After some more reading, I conclude that the decline of Ottawa hockey coincided with the decline of the lumber industry in the Ottawa Valley. Ottawa became a civil service town, and the civil service didn't support hockey like the lumber industry had.
Frank Finnigan was an original Ottawa Senator who played for the old Ottawa Senators from 1924 to 1934. His daughter, Joan Finnigan, published many books on the history of the Ottawa Valley, including the hockey-themed book "Old Scores, New Goals" which was released in 1992 as the city of Ottawa received an NHL franchise once again. This book includes quite a bit of discussion on the hockey culture of the Ottawa Valley in the early part of the last century, and also some valuable information on the money involved in a pro hockey career. Quotes below are all from "Old Scores, New Goals".
Why did the Ottawa Valley develop so many pro hockey players from 1900-1930?
Frank Finnigan: "In those days the Ottawa Valley was the cradle of hockey. I think at that time the Valley developed at least fifty per cent of the hockey players in Canada."
Joan Finnigan singles out the lumber industry of the Ottawa as a key factor. The rich lumber families were strong financial supporters of competitive hockey, including pro hockey. And the culture of the lumber industry included competitive events and fostered legendary lumbering giants such as Joseph Montferrand (Big Joe Mufferaw). This culture transferred to supporting competitive sport and hockey heroes when hockey became popular.
Geography was also a factor. The Ottawa Valley had long, cold winters, and no shortage of water to freeze into outdoor ice rinks. Also, the Ottawa Valley was filled with small communities that were connected by rail, allowing competitive hockey between communities to grow up all across the area.
Perhaps because of the long, cold winters with no shortage of water to freeze into ice rinks, perhaps because of the kind of "sporting" character the lumber industry created, the Ottawa Valley became the cradle of hockey in Canada, providing the various amateur and professional leagues -- the Amateur Hockey Association, the Eastern Canada Association, the Canadian Amateur Hockey League, the Federal Hockey League, the National Hockey Association, and the National Hockey League after 1917 -- with nearly 50% of their players between 1880 and 1920.
Frank Finnigan, his son Frank Finnegan Jr, Ottawa Citizen writer Roy MacGregor, and Ottawa hockey buff Bob Wake of Carleton University discussed why the Ottawa Valley produced so many more hockey players than Bob's birthplace in the Saguenay Valley. Finnigan pointed out the importance of the geography of the area, with many towns all connected by rail.
Bob Wake: When I came up here in 1925 from the Saguenay Valley you were playing then, Frank, and I remember you. Being eleven years old then, I was memorizing the names of all the N.H.L. hockey players. Well, Chicoutimi is an isolated area and Shawville is an isolated area, but out of my country -- that is the Lake St. Jean district -- there has been George Vezina, Johnny Gagnon, and one of the Lamarands. Now we could skate from October to March, so how come only four players from Lake St. Jean? And the Ottawa Valley has produced so many hockey players you can't count them. And incidentally you don't get them any more.
Frank Finnigan Jr.: The towns were closer together and they went on the train, and lots of times there were men ready with horses and sleighs to put some young lads on with some hay, and get them to games -- hockey-nut men. Campbell's Bay and Coulonge and Shawville fought for years, and Quyon...
Roy MacGregor: That's the key right there. The towns have to hate each other.
Bob: I know I'm the only one from the Saguenay Valley but we had all that too. When the Chicoutimi team went down to play Jonquier, they had to get the police every time, to get the guys to the train to go back to Chicoutimi.
Frank Finnigan Sr.: Here in the Ottawa Valley you have so many towns together able to reach each other, all within a hundred miles of each other, or less. And all kinds of train connections. From Chicoutimi you could only get to Quebec City and Montreal.
Ottawa Valley hockey culture
The Valley also stocked the great Ottawa teams -- the Rideau Rebels, the Ottawa City Hockey Club, the Silver Seven, and the Ottawa Senators -- with some of their greatest players. During this era, the Ottawa Valley was a ferment of amateur hockey. Cross-roads hamlets tried to equip and field teams to play neighboring hamlets and rivalries grew up between villages supporting pickup teams. Small towns built and regularly iced outdoor rinks, some with lights strung around the perimeter for night games. The speedy and reliable post office of those days delivered challenges to rival teams, and fans laid heavy bets. The sportswriter was born, reporting for small town weeklies and big city dailies. Governors-General in the Capital and Horatio Algers in the lumbering and mining towns of the Valley became promoters and financiers of hockey teams. Leagues were formed and re-formed; teams organized and disbanded. Cups were cast in pure silver.
