Some visual stimuli

Not everyone has Facebook, so I thought I'd repost on here some pictures I dug out from Huntington/Charleston's prehistory...

No-good news is no news

Something that's bothered me on the Stars/Comets end of things is that I have to go to Charleston's paper to find anything about Huntington's rink closing. There is a total whitewash in the Herald-Dispatch and Advertiser regarding the closure of Iceland, with articles talking about how Charleston doesn't want to play Huntington, fearing a bloodbath, while ads in the paper trumpet half-price hockey on a date when Toledo was supposed to be in town for a Tri-State League matchup...

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...

Finds like this are why I started on this

Another thanks to Tom at the EHL webpage for hooking me up with NewspaperArchive. I've been so torn on what little revelation to put up here, but I think this one takes the cake. From the Charleston Daily Mail, November 5, 1940:

"Formation of a six-team hockey league in which the Charleston Comets would play 20 league games plus seven home matches with Huntington is the goal of James R. Chandlee, who will direct hockey activities this season at the Ice Sports rink.

At a meeting held recently at Pittsburgh, plans were discussed for organizing a league composed of teams from Charleston, Huntington, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Akron and Johnstown.

John Harris of Pittsburgh, manager of Duquesne Gardens and owner of the Hornets' hockey team, expressed enthusiasm over the proposed league, saying he will enter his Smoky City skaters.

Owners of the Cleveland arena will enter their Cleveland Barons. Akron's new rink will lie
completed about Dec. 1 and Rubber City hockey entrepreneurs are eager to join the loop. In fact, so enthusiastic are the Akronites about West Virginians, they will feature Charleston and Huntington in opening-night matches.

Johnstown hns a rink but has never had a hockey team, though visiting professional teams have played there periodically in the past. The Johnnies are eager to organize a team and enter the league.

The proposed league would operate under the jurisdiction of the Amateur Hockey Association, which withdrew from the A.A.U. three years ago. While carrying the rating of amateur hockey, the teams would actually be semi-pro.

Chandlee said he hopes to have one of the best teams in the league and offer Charleston a high-class brand of hockey.

A proposed schedule and other details will be worked out at a meeting to be held next week. Among those who have indicated they will attend the next meeting are directors of hockey at New York's Madison Square Garden and P.E.M. Thompson, president of the Amateur Hockey Association and owner of the Atlantic City Sea Gulls."

What will there be on here?

I'm relaunching this--I have begun to more or less start from scratch on the whole thing, going back to the very first ice rink in Huntington, Iceland Arena, in 1938. I will be chronicling the three seasons of Huntington Stars hockey (1938-41), one season of Huntington Hornets (1954-55), and seven seasons of Huntington Blizzard (1993-2000), and any related sub-amateur exploits I can dig out during these stretches.

And you thought I'd forgotten about this all

I'd fallen off the ball about three stories, but I'm by no means done. Went back to the microfilm a couple weeks ago, been doing some odd websearches here and there and found that there is a corner of former governor Gaston Caperton's collection at the State Capitol about the Blizzard. Checked this out last week, and used it as an excuse to check out Southern Kitchen before it closed.

I noticed a mention of a Huntington Stars in a column of Ernie Salvatore's from my brief microfilm search; this inspired me to dig some more into that corner of things. I hit a goldmine--turns out THIS was the first hockey team in Huntington; the Aces was in fact the name of Huntington's entry in the Mountain State Baseball League. The Stars began play in 1938 at a place called Iceland--Huntington's first ice rink, and the second rink in the state (Charleston had the first, one year earlier). They played a handful of games for the 1938-39 season, primarily against a team from the Charleston rink, then ripped through a 1939-40 schedule against teams from Charleston, Toledo, Detroit, Atlantic City, and wrapped up the season against a team from New York City's Metropolitan Hockey League.

1940-41 promised to build on the previous season's success, and with the on-and-off-ice success of hockey in West Virginia, the general manager of Huntington and Charleston's teams formed a league in mid-season with a team in Akron, the Tri-State Hockey League. At some point in late January-early February, however, something happened; what isn't entirely clear from what I've seen, but the league had admitted a team from Toledo--the Babcocks--which was to begin playing the next week against Huntington and Charleston. However, all mentions of the TSHL abruptly end in the beginning of February. The final games of 1941 were played against Charleston, the Toledo Rovers, and the Detroit Racers, the latter two exhibition matches.

What happened I can only deduce from the ads in Huntington's papers first advertising discounted ticket prices--previously 75c for reserved seating, 50c for general admission, for the final two games it was 45c for all seats--and then advertising that at the end of the season Iceland would be closed for repairs and--big one--the installation of a wood floor. The venue, per city directories, was renamed Arena Gardens and, while operating year-round now, was converted into a roller rink. It would burn down a few years later (believed to be 1945, but unsure), and the site is currently occupied by a Fantastic Sam's.