-shirt and sneakers no less!), and working from home in the backyard.
Hi everyone! I hope everyone had a relaxing Easter weekend and was able to spend some much-needed time with family and friends. I don’t know about any of you out there, but it hasn’t exactly felt like spring lately despite the Easter Bunny’s recent appearance. Ottawa was hit by a major snow storm on Wednesday and we got another five or ten centimetres today, so the kids have been suiting up in thick winter coats and snow pants, but luckily the temperature has been above zero degrees (Celsius, that is) today so the roads and driveways are mostly clear now, and in a day or two the snow should be completely gone.
So, since Mother Nature has decided to do something different this year, we’re going to do something a bit different here too. A few weeks ago, a site visitor by the name of Jessica Hobson contacted me with a few questions concerning the Seals’ famous footwear. Here are some excerpts from the emails she has sent:
I purchased a very cool looking pair of white and green skates years ago, to display in my shop’s window during Christmas, as they were the colours of my hometown Hespeler Shamrocks. I cannot for the life of me remember where they came from, but I can only assume that I would have picked them up at a thrift store or at a garage sale as they would have been only a few dollars at the time.
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Fast forward to this winter when I’ve been beginning to part with some items from my storage unit full of treasure that I am no longer really needing…
I received a message from a local memorabilia collector who shone a light on exactly what I was in possession of; a very rare pair of Bauer Supreme 91’s from the California Golden Seals! He mentioned that I should connect with a couple auction houses in the USA.
As they are of no sentimental value to me and appear to be valued at far more than the original $35 I had once listed them at, I wanted to connect with you to see if you may be able to suggest the most appropriate person or organization that may be interested in purchasing this rare piece of hockey history, seeing as there are only 2 photos existing on the internet of these exact skates.
In a second email, she also mentioned that the skates tongues have some unique cuts on them, which may indicate which player these beauties once belonged to.
For all you non-Canucks out there, Hespeler is a town in Southern Ontario (near Waterloo). Perhaps these skates once belonged to a Seals player with a link to Hespeler or Waterloo, either as a hometown or a place where they once played some junior hockey, I’m really not sure. If anyone has any information, please let me know and I can put you in contact with Jessica. She is also looking for a buyer so if you’re looking to own a rare piece of Seals memorabilia, here is your chance.
That’s about it for this week. Hope you all have a great weekend and, if you are in the path of the solar eclipse, I hope you get a nice glimpse of this once in a lifetime occurrence. Until next time, stay gold!
Since the very earliest days of organized sports, brothers have grown up competing against one another. In many cases, the youngest brother became a goaltender because that was where his older brother told him to do if he wanted to hang out with the older kids. In many other cases, however, both brothers got to skate freely and score a few goals. Sometimes, their paths would cross in junior hockey, and sometimes those paths would cross in the big leagues. In very rare cases, some brothers got to play together, such as the Seals’ Bill and Ernie Hicke, but in most cases, brothers competed for different teams and made it difficult for Mom and Dad to side with one kid or the other.
Mickey Redmond was the first to crack the NHL back in October 1967, and his brother Dick debuted in the early weeks of the 1969-70 season. Mickey moved from the Canadiens to the Red Wings in 1971, and Dick moved from Minnesota to California not long after. The moves did wonders for their careers. Mickey became a two-time 50-goal scorer with the Wings, and Dick became a quality offensive defenseman for the Seals. In February 1972, the brothers faced off in a game that meant a great deal to both teams, who were fighting for playoff spots in their respective divisions. The Seals were coming off an impressive 2-2 draw with Montreal, so a positive result was expected against the less talented Wings, but Mickey had other plans. The elder Redmond scored three times, and almost netted a fourth, so the younger Redmond had no choice but to eat a little crow, especially after the Wings triumphed 8-2. You can read all about the game here.
Well, that’s it for this week. I will be off next week as I will be travelling with the family this Easter weekend, but I will be back soon after. Enjoy the lead-up to the playoffs, and until next time, stay gold!
Hi everyone! Isn’t it great when an underdog, somehow, overcomes the odds and takes down a bigger, meaner opponent? It doesn’t happen often, but if you are a fan of an underdog, those moments stick with you for a long, long time. You feel like you can stand up a little straighter, swagger a bit, chew that gum a bit louder. You know the feeling. Problem is, that feeling don’t last long. Reality eventually sets in and losing becomes the norm again. Where am I going with this? Well, let’s take a trip back to November 15, 1970. The Seals have just taken down the mighty Boston Bruins, the defending Stanley Cup champs. The Seals were talking tall, no doubt about it. It was their fifth win in seven games, and the team was looking like it was going to make a serious run at the playoffs. The Bruins, on the other hand, had different ideas. Not only did the B’s beat the Seals every other time they met that season, all four contests were, well, no contests. This week, you can read all about the Seals’ big win, from the perspective of the losing club, as this article comes from the Boston Globe. Check it out here.