Leagues sprang up like dandelions in June: church leagues -- Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist -- you name it; inter-class leagues in elementary schools; high-school leagues; university leagues (McGill, Queen's, Toronto); an Upper Ottawa Valley League; a Lower Ottawa League; inter-village leagues; inter-town leagues; inter-city leagues; inter-regimental leagues; county leagues. In Pembroke the highly popular Debating Club fielded a Debaters' Team, and in Ottawa the leading merchants began a mercantile team league, including the Ottawa Electrics made up of employees of the Ottawa Electric Street Railway Company.
In the beginning local merchants most often provided team sweaters and team equipment, as well as very scant traveling expenses, maybe tickets to travel on the train from Perth to Brockville to play there and come back the same night. It was a landmark experience for young men if there was ever entertained the thought of slaying overnight in a strange and far-off hotel.
During this period from 1891-92 to 1902-03, hockey mania seized Ottawa. Junior and Senior teams sprang from almost every neighborhood, sponsored by local businesses. While the Ottawa City Hockey Club, renamed the Capital Hockey Team, challenged teams like the Montreal A.A.A., Montreal Victorias, and Montreal Shamrocks for The Stanley Cup in the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada League, their farm team, the Young Capitals, were pitting their strength against such outstanding junior performers as the Electrics, Aberdeens, Jim Enright's Victorias, Ottawa Seconds, New Edinburghs, a hard-hitting crew that sometimes came up The Valley from Buckingham, and a team bearing the banner of Garland's Wholesale and Drygoods House. The Garlands boasted some formidable young hockey players-in-training, such as Harvey Pulford, Forester McKinnon, Tom McNichol, and Tom Brown, The Young Caps produced such outstanding athletes as Bill Powers, Eddie and Paddy Murphy, and Bob Mulhall.
Old-timer Fred Davis of Fort Coulonge in Western Quebec remembered the early days of hockey. Notes on the distances below - Fort Coulonge is 37 km from Portage-du-Fort, 40 km from Shawville, 64 km from Quyon, 79 km from Kazabazua, and 118 km from Ottawa.
When I was a boy, Fort Coulonge was a great hockey town. One of the first covered rinks in the county was here; my dad owned it. But the townspeople, because they couldn't agree on what percentage my father should have, went onto the river and built an open-air rink in spite. So our great one, Harold Darragh, went to the Ottawa Senators.
Coulonge used to play Shawville, Quyon, even a team from Kazabazua. We would take a train to Ottawa and then get to Gatineau whatever way we could. A team of good horses driving a bunch can't go much more than six miles an hour, so you can imagine how long it took us to get to Shawville, Campbell's Bay, Quyon! The women were the coldest because they used to get fancied up for the games. They would warm up a bunch of bricks and put them in the bottom of the sleighs and cutters and stand on them. There was a terrible rivalry between Shawville and Portage-du-Fort; they were always fighting.
Edgar Boyle of Ottawa recalled hockey in Maniwaki, Quebec (130 km north of Ottawa). It's interesting that he notes there was very little social life and the hockey rink was a big part of community life.
Wikipedia notes "Ottawa was linked to Maniwaki by a branch line of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, a distance of 82.3 miles. After crossing the Ottawa River, there were stations were at Hull, Wakefield, Low, Kazabazua and Gracefield before reaching Maniwaki. It was opened in stages between 1893 and 1902."
Although his Wikipedia entry doesn't mention it, apparently Billy Gilmour and his family were connected with Maniwaki, possibly through his father's lumbering business.
Social life in the small villages was not very active in those days. There was not much time for it -- working hours were far too long (seven to six). However, there were four regular places where everyone met at one time or another. They were the post office at mail time, the railway station at night when the Ottawa train arrived, the church steps after service on Sundays, and, in winter, the hockey rink. That was about the extent of it. There were no shows, no radios, very little card playing; actually very little social life.
