While I'm stalledish on one angle though...

...new motivation to dig a little more on the Tri-State Hockey League. Of everything I've looked up in the two and a half years of semi-sporadic research (my wife is telling me as I type this that I should write a book of all this!), this is the corner that excites me the most. As far as I can tell West Virginia was in fact the site of the first organized ice hockey played in the Southern US, when Charleston's Ice Sports rink opened in 1937 (beating Miami's Tropical Hockey League by a season). Had the TSAHL gotten off the ground, it would have been something of a proto-ECHL, straddling what were the territories of the Eastern Hockey League and the Michigan-Ontario League:

• Huntington and Charleston, WV
• Akron and Toledo, OH
• plans for teams in Pittsburgh and Johnstown, PA, and Cleveland

Interestingly, on the territory note, the Toledo Babcocks were apparently in the MOHL while they were in the TSAHL; they were brought in when the proposed Pittsburgh entry failed to materialize, and Johnstown did in fact have a team the next season in the EHL, so talent-wise, I'm considering them to be essentially equal. Unfortunately, you'll notice that above I only list four teams that actually played, and two of them were a relatively close distance to each other--this ended up being the downfall of the league. Both Huntington and Charleston were on shaky ground, and were able to keep afloat because they were so close to each other, thus able to share costs for things like road trips. When Huntington's Iceland closed in February 1940, Charleston's Comets--barely able to keep going on their own, even with a fierce Huntington-Charleston rivalry--followed suit.

This much I know. What I'm curious about, though, is how they got from point A to B to C and so on...