Outdoor hockey

Hey Bucci,

Great to read your excerpts from Jack Falla’s works. Jack and I are contemporaries, having lived in adjacent towns, he in Natick and I in Framingham. While I left Framingham a few years before he moved to Natick, I’m sure we frequented many of the same outdoor venues. For an old-time hockey diehard, nothing beats good outdoor ice.

The readings bring back many memories. For me, hockey in the late 50s and early 60s meant Gleason’s Pond. Games involved everyone from old timers, college and high school players and anyone younger who could keep up. As a little kid playing with the big boys, I was the one who got sent out on the thin ice when an errant pass slid the wrong way. More than once they fished me out with tree branches or hockey sticks and drove me home soaked, including the first day I wore my brand new CCM Tacks. No one in town could have been happier when the big kids won the state championship for Framingham in 1961.

One vivid memory of Gleason’s: Freddie Keane got new hockey gloves for Christmas. The next day he fell in the partially frozen pond. Not wanting to ruin his gloves, he tossed them on a floating piece of ice and climbed back onto the solid sheet. That afternoon he returned to salvage the gloves. We chopped out a body-sized piece, and Fred lied down on it while we tied a rope around him. Then surfer-style he paddled out 50 yards to the gloves, grabbed them, and we towed him in.

As my friends and I got older, we graduated to the lighted outdoor rink at Bowditch Field. On winter nights the rink was reserved for public skating from 6-8 and then open for hockey from 8-10. My dad worked for the Park Department in those days, and his winter job was to tend the rink. If I had my homework done, he’d pick me up and get me to the rink by 8. After 10, I’d help him scrape and hose down the ice. Guys came from all over greater Boston to play there at night, and games often involved 15 on 15 or more. If a couple of goalies showed up, so much the better. During Christmas break many college players came to stay in shape. Listening to their stories was a real education. Here one learned to stickhandle in a crowd and look up to avoid collisions. More than once these games led me to the Framingham Union Hospital emergency room for stitches. Several years later I was the one telling college hockey stories to a new generation of high school kids.

As time went on, I had the opportunity to coach high school hockey. At least once a year, I would give our ice time to the JVs and take the varsity out to practice on a local pond. For some this was their only outdoor skating of the year. We’d set up boots for goals, arrange teams, and have maybe two or three games going at once, winners meeting for the Carver’s Pond Cup. Goalies always skated out. Practice ended with stops and starts around 100 yards in length. Today at alumni games former players often speak with nostalgia about those sessions as among their best recollections of the program.

These days I don’t get out as often as I’d like. Global warming or whatever limits outdoor ice, and outdoor rinks like Bowditch just aren’t around like they used to be. Even when the ice is good, a pond game is tough to find.

Several years ago my wife and I took a long-planned ski trip to Banff and Lake Louise. On a whim, I threw my skates in the suitcase and my stick in with the skis. Lo and behold, I found myself one cold sunny day involved in a serious game of 2 on 2 on the plowed-off lake behind the Chateau Lake Louise with three young hotel employees who had the afternoon off. As the sun receded beyond the glacier and snow covered mountains surrounding the lake, I looked around and wondered if hockey could ever get better than this.

Jack Falla would have loved it.