We hadn’t even noticed that they were.
“Yes, thank you,” we said as we went back into the classroom to a hero’s welcome.
“Just like scoring a big goal,” I said to Jim.
“Yeah,” he said simply, as we returned to our desks.
V—THE HOCKEY RINK
The big guys had laid down the rule. If you didn’t help build the rink, you couldn’t play on it once it was ready. It was a very cold day in January when the construction started. We got a good start on it from the snow drifts nearby. The big guys would cut blocks out of the snow drifts, using their rubber boots to tramp them out at first, then, cutting them out with pieces of plywood that they found behind the school.
We carried them over to where Don and Tom would lay the blocks in a pattern that would eventually form boards for our hockey rink.
“Keep them straight,” Don called out. “Start at the corners. Don’t get any one spot too high, too soon,” he would call out over and over.
The guys and girls carrying the blocks followed the commands without hesitation. It was cold that first day. The wind was strong enough that it would whip the grains of hard snow from beneath the blocks as we lifted them out. They felt like sandpaper scrubbing at our exposed faces and necks. Jim worked hard, steadily, without complaint, always carrying a large block, or sometimes two of them, setting them into a nice tight corner. He was building up the boards around the perimeter of the rink.
By the end of the first day, the entire wall at one end of the rink was built to a height of four feet and foundation blocks had been laid around the entire perimeter of the rink.
It was not surprising that Jim was helping to build a hockey rink. He had taken to the game at a young age. He first started to skate when his mother Maxine brought him across the road to the rink Frank Renaud had built for his children. Maxine, who had a great mind for sports, put a chair on the ice to steady Jim. At first, he ran on his skates, but within two days, he was outskating some of the older kids. Even as a preschooler, he was tenacious about learning to skate.
Maxine had made a rule early on. You can pick one sport to play. Jim picked hockey. When he came home with a circular from school stating that Essex arena was home to a minor hockey program, Jim was signed in to play the next day. Maxine loved the idea of indoor hockey.
In short order, Jim, along with his brother John, the Lauzon brothers and Renaud brothers began to practice hockey on any patch of frozen ice they could find. Tom, Jim and Randy always played against Don, John and Clare. The games didn’t end with nightfall either, as the boys fitted the puck into a salmon can so that it was easier to see in the moon light.
In summer, the boys would switch to road hockey and softball, always maintaining the same teams. John would say later that in all of the thousands of games they played, he never recalls his team winning a single game.
“Jim’s team always won,” John said as a matter of fact. And even though Jim was not the oldest player, he set the tone for the games.
But the game of organized hockey at Essex arena was entirely different. Don Lauzon summed up the feelings of the boys best when he said, “Is this ever neat. When you shoot the puck, you don’t have to walk into the field to get it.”
Still, it was not the men who were the driving force behind getting the boys into organized hockey. It was the mothers, Maxine and Mary Theresa. Ed and Red, for their part, went along with the idea.
When Jim started to play hockey at Essex arena, they had divided the rink in half. Jim was already shooting the puck through the net. The minor hockey officials quickly moved him up a division so he could play on full ice, then they moved him up again because of his dominance at that level.
Mary Theresa Lauzon was an aunt to Jim, and a sports enthusiast. One of her most important jobs in her youth was to listen to the Tiger games on the radio while the men worked in the fields. She would report every important development to them in glowing detail.
Red knew the hard part of life, having served as a prisoner of war in Germany after his capture in Europe.
“You might be surprised how all food tastes good when you’re starving,” is the little he would say about the experience.
When Essex arena opened in 1960, the boys were thrilled. The town had built a rink, but they didn’t have a Zamboni, so the boys hung around the rink for a long while on Saturday, anxious to go out onto the ice to help shovel the snow off of it for the next game.
One of Don’s favourite memories of those early years was the first time he saw Jim take a penalty shot.
“Hey, Ed! I’ll bet you a beer he doesn’t score.”
“He will score,” Ed said with confidence. Jim did, firing a hard low shot past the goalie before he could move.
Back at the Grade School, Tom admired the rink they were building.
“We had a good day,” Tom said to Jim after school, as they made their way toward the school bus.
“You guys have got quite a rink there,” Tom S., the bus driver exclaimed. “I’ll have to get my old skates out of the barn, sharpen them up with a file and show you guys a few tricks,” he said. Tom and Jim laughed.
“You probably could,” Jim said.
“You bet I can,” Tom S. said with a roll-your-own cigarette dangling from his lips. “And I don’t need a store-bought hockey stick to do it with either,” he added.
The construction continued for three more full days. Work started each day before school, during recess and especially at noon hour. Each student ate their lunch fast on those days, because the teacher wouldn’t let us leave our desk until they had finished lunch.
Within a couple of minutes, there was a steady chorus of, “Done my lunch, Miss,” as student after student got up, went to the back of the classroom, put on their coats and mitts, rubber boots and hats. “We’ve got a lot of work to do,” some said with pride.
Construction was a lot slower now. The snowdrifts nearby had all been cut into blocks and carried away. The students now had to transport them all the way from the other side of the school, from the snow banks on the side of the ditch there. It was a long haul from the ditch to the skating rink and many of us had to take a break part way between the ditch and the rink, because the load was too heavy for the long trek. Some porters dropped their blocks too aggressively and watched them crumble into small pieces.
“What happened? Watch it,” the guys in the ditch doing the cutting would say when this happened.
“It’s hard to carry those blocks up out of the ditch you know,” they added. “Carrying them to the rink is the easy job. Don’t break them on the easy job!” they exclaimed.
Jim usually didn’t get involved in the discussions. He would just carry the blocks to the skating rink and return to the ditch to get more, never resting, always looking like he could easily carry more. Tom and Don noticed. They were now the head construction guys.
“Hey, Jim,” Don said, “How many trips have you made today?”
Jim just smiled. “About as many as you,” he said and returned to the ditch for another load. We were nearly finished when Don came along with a plastic sled, he had found in the ditch.
“Hey, guys,” he said, “blocks can be piled onto this thing and just pulled over.”
Everyone thought Don was a genius for discovering the sled, but we had pretty much emptied the ditch of blocks by now.
“I wish I had found it sooner,” Don said with a smile. “It would’ve saved you guys a lot of work.”
The rink was almost ready now. The ice was frozen.