There was a great rivalry between the two villages of Davidson and Maniwaki in sports. They played hockey and baseball, and played hard against each other. They also combined, under the Maniwaki name, to play against other Valley towns and also against teams from Ottawa. They had a good baseball field, a splendid fairgrounds, and, even as far back as 1907, they had a very good indoor hockey and skating rink. The rink, which was in a substantial building, was situated on the Desert River Road, midway between the two villages. As a matter of fact, it was the first of three closed links built on the same spot. Two of them burned down.
I think it might be in order here to recall some of the more prominent players of that era. In hockey, there were the Gilmours (Billie, Suddie, and Ward), Jim Nault, Redmond Daly, Jim Quaile, Mike Lawless, Wally Lawless, Bob Mooney, Gray Masson, Lionel Bonhomme, Fred Rochon, Joe Gendron, et cetera, et cetera. The quality of hockey played in that era was of very high caliber. It was a notable fact that Billie and Suddie Gilmour had both played for the Ottawa Silver Seven, the world's champions of that day. The other members of the Maniwaki Hockey Team were relatively good.
Fans came from the area all around for the 1910 Stanley Cup championship game in Renfrew, ON, against the Montreal Wanderers.
The high point of hockey playing history in Renfrew was the 1910 Stanley Cup championship game between Renfrew Millionaires and the Montreal Wanderers. Hockey mania possessed much of the Ottawa Valley. Every train to Renfrew brought in its fans from Pembroke, Arnprior, Ottawa, Montreal, Brockville, Eganville. When the special from Pembroke and the regular from Ottawa both arrived at the Renfrew Station at the same time, the streets were filled with people from the station to the rink.
Friday afternoon, the day of the match, the 1:40 train from Montreal arrived at the Renfrew Station with a special car for the Montreal Wanderers attached to the long line of regular passenger cars. Half the town of Renfrew was there to look over the team which had already won so many championships. " Never before has there been such excitement in Renfrew as there is today," reported The Renfrew Journal.
All afternoon hockey fans streamed in from the countryside, some walking, some by horse and sleigh or cutter, from Burns-town, Springtown, Spruce Hedge, Black Donald, Goshan, Ashdad, Haley Station, Adamston, Cobden, Mount St. Patrick, Dacre, and all the farming communities in between. "The country people," The Journal reported, "were coming in loads from two to fifty!"
An hour after the arena ticket office had been opened all reserved sets were sold. Even with the rink expansion O'Brien had engineered and paid for, the new balconies almost doubling capacity, it began to be apparent early in the afternoon that not everybody who wanted to see the game could be accommodated. All seats were sold by 6:00 and it was Standing Room Only after that.
Frank Finnigan remembered playing hockey non-stop while growing up in Shawville, Quebec.
Frank Finnigan: When I was young growing up in Shawville the whole world was a rink. A hockey rink, not a skating rink. When I first started to play hockey, I played on the ponds and on the crust. We'd have a big rain and it would freeze and make the crust -- just the same as ice. Yes, it would be just the same as ice; it would carry a team of hockey players or a team of horses. And then we had the ponds and the creeks. When we got a bit bigger we had the small lakes, which we kept shoveled off in the winter. Then every second house in Shawville would have a little rink in their back yard. It wouldn't be too big but you could still play on it. The John Cowans on Back Street at the old Shawville Equity -- they published that paper for a hundred years -- had a great big summer kitchen and sometimes we would flood that and use it. It was the first covered rink! And then you'd have the streets to skate on when you'd have a rain and it would freeze. You played shinny on the streets in the winter and road hockey on the streets when the ice and snow was gone.
Well, then in 1913-14, Shawville got its covered rink -- one of the first if not the first in the Upper Ottawa Valley. W.A. Hodgins, general merchant; Duncan Campbell, gentleman; Chris Caldwell, hotel-keeper -- they put up the money for the materials for the rink, but everyone in town gave their labor free. There was Standing Room Only for three to four hundred people. We even had night games. The first lighting arrangement was oil-burning lamps strung above the ice surface on wires. The lamps would smoke up, go out, and often be shot out by the players -- sometimes on purpose to keep the other team from seeing too well when they were winning, sometimes just plain accidentally by a high shot. The Shawville rink fell down one day in the 1970s.
