Nostalgia…

My earliest hockey playing memories come from a time just before the Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup in 1961...  My father took me to a Holy Name Society meeting held in the basement hall of our parish church where a couple of the Blackhawks had been invited to appear.  I got the autographs of Reggie Fleming and Dollard St. Laurent!  I vaguely remember working up the nerve to ask about how much hockey equipment weighed.  My Dad and I saw the Hawks clinch the Cup against Detroit in that church hall... one of the first, dimly projected, closed circuit TV setups in Chicago history!

WGN-TV in Chicago started to broadcast some of the Hawks road games about then. Some of the happiest moments of my childhood revolved around those broadcasts. WGN and WMAQ were the Chicago radio stations that would broadcast the home games, but when the Hawks were on the road and there was no TV coverage... I'd sometimes try to capture an out-of-town AM radio station’s broadcast on a clear night.
  Detroit was the easiest to catch.  I heard about “Fire-Brewed Stroh's Beer” long before it ever made its way down to Chicago.  I also got to learn a little French when the Hawks went to Montreal!

My childhood heroes were Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, and especially Glenn Hall – the rubberized, iron-man goalie of the Hawks... 522 consecutive games without a night off!
  They regularly arrived in my home with larger-than-life realism via the fantastic Hall-of-Fame announcer, Lloyd Pettit.  Naturally, I played goalie... Glenn Hall butterfly style.  My first goalie pads were narrow, red vinyl-covered chair backs from our old kitchen dinette set.  The chair backs were padded, curved plywood inside... which worked out perfectly for nailing leather leg straps
to the backs with large-headed 3/4" long roofing nails.  If a puck happened to hit the front of the pad over one of the nail points, it sometimes impaled itself... No rebounds!  Within a year, I purchased my first real pair of goalie pads at Central Sport Shop for $35... money I saved from my paper route.  They were WinnWell... black vinyl... about 24 inches long.  I figure that if I still had them, I could sell them on EBay for about ten times that.

My next set of pads were Cooper GP-65's, I think... 29 inch leather... purchased with my earnings as a stock boy at the local Open Pantry convenience store.
  I remember my dad drove me across town in a blizzard to Gunzo’s (the Chicago Blackhawks equipment supplier) to pick up my treasure.  Those pads carried me through my college hockey playing career and through about 15 more years of occasional rink rat hockey.  They eventually perished in a faded green U.S.Army duffle bag, on a metal shelf in a dark corner of a damp Seattle basement... where some mice had taken up residence in the horsehair padding.  At least I've still got the custom-fit fiberglass goalie mask I made!  It looks just like the spooky guy in the Halloween movies... but mine was first!  I remember the day my college roommate dumped Plaster of Paris onto my face while I tried breathing through McDonalds straws stuck into my nostrils for twenty minutes! 


Backtracking...
When I was still in high school, two idiot buddies of mine used to sneak out to Hanson Park in the middle of the night to open the hydrants adjoining the ice pond with a giant pipe wrench... probably stolen... I never asked.  When I awoke at 5am for my morning paper route, my first assignment was to check whether that wrench was in my 4-wheeled paper delivery cart... the signal that I was to SNEAK out to the park to turn off the hydrants.  Yeah, right!  A fat kid with a two foot long, optic-orange pipe wrench sneaking across Fullerton Avenue like a Ninja!  We had great ice those years.  Those lazy park workers probably loved us, which is probably why we never got caught.  One sub-zero morning, however, I awoke to find the wrench locked inside a six inch deep ice cube at the bottom of the cart... flooded by those idiots with my parent’s garden hose... now split open lengthwise... looking like a coiled frozen cobra on the patio!  The handle of the faucet in the driveway was still opened, so I figure that ice cube might have reached the top of the 24 inch deep cart if the hose hadn't exploded.

Backtracking further...  I was probably only about 12 years old when I first had the thought of building the "Bigger, Better, Chicago Stadium Version" of the generic table hockey game I owned (Lousy game!... Puck used to get stuck behind the net!)  Some important tasks in life tend to get a little postponed... I recently decided that NOW was the time!  I imagine there are those of you out there who have similar sets of memories about childhood parking lot, gymnasium, or ice pond hockey games... and bigger memories still of those occasional pilgrimages to one of the "Hallowed Halls of Hockey" in the city where you live.  I started this business to help you old-timers revisit those less stressful times... and to provide your children with a durable keepsake and a platform for building their own hockey memories!

Steve Wojtynek
retrosportsgames.com                            

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