The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Here is the second part of ÒThe Town Where Everybody PlaysÓ by Trent Frayne, published in a January 1958 edition of MacleanÕs Magazine. The third and final part will appear Tuesday. * * * Meanwhile, the Ottawa Canadiens had arrived in Winnipeg on a Sunday and were practicing there before traveling to Flin Flon for the opening game on the following Wednesday. Thirty-six hours before game time queues began to form outside the Flin Flon rink for the dollar-fifty standing-room accommodation. Finally game time arrived - but the Canadiens didnÕt. They didnÕt reach Flin Flon, in fact, until Thursday. ThereÕd been a confusion about dates and venue, said their coach and manager, Sam Pollock; thereÕd been talk the series would start in Winnipeg. That started the series off on a high note of acrimony. The mild-mannered Buddy Simpson said that Pollock ought to be thrown out of hockey for life. The stirred-up fans felt the same way. When the first game finally was played, two days late, the jammed crowd in the little rink hooted and hollered at Pollock as the Bombers won. In the second game the Bombers led 3 to 2 with two minutes to play, but Canadiens piled in two goals in the last ninety seconds to win, 4 to 3. The third game played in Flin Flon was won by Canadiens, so that the team entrained for Regina to complete the series with the Canadiens leading, two games to one. The giddy crescendo was reached when the Bombers won two of the next three games, forcing a seventh and deciding game on May 8. In Flin Flon that night a music festival was in progress in the Hapnot school auditorium. Rev. Douglas Rupp, the lean quietly composed pastor of the Northminster United Church and president of the Music Festival Association, interspersed his remarks between the music competitions with bulletins from Regina. At ten-thirty the festivalÕs imported adjudicator was delivering his critique when Rev. Rupp came bounding down the aisle. ÒWe won! We won!Ó he cried, and shouts rent the auditorium while the adjudicator stared in amazement. Outside, people began honking the horns of their automobiles and the din swelled and echoed across the rocky hills on which the town undulates. Bernice Barrett, a school teacher from Ontario, says she thought it was the end of the world. ÒI never had much interest in hockey before I came here,Ó she says, Òbut this time you couldnÕt escape the charged atmosphere. It swept you up and carried you along. When they won, it set off a chain reaction, like the stroke of twelve on New YearÕs Eve.Ó Mixed with the normal exhilaration of the victory itself was irrepressible pride in the fact that eight players were born or raised in Flin Flon and had climbed up through pee wee, bantam, midget and juvenile ranks to the junior Bombers right in the tumbledown rink at the edge of town. ThatÕs a unique progression nowadays when professional clubs move accomplished young players to teams they sponsor and on which the players can be developed in the pro teamÕs system and pattern. These days most junior hockey stars maintain contact with their families only with the cooperation of the postman. In Flin Flon the fans had been watching Captain Teddy Hampson, who scored the winning goal in the deciding game, from the day his mother had registered him with Pinkie Davie at the Community Club. Three other Bombers, Mel Pearson, Carl Forster and George Konik, were the sons of underground miners. ForsterÕs father, in fact, was five thousand feet underground the night his son was playing for the national championship. Ron HutchisonÕs dad was a boilermaker and Duane RuppÕs father a laborer. Most of the people in Flin Flon could remember the winter Ken Willey had first played in the Tom Thumb league, and there werenÕt many people in town who didnÕt know that Mel PearsonÕs mother and Ken WilleyÕs mother were sisters. Ambassadors in maroon Most of the other players were the products of a week-long tryout camp held every mid-September in the Flin Flon rink. The club advertises its school in small-town newspapers in Manitoba, and players who make the grade with coach Bobby Kirk, a former New York Rangers forward, are given jobs with HBM&S co. If their work is satisfactory they qualify for advancement like any other employee. The players practice every morning and work at the plant every afternoon. They play a fifty-five-game schedule, thirty at home, in a league that includes Estevan, Prince Albert, Regina, Melville and Saskatoon. See 'Bombers' on pg. Continued from pg. On road trips the Bombers are ambassadors for Flin Flon; the club supplies each player with maroon flannel jackets and grey flannel trousers for off-the-ice wear and players are instructed never to appear in public without a white shirt and maroon knitted tie. They were wearing these natty clothes at a Memorial Cup victory dinner in Jubilee Hall as they returned in triumph from Regina when three hundred and eighty Flin Flon citizens paid five dollars a plate to honor them. This was the climax of something more than a mere sports victory. ÒWhen our team won,Ó philosophized Lou Parres, a consulting geologist who has lived in Flin Flon for ten years, Òit was a reflection of the determination and the esprit de corps of the people who live here. Those are qualities of our isolation. To most people in the country it was highly improbable that Flin Flon would win. The people in this town have come to know that the highly improbable is entirely possible. Look at the town itself.Ó Flin Flon is an improbable town. Its street lights are never turned off. Many of the houses have no cellars and are built on stilts. Most of the sidewalks are built on sewers, boxed in and insulated with sawdust. Every night the whole foundation of the town shakes slightly as dynamite charges are set off in the mines a mile below the surface through solid rock. In June itÕs light enough to play golf at midnight north of 54 degrees where Flin Flon sits straddling the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border, and in December itÕs necessary to turn on the lights of an automobile to navigate the winding climbing streets at four in the afternoon. The lights are left burning because the city engineers discovered that when they were turned off in winter, the cold weather weakened the filament. Constant turning on and off burned out the lights. Since electricity is extremely cheap in a country of numerous lakes and rivers, it was found to be less expensive simply to keep the lights burning. Similarly, it was found cheaper to build a house with no excavation because the surface was solid rock. So most people put their furnace room and basement storeroom on the ground floor and their living quarters on the second floor, although in newer areas of the town some basements have been excavated. The original water and sewer pipes were laid on top of the ground for the same reason - a rock foundation. The pipes were boxed in and insulated, and were used as sidewalks. These gradually are disappearing as trenches are being blasted in the rocks to accommodate the water mains and sewer pipes. The company, which has a payroll of about twelve million dollars a year, with an average wage of forty-seven hundred, is the life blood of the community but in some respects it is a blight, too. Smelter smoke containing sulphuric-acid fumes pours endlessly from a tall spire of a chimney that dominates the town and is a landmark for airplanes fifty miles around. When the atmospheric pressure is low and the wind is right the smoke floats across the town and it can burn out lawns and kill plants overnight. Consequently, practically no one has a lawn in Flin Flon.