Now, covered rinks have some advantages, but not many. You have to wait for rink time these days, so you don't get nearly as much hockey as we did in my learning days. We just moved from one kind of rink to another -- perpetual motion. If one pond wasn't good enough, we moved to a creek and so on. I played hooky from school all the time to play hockey and I wouldn't recommend that! I think everybody should get an education. I had a tough time.
We didn't have any fancy skates and equipment. I bought my first single-blade pair from Cedric Shaw for five dollars when I was thirteen years old; they were secondhand. Before that I played on double-enders. We were always collecting from the Shawville merchants for money for team sweaters. We had to supply your own hockey sticks. That was hard for me. The good ones, made of natural wood with clear shellac, were fifty cents each. The cheap ones were painted red to cover up the knots. We used frozen horse balls for a puck when we couldn't afford a rubber one. Most of the time.
Frank Finnigan: Without any organized leagues, we were always looking to throw down a challenge for a game, any chance we got, to Bryson, Campbell's Bay, Portage-du-Fort, Quyon, anything within range because, remember, there were no cars in those days; players either went by horse and sleigh or by train -- if they could afford it -- and that was seldom. Remember, we are talking about times when many kids didn't have skates because their parents couldn't buy them and when even buying a new stick was a budgeting problem. That's how I learned to only use one stick a year and I continued that even when I was in the National Hockey League playing for the Ottawa Senators and the Toronto Maple Leafs.
I was only twelve, the youngest on the team, when the big challenge came from across the Ottawa River from Westmeath, Ontario, to play a game there. If you know your geography of The Valley at all, that meant taking the train up to Fort Coulonge, Quebec, crossing the Ottawa River by ice and then traveling into Westmeath. The Shawville team was called Cy's Pets, after Cy Hodgins who did some of the financing -- Shawville was the center of a large prosperous English Protestant farming community -- and most of the businessmen were hockey crazy. Besides, most of them were my relatives. We were the pride of Shawville, a very proud town anyhow, and the merchants had outfitted us all out in fine hockey sweaters with socks to match. Some of us even had the expensive fifty cent hockey sticks.
Money in hockey
Behind the scenes, in villages, towns, and burgeoning cities the wealthy, powerful, and influential were gathered to raise money to fund their hockey teams, to buy equipment, to improve rinks, to pay travel expenses, to boost players salaries. We have only an inkling of the intensity of the betting on games in those days, for obviously most of it was unrecorded. But, on occasion, teams were accused of playing to lose because of bets that had been placed beforehand. When Haileybury met Cobalt for The Stanley Cup in the last N.H.A. game of 1910, famous mining magnate Noah Timmins, the Haileybury sponsor, was said to have bet $50,000 on the outcome. Haileybury won 14-9, and we have to presume that, in the manner of the rich getting richer, Timmins collected his bets.
The episode of the Renfrew Creamery Kings, aka the Millionaires, brought money and hockey into the spotlight more than ever. High salaries of $2000.00 or more were discussed, and the money advantages of playing pro hockey also included good off-season jobs.
Following this meeting stories of player raids filled the newspapers, rumor having it that Renfrew had offered four Ottawa players --Marty Walsh, Fred Lake, Albert Kerr, and Fred "Cyclone" Taylor -- $2,000 dollars each to desert Ottawa. "Stage money," cried out the Toronto Globe, seemingly unaware of the O'Brien resources or their propensity to follow through once they began something.
The Ottawa Senators retaliated by sending envoys around the country urging their players to stay with the team and offering good "under-the-table" Civil Service jobs in the off-season. The Ottawa Citizen reported then that Renfrew had raised its offers to $2,500 per man, with two-year contracts, off-ice jobs for any player who wanted them, all the money to be deposited immediately in a bank of the player's choice.
Frank Finnigan gave some details of his financial career in hockey. He knew from an early age that he wanted to play professional hockey.