Hope you all enjoy the weekend, and that the weather is warm and pleasant like it is up here in Ottawa. Spring time is just around the corner, and that means the playoffs! May your team be the author of, and not the recipient, of a surprising outcome that allows you to walk tall and chew louder. Until next time, stay gold!
Hi everyone! How was your week? If you live in Ontario, it was probably a little shorter than most thanks to Monday’s Family Day. It was a nice opportunity for my family and I to take in a matinee movie (Turning Red, for the kids, of course), eat lots of popcorn, play some arcade games… and then watch my daughter puke up a entire serving of strawberry Fruitopia all over the coach, and then a few seconds later, all over our white carpet, literally two feet away from the bathroom. We suspect it was a little too much sugar on an empty stomach. Here’s a parenting tip for all of you: if you plan on going to the movies with your kids around lunch time, and you plan on letting your kids load up on sugar, make sure they a good lunch first to balance out the good and the bad food. Other than that little incident, it was a nice day, and a relaxing long weekend.
Stability is indeed a nice thing. Spending a relaxing few days with the family, not making any major plans, staying in your pajamas and playing video games on the couch is rewarding. Travelling around is nice too, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes it’s nice just take in the comfort your home provides. I imagine former Seals great Gary “Suitcase” Smith probably wished for that stability once in a while. As you can imagine, with a nickname like the one he was christened with, Smith moved around a lot during his career. His four-year stint in Oakland was actually the longest of his professional career. This week, I invite you to head on over to Sports Collectors Daily to read a wonderful, comprehensive career summary of Smith’s career. It’s a long piece, so you might want to pour yourselves a cup of coffee first, but the article is well worth your time. It covers Smith’s entire professional career, from his time as a Toronto Maple Leaf call-up to his very last NHL season as a Winnipeg Jet some fifteen years later. A big thanks again this week to Mark Harris for sending me the link to Stephen Laroche’s article.
Hi everyone! You’ve picked a great day to spend a little time from your busy day with Golden Seals Hockey! This week, I’ve got a double-whammy for you all! Two articles for the price of one, which, considering is zero dollars, is one heck of a great deal, right? The first piece is about Charlie Finley’s attempts to make the Seals relevant. Old Charlie was always up for a wild new marketing ploy, even though most of them failed miserably, or at the very least, were just plain weird. One of his classic moves was taking his legendary “Charlie O.” mule mascot from the baseball A’s and transferring it over to the ice. The problem, I can only assume, is that donkey’s don’t skate. Not in the least. So, what else could Charlie do but hire a couple of dudes, stick them inside a donkey costume, and voilà! The Seals’ new mascot worked out about as well as their previous mascots, Stella and Seymour, the two live seals who spent their short-lived careers literally laying down on the wonderfully cold ice surface of the Oakland Coliseum. This article, courtesy of Mark Harris, features a beautiful picture of the Seals’ mule, and you can take a look at it right here.
The second treat this week is a funny, short story from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan about former Seal great Bill Hicke, who seemed to have a bit of trouble understanding how the autographing procedure worked. From what I gather, he may have had quite the collection of Bill Hicke cards in his personal collection. Why, you ask? You’ll have to check the article out for yourself here. Thanks go out to Pete Manzolillo for sending me the link to this great piece.
Hope you all have a great weekend, and if you are living in Ontario, a great, long Family Day weekend! Until next time, stay gold!
Hi everyone! As you may or may not know, I’m working on a new book which I hope to have published in a year or two (the process takes a VERRRRRRY long time). It’s something a little different than what I’ve done before. I decided to look for some overlooked, forgotten, odd, and unusual stories from the 1970s, write some short pieces on each, and put them together to create a sort-of history of the disco decade. If you’ve visited this site a couple of times of the years, you’ve probably figured out by now that I tend to get excited by stuff no one has ever heard of, or at least, has tucked away in the back of the brain where you can find those old memories of when you wet your pants in kindergarten….
Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, now I remember. So, I was doing some research this week, and I realized a couple of things. 1. I had not yet posted anything about the night when Gary Sabourin tied the franchise record with four goals in one game. 2. Sabourin scored those four goals the legendary Phil Esposito to New York trade took place, and 3. Esposito’s first game as a Ranger was in Oakland. So that’s what today’s article is about: the night Gary Sabourin stole the spotlight from Esposito as the entire hockey media descended upon the Bay Area. You have to admit his timing could not have been better, at least from a personal standpoint. If you’d like to read up on the historic night in Seals history, you can head on over to the article right here.
