People I will not be speaking with anytime soon

Dan Battles, former Charleston hockey captain (and longtime skating instructor) died in 1986.
Bob McDonald, patron saint of Huntington ice hockey, died in 1995.
Luigi Narcise, would-be hockey investor, died in 2006.

I knew I had just missed Narcise, but I just found the others out today--I figured McDonald and Battles would be longshots at best, given their advanced age...

Picking up from yesterday

If the library had stayed open a few minutes longer I'da found my answer to the saga--Luigi Narcise, quoted in the 22 December 1959 Huntington Advertiser:

Andy (Mulligan, Toledo Mercurys GM) just waited too long and I'm going to tell him so."

Narcise and Arnold were open to hosting the March 1960 games, but as far as I can tell the Mercurys did not pick up the option. Huntington would next host a hockey game in 1966, as the NHL's impending expansion seemed certain to create an opening for Huntington. However, the games were not terribly well-attended, owing in large part to minimal promotion and one of the least inspiring lineups in the city's hockey history: back-to-back games with the top two teams in the OHA Major Intermediate A Hockey League, the Simcoe Gunners and the Port Colborne Sailors. The O is for Ontario, not Ohio--this would be the first and, as far as I can tell, only hockey game played in Huntington with no local interest whatsoever. Every other game before and since either featured a team from Huntington or someplace relatively close by.

BTW, in case anyone's wondering, Simcoe won both games, 5-4 on 23 April 1966 and 9-6 on the 24th.

Digging one tunnel, finding a new one (in more ways than one!)

The first three hockey games played at the Veterans Memorial Fieldhouse were all played with the Miami Valley Bruins in 1951. Based in Troy, OH, at that time they were an independent team; they would be rechristened the Troy Bruins for the 1951-52 season and were admitted into the IHL that season.

13 March 1951: Miami Valley Bruins 6, New York Rovers 4 (exhibition)
27 March 1951: Miami Valley Bruins 4, Hibbings Flyers 3 (OT) (semifinal of the National Independent Open Tournament; this would actually set up a rematch with the Rovers in the final of that tournament)
4 April 1951: Cleveland Barons 7, Miami Valley Bruins 3

Attendance was about 1500 for these games, and there were supposed to be more exhibition games played the next season, but so far no luck looking. (While looking this up, I noticed that there is a new incarnation of the Troy Bruins, in the UJHL independent junior league, which will be playing at Hobart Arena next season.)

Fast-forward to 1959, when the Toledo Mercurys found themselves booked out of half a season. Testing the waters in various temporary locales, they played an exhibition match against Huntington's old team, the Louisville Rebels, on 25 October (a 2-2 tie). Organized by Walter Arnold and Luigi Narcise--the same Narcise who tried to buy the Hornets a couple years earlier--they drew 2000 for the game, enough to warrant further consideration by the Mercurys.

While they unexpectedly elected to play some games in St. Louis (and this season they are referred to in the record books as the Toledo-St. Louis Mercurys), as of late December 1959 (when I stopped microfilming this afternoon), the Mercurys made an overture to Arnold and Narcise to play their February-March schedule in Huntington. As the Huntington Advertiser pointed out, however, this would have been problematic due to the coinciding Golden Gloves boxing tournament and West Virginia Catholic High School Basketball Tournament--half the dates would have to have been rescheduled.

Of most interest on my end of things, however, is--and this is not at all unexpected--Arnold and Narcise were using the Toledo match(es?) as a means to test the waters for an IHL expansion franchise in 1960-61. They had even considered buying the star-crossed Denver Mavericks team, but the combination of schedule mismatches and severe financial difficulties ultimately discouraged them (the team ultimately ended up in Minneapolis).

Help me gang--were there any other games, either with Troy or Toledo (or any other teams for that matter)? And whatever became of Arnold and Narcise's expansion efforts?

Rutherford: it's the USHL

Tony with another scoop (and a goof, I'll point it out momentarily):

Huntington, WV (HNN) – Prior to the Tuesday, May 26 Huntington City Council meeting, Big Sandy Superstore Arena Director A.J. Boleski has requested to make a presentation regarding the United States Hockey League.

Huntington has had several experiences with professional minor league hockey, which at its best with the team winning saw an increase in downtown traffic and good attendance to the lower echelons when the team was near the cellar. The same with Arena Football and variations thereof. Even, graduated MU football players couldn’t turn several of those teams into financial survivors.

Although nothing has been made public about the proposal, the United States Hockey League is the top junior ice hockey leave in the U.S. It’s a strictly amateur league with players 20 years and under. Since the league is amateur, the players do not lose NCAA playing status.

Currently, the league has twelve fourteen teams from mostly the Midwest, including Minneapolis, Minn., Dubuque, Iowa, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Columbus Youngstown, Ohio, and Fargo, N.D.

Junior hockey is something I'd considered, but again, the geography is off here as it is with every other league. It would be a good fit with Huntington's image as of late, however, as a center for amateur sports--WV high school tournaments in wrestling and volleyball, little league baseball, the soccer tournament in Barboursville, not to mention the decades of amateur boxing tradition here, either in Golden Gloves or Toughman.

Press--and A NEW HOCKEY TEAM?!

HuntingtonNews.net plugs this site while mentioning a group coming to Huntington this coming week with a proposal to city council re: a new hockey team!

A couple bits he did goof on though--the Hornets were 1956-57, and the Packers have both a for-profit and non-profit entity.

So welcome to all those dropping by, feel free to peruse this fine site and drop a line.

Whoo links!

I finally discovered the "links" tab on the side there and made some changes to it.

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...

A shoutout

I don't know how I JUST NOW got into this, but I thought I'd pass it along... a band called THE ZAMBONIS. I'd heard of them, but until about 15min ago I'd never actually listened to their music--EVERY SONG THEY MAKE IS ABOUT HOCKEY. Here's a link for yas :^D

Throw those attendance figures out the window

I've reached the point where the dung hit the fan as far as the Morris Jeffreys era--a near-million-dollar suit filed by Bank One regarding loans dating back to the Bob Henry era--and in the middle of it all a revelation that the attendance figures during the Henry years that their attendance figures were boosted by quite a few freebies. So THAT explains my little graph there...

Narrowed down the beginning of the end...

Attendance increased over the course of every Blizzard season* except one: the 1998-99 season. After this season Morris Jeffreys sold the team to David LeFevre and Beacon Sports, and after another season the team was out the door. The question: why? Where did it go wrong? As always, if anyone can chip in I'd appreciate the hell out of it; as it is I'll be hitting more microfilms this week.


*--although, as my earlier graph showed, not necessarily from one season to the next