Frank Finnigan: I knew by the time I was nine that I was going to be a professional hockey player. Of course, we didn't have any radio or television then, but I used to save my money and buy every newspaper from Ottawa that I could get hold of. I wasn't very good at school, but I could certainly read the sports pages of The Ottawa Journal and The Ottawa Citizen at a very early age! The train used to come into Shawville at six every evening, and as soon as I would hear that whistle blow I would head down to Joe Turner's confectionary or Doc Clock's drugstore and get my papers. So would a lot of other people.
Finnigan was first paid $10 at age 13 to play for Quyon against Fitzroy Harbour.
Frank Finnigan: The first money I ever earned was when I was thirteen and Quyon paid me to play against Fitzroy Harbour for money under somebody else's name. I was under age, only about a hundred and thirty pounds, so I had to take somebody else's name for Quyon. Ten dollars. And Quyon lost. We were playing against men. They came across on the ice to us. There was no power plants in those days, so it was safe crossing in a car. The ice isn't sitting on top of the water, so it cracks and goes down if you try to cross with a car or a team of horses. It was easy to maintain a nice road in those days.
He played senior hockey in Ottawa for Ottawa University in the Ottawa City Hockey League (OCHL). Finnigan was paid to play for the university team, and did not have to submit any assignments.
Frank Finnigan: Well, one of the referees who refereed in our league, Bill Smith of Ottawa, saw that I had possibilities. Word got around to Dr. Eddie O'Leary of Ottawa University, and he asked me to go down to Ottawa and play for Ottawa U. in the Senior City League against Montagnards, Ottawa, Munitions, and Victoria. You think that kind of thing only goes on today? Well, I played two seasons for Ottawa University, 1920-21 and 1922-23, at fifty dollars a game! Yes, the Coulsons -- J.P. and his sons, Harry and D'Arcy, who owned the old Alexander Hotel and who backed the Ottawa U. team -- they paid me fifty dollars a game. I was enrolled in the university as a "commercial student." But I never went to a class. That's true. You can see a picture of me yet in the hall of the old Arts Building at Ottawa.
Finnigan played two more seasons in the OCHL, taking the train from Shawville to Ottawa for games while working as a lineman for Bell Telephone.
Frank Finnigan: I had some other interesting offers, too. When I was young and still playing amateur I had an offer to go to Pittsburgh and play on a kind of "scholarship" -- they would put me through for a doctor or a dentist. It was a semi-pro league there, it wasn't a minor league, but I can't remember what the university was. They offered me pretty good money. I had the same kind of offer from Queen's University at Kingston -- they would have paid me to play hockey there and put me through whatever degree I wanted. But I didn't have the education, you know, at all. Remember I quit school at Grade Nine.
Finnigan's first NHL contract paid him $1,800 for the season, and bonuses brought him up to $3,400. And his annual salary increased substantially in the following seasons.
Frank Finnigan: It was a three-year contract for eighteen hundred dollars a year. I was a green kid from the country and (Frank Ahearn) never held me to it, gentleman that he always was. The next year he upped it to thirty-five hundred dollars, then forty-five hundred, then fifty-five hundred, with bonus all the time.
In 1926, the average salaried employee in the manufacturing industry in Canada made $1890 a year, and the average wage earner made $999 a year.
So Finnigan's hockey salary and bonuses gave him a very comfortable living, especially considering that he only worked half the year and could make money in the off-season.
In fact, Finnigan stated his offseason employer, Ottawa Electric, paid him all year, in addition to his hockey salary, per a conversation with Finnigan and Jake Dunlap about all the Ottawa hockey players coming home in the summers of the 1930s.
