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.
On January 4, 1958, MacleanÕs Magazine published an in-depth piece on the hockey scene in Flin Flon. Journalist Trent Frayne captured the essence of the community and its ties to the winter game with his article, ÒThe Town Where Everybody Plays.Ó With permission, we are pleased to reprint the piece in three parts, beginning today. * * * Flin Flon is a town that teeters on lonely rocks six hundred miles northwest of Winnipeg in the loop of longitude where summer days are almost nightless and winter ones mostly dim. It is a remote town that startled a good many Canadians last spring by producing a largely home-grown hockey team that won the junior championship of all Canada. The victory was the more remarkable because the Flin Flon Bombers defeated the heavily favoured Ottawa Canadiens, a team sponsored by the worldÕs professional champion Montreal Canadiens and lovingly packed by them with some of this countryÕs best young players. While the defeat of the eastern Canadian champions may have astonished most of the hockey experts - it was the first time since 1948 that the western representative had won the national championship - only the most pessimistic fan in Flin Flon was more than mildly surprised. Nestled in the middle of a rocky nowhere, the twelve thousand inhabitants of the area have made the pursuit of sports trophies a year-round avocation in relieving the monotony of their isolation, and theyÕve grown accustomed t the pace. Ultimate success on a national scale was a matter of time to most people in Flin Flon because they had seen one of their womenÕs curling rinks win the western Canada championship in 1955, and their junior girlsÕ basketball team win the Manitoba crown seven times in the last nine years, and the high school girls win the Manitoba title six times in the last eight years. In hockey, the juniors won the Northern Saskatchewan league championship four times in the last five years, the midgets won the Manitoba championship three times in the last four years, and the juveniles won the Manitoba championship twice in the last three years. On a local scale, there was sports of all sorts for all ages. Forty-five adults passed their Red Cross life-saving swimming tests last summer when they could wrest a cubic foot of water away from three hundred youngsters registered in learn-to-swim classes. Kids not old enough or big enough to catch a place among the two hundred and twenty youngsters playing Little League baseball, or on the eight teams (four of boys and four of girls) in the thirteen-and-under volleyball and croquet and soccer on the townÕs six playgrounds. Fathers and even mothers coached the eighteen hockey teams in the Tom Thumb and Pee Wee hockey leagues, and four hundred people belonged to the nine-hole golf course incredibly fashioned out of solid rock, huge boulders and dense boggy muskeg. Five thousand people sprawled in the summer sun on a fantastically concocted artificial beach, and sixteen hundred curled in the townÕs three rinks. A sixty-three-pound lake trout stretching half an inch under four feet was landed by a girl named Lorraine Hayes four years ago in nearby Lake Athapapuskow (which fishermen abbreviate to Athapap) and during a widely publicized four-day Trout Festival conducted annually for the last seven years the winning trout has never weighed less than thirty-three pounds. The people who didnÕt participate in any of these varied recreations, and perhaps some who did, were heavily involved in a glee club, a camera club, a figure skating club, a canoe club, an archery club and/or ballet classes. Sometimes itÕs hard not to play something in Flin Flon. When Doug Dawson, the manager of the champion junior Bombers, moved there as a teenager ten years ago he was watching some high school boys play hockey in the Flin Flon rink. A stranger standing beside him at one end of the rink asked him if he played hockey. ÒSure,Ó said Dawson, ÒI played in Winnipeg.Ó ÒHow long have you been here?Ó asked the man. ÒThree days,Ó said Dawson. ÒWell then, why in thunderation arenÕt you out there playing now?Ó roared the man. Flin FlonÕs battered old corrugated-tin rink has been standing since 1935, seven years after the town was first settled. The Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Company, which now employs three thousand men and thereby dominates the town, began to bring in hockey players in Õ35 to give diversion to the townspeople. Well-known Winnipeg hockey players Buddy Simpson, Ray Enright, Gordie Hayes, Cliff Workman and Buddy Hammond moved north to take jobs and play hockey. Wally Warnick and Slim Holdaway went there from Brandon, and Sid Abel, later a star centre for the Detroit Red Wings and coach of the Chicago Black Hawks, joined the Bombers from Melville, Sask. See 'Name' on pg. Continued from pg. These were the original Bombers, a name that acquired hockey fame in the west in the old Saskatchewan Senior Hockey League. Buddy Simpson, now Conservative member of parliament for the Churchill constituency, recalls that he received forty-two cents an hour and worked in the mill fifty-six hours a week, which produced a weekly pay cheque of $23.52. He was married and unemployed in the mid-thirties, as were most of the players who went to Flin Flon even before a road was through from The Pas, a hundred miles south. Teams traveled by train on a spur line of the Canadian National Railways. The routes to Winnipeg or Regina or Saskatoon still wind so circuitously around the literally thousands of rock-bound lakes of northern Manitoba that the journey to any one of them requires at least twenty hours, including connecting-line stopovers. Hockey teams have covered that route every winter since 1935. Eight years ago the emphasis swung from senior to junior hockey, with last season being the most successful in the townÕs history. It reached its glorious culmination when three games of the Dominion junior final were played in the shabby old rink. This was a monumental undertaking, since the rink seats only 1,145 people and the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association asked for a guarantee of forty-five hundred dollars a game when the Bombers made application for home games. Ordinarily all seats are sold for seventy-five cents each for league games. To raise the required forty-five hundred dollars, the club boosted prices to three dollars for reserved seats and for standing room as well. The town was in a frenzy of excitement four days before the opening game. Every seat had been sold when it occurred to Pinkie Davie, the manager of the townÕs Community Club, which administrates all childrenÕs activities, that there would be no room in the rink for the kids. He consulted Buddy Simpson, then an HBM&S company official. They organized a crew of workmen who set to work to knock one end out of the rink. When this was completed, long rows of two-by-four planks were set up at the open end of the rink to form temporary bleachers from which the kids of Flin Flon could see the Memorial Cup finals. (Part II will appear Friday).