So, that’s about it, folks. Hope you enjoy the NHL All-Star Weekend, if you’re into that sort of thing. Personally, I kind of take an annual break from hockey at this time, but don’t let me deter you from taking in the skills competition or the 3-on-3 tournament. Just not my thing, that’s all. Hope to see you all back here again next weekend! Until next time, stay gold!
Hi everyone! I hope you’ve all had a great week, and are not letting the January blahs get you down. The first month of the year really is a drag sometimes, isn’t it? Especially if you live up here in Canada and every day is either cold, or bitterly cold, or snowy, or rainy, or freezing rainy, or sometimes all of the above. Things could be a lot worse though, as you will soon find out.
This week, we’re heading back to game one of the 1971-72 season, and the Golden Seals have just been dealt a severe blow. Marv Edwards, on loan from the Leafs, was expected to join the team and be a steadying influence on rookie Gary Kurt, but because Charlie Finley had supposedly pissed off some people in Toronto, Edwards was on his way back up north. So, Kurt was the best the Seals had at the goaltending position and thus became the de facto number one until Lyle Carter was able to get to Oakland from the International League. The next time you start feeling like you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders, be thankful you’re not Gary Kurt, playing behind a group that finished dead last a few months earlier, and staring down at real NHL players charging at you full tilt looking to rip a slap shot between your eyes. You can read this week’s article from the Oakland Tribune‘s John Porter right here.
That’s it for this week folks! Hope you have a great weekend and get some hockey under your belts. Until next time, stay gold!
Hi everyone! It’s great to be back! It’s been an interesting week. I’ve been cutting back on sugar these last two weeks, and I’m starting to see a difference. I’m not even all that grumpy that my blood sugar is now officially more blood than sugar. That’s probably a good thing, I suppose. Sugar, I think, is not absolutely necessary to life, but it certainly adds a little fun, doesn’t it, much like hockey players who offer fans a little more than just goals and assists. Connor McDavid can really rack up the points, but man, can that guy ever do it with flair. Other superstars put up big numbers too, but the flair factor is not quite the same. If there were two guys in the NHL back in the Seals days who genuinely got fans excited, it was the two Bobbys, Orr and Hull, the latter of which is the subject of this week’s new article.
It doesn’t happen every day that I learn something new about the California Seals. I’ve been researching the team since I was about 12, and I’ve read just about everything I could get my hands on if it had anything to do with the Seals. So when I found this article from December 9, 1970 saying that Finley not only made one, but two cash offers for Bobby Hull, I was pretty stunned. Everyone talks about how the Seals would have been different had they been able to draft Guy Lafleur a few months later, but Hull in a Seals uniform is a very intriguing thought indeed. Who knows how many fans he could have drawn to the Coliseum? He might have still bolted when the WHA came into existence two years later, but you never know, maybe he would have stayed in Oakland. Fun to think about, isn’t it? If you want to read about this very little-known part of Seals history, you can find this Oakland Tribune piece right here.
Hope you all have a great weekend! Until next time, stay gold!
Hi everyone! How are you all doing this fine Friday evening, (or maybe Saturday morning, if you’re reading this with the next day’s morning coffee)? Am I glad that it is the weekend! Is there anything better than Friday night? It’s the longest possible time before you have to go back to work on Monday. It feels like the world is your oyster, and it’s difficult to decide just what you’re going to do out of all the things on your list. I know that by Sunday night I’ll be kicking myself for not getting as much done as I wanted, but hey, that’s how every weekend goes, doesn’t it?
I can’t say it was a great week… fighting a cold, playing catch up at work and still not feeling like I got everything done, the Habs lost twice (maybe three times, I can’t remember). I couldn’t even play Nintendo Sports golf without the Switch disconnecting at least seven times in twenty minutes. I hope things turn out better this weekend.
Where am I going with this? Oh yeah, the Seals ’68-’69 season. It started off pretty badly too. The team looked listless, and unable to beat anyone, and attendance was lousy, if not worse than the year before. The team’s future looked totally bleak, but out of the darkness came a tiny glint, just a little sunshine, and all of a sudden the Seals were gunning for second place. This week’s article is a wonderfully written piece from the San Rafael Independent Journal‘s November 1, 1968 edition. It describes in a rather humorous way how the Seals were floundering early in their second season, namely how they couldn’t draw flies to the Coliseum. While that situation never really changed over the course of their nine years in Oakland, the team somehow survived those early bumps to enjoy a little bit of success a few months later. You can read this week’s article here.
Anyway, hope you all have a great weekend! If you’re on the East Coast (or sort-of East Coast like me), take it easy on the roads tonight and tomorrow, and then try to hit the sledding hills with the kids and grandkids!