Jake: I want you to try and name as many people as you can remember, because when everybody came home to Ottawa in those years from playing in the National Hockey League and the Western League, or the seniors or the semi-pro American league in the States, in the summer that was when things really lifted in Ottawa. The guys were home, they didn't have to play any more,
Frank: Des Smith, Lionel Hitchman, Bill Cowley, all the Bouchers -- four of them, Frank, Billy, Buck, George. Joe sold a correspondence music course, Carl didn't play hockey. Five, no, just four Bouchers -- Bobby, yes, five. There were six brothers. Now get into the Kilreas: Kenny, Hec, Wally, Jack -- he ran the camera shop -- Brian played for Eddie Shore down in Springfield. Crafty Crawford, Justine Bow, and then there was Ebbie Goodfellow, a hell of a hockey player, Harvey Rockburn, Ted Lindsay from Renfrew, the Cleghorns, Harold Darragh, Jack Darragh, Eddie Gerard, Punch Broadbent, Cy Denneny, Eddie Gorman from Buckingham, Newsy Lalonde, Les Graham, Des Smith, Roger Smith -- his brother played for Pittsburgh same time as Lionel Conacher played over there before he went to The Maroons -- Lew Bates, Eddie Finnigan, Joe Matt -- went over to the States later --Jack McVicker from Renfrew went to The Maroons, Ray Kinsella, two Conn boys played for Toronto, Maddie Cullin, Quackenbush, Gordie Bruce played for Boston, Hank Blade, Tony Lecarie.
Jake: All these guys that played pro, semi-pro flooding back into town, into Ottawa for the summer in the '30s. When April came, they all got together. "How are you going?" The camaraderie that existed at that time was wonderful, exceptional.
Frank: Art Gagner, Lionel Hitchman played for Boston. Alex Connell, King Clancy, Clint Benedict, Bert McKinley -- oh, so many!
Jake: And Ottawa wasn't a big city then, and you had that many players coming home every summer. Bill Touhey, D'Arcy Coulson, Harold Starr, Allen Shields, Gerry Lowry, all the Lowrys, Frank Lowry, brother of Tom Lowry of
The Ottawa Journal, a great guy. Louis St. Denis, Gordie Bruce...
Frank: We played ball, tennis, golf. They all had jobs in the government. We had leave.
I got leave from Ottawa Electric, but I got paid all year. The Ahearns, Eddie Gorman -- Buckingham.
Jake: Aurel Joliat. You can imagine in the doldrums of the '30s, in the height of the Depression, suddenly all these guys swarmed back home. You can imagine what were they going to do. That's why some of them got into the bread business, or played ball over at Lansdowne Stadium, or went to The Whip, a place in Hull right next door to Madame Burger's. When you went over the Interprovincial Bridge on the right hand was the Empress Hotel, on the left was Beal's garage and the Regal. That was a great spot the Regal; all the guys met there Sunday morning. "Everything's legal at the Regal," they used to say.
Although hockey salaries stagnated in the Depression years of the 1930s, Finnigan still made $4000 in his final season with the Senators, a very good salary for the era.
Finnigan received a new car every season from a local automobile dealer in return for his endorsement. Local clothiers, furriers, and hatters sent him the latest fashion in return for his endorsement.
Joan Finnigan remembered her father as a generous man who bought the best for his wife and children.
Joan Finnigan: The morning following my father's returnings we always got up with "Christmas" excitement in our hearts, for our father was a generous man with impeccable taste in clothes and would come home laden with gifts for my mother and for us. I can see the dresses for my sister and me, laid in layers of tissue paper, straight from New York's finest stores.
The vein of my father's generosity ran over into a fault. One day he took me to buy a pair of new shoes and instead bought me three pairs, one a chocolate brown pair by Hurlburt, no less, with gold eyelets and curly laces, so grand that, when I first got them, I used to stick my feet out in the aisle at school so that everyone could see them.
When it came time to buy me my first skates, my father bought the most expensive in the city. I can feel the leather in them yet; they were soft, black, almost figure-skating quality. The chrome in the blades was mixed with some other alloy which, in my mind, verged on platinum so that my feet on the ice netted the sun by day and the moon by night. I knew that no one on earth had ever had a pair like them. And certainly I knew that in the change shacks at the outdoor skating rinks there was no chance that I would ever get my skates mixed up with anyone else's.
The benefits of being a pro hockey player went beyond the salary. Pro hockey players lived a glamourous lifestyle, rubbing shoulders with celebrities and visiting the big American cities.
Frank Finnigan: But even though he was losing money every year -- and his father was grumbling about it all the time -- Frank Ahearn was a perfect gentleman to us all, all the time. It was nothing but the best for us, the best food, the best traveling, the best accommodation -- the Waldorf Astoria in New York, the Leland in Detroit, the Congress in Chicago, the King Edward in Toronto. And we always had a private railway car attended by porter Sammy Weber.
Frank Finnigan: The club bought the best tickets for us to the best shows. We saw Bing Crosby make his debut in New York at the Paramount Theater on Broadway and we met him after the show. Ever after that he was a fan of ours and used to come to the games and sit behind the players' benches and talk to us during the games, especially to Hec Kilrea and me. We saw Al Jolson in Sonny Boy and when he sang "Sonny Boy" everybody cried.
Sometimes the whole team would go to Harlem to hear the great jazz players, perhaps at the Cotton Club; we saw the Nicholas Brothers, famous tap-dancers, and we heard Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Count Basie. Calloway was my favorite.
Some of us would go into Jack Dempsey's bar after a game across from Madison Square Gardens. Have a beer and shake hands with Jack. He was finished boxing by then and he was the front man.
Frank Finnigan: Chicago was a city in the grip of Al Capone and his mobsters. That was the time of Prohibition and speakeasies and bad liquor. Billy Birch from Hamilton and Lionel Conacher from Toronto -- both then playing for New York Americans -- and myself went into one of the hotels that was one of Al Capone's haunts, and we saw him there. It was a speakeasy with a dancing show.
In the Brunswick in Boston we used to meet Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig on the elevators and in the lobby. Hec Kilrea, Alex Connell, Buck Boucher, King Clancy, and myself would talk sports with them.
Frank Ahearn used to have the team up to his summer place at Thirty-One-Mile Lake in the Gatineau. It was a huge island with main lodge, cabins, boathouse, icehouse. We boated, fished, played tennis, ate, and lived like kings. There was a cook, servants, handymen...
Frank Finnigan continued to reap the benefits of being a hockey star after retirement. Even though he had a drinking problem for years, he got many business opportunities through his hockey connections, starting with the owner of the Senators, Frank Ahearn.
Frank Finnigan: We had the Olde Colonial Hotel before I retired. It was on the corner of what is now Î Connor and Queen, right across from the back door of Murphy-Gambles. Right down from the Windsor Hotel. Frank Ahearn fixed it all up for me and we paid rent monthly, my partner and I, Ashe. Tom Ahearn, Frank's father, owned the property, but Frank talked his father into giving me the hotel as my "second career."
Frank Finnigan: I should have stayed in the hotel, but I was drinking. I sold my shares and then I lost my job at Brading's, so I was in trouble. I went back to Mr. Ahearn, Frank Ahearn. He was Member of Parliament for Ottawa at that time. So he got in touch with somebody and he told me, "Britain will declare war before too long." He said, "Go up to the cottage and have a rest and get straightened out and I'll see if I can't get you into the government." I went into the government and I worked there for about a year or about six months, and then we were making pretty fair money -- more that the Grade Twos or Threes, and they were doing the same work as we were.
Frank Finnigan: Russ Boucher was the Member of Parliament for Ottawa...Anyway, Russ said to me, "They're building a big hospital in Smiths Falls and there'll be a lot of work up there and Merrickville's not too far from there and they're also building a correctional home or prison at Burritt's Rapids." He said, "Go up and try and buy the Merrickville Hotel." So I took the train and went up to Merrickville and saw the owner and he wanted to sell it, so I bought it. I told him I'd be back in a few days.
Now the license had to be transferred. The problem was, the beer quota at each hotel was rationed before I went to Merrickville. Anyway, I knew some people who had some pull still. I'm not going to say who.
Eddie Finnigan, Frank's brother, also gave some details on the money he made from hockey.
Eddie Finnigan: In 1928, I played for the Shamrock Juniors, and I went on the Ottawa Senators negotiation list. I got five hundred dollars a year on this negotiation list for the professional Senators. That was under the table. I was supposed to be amateur. I was on that list for, I guess, about three years.
Remember, $500 was about half the average yearly wage for a Canadian wage-earner at the time. But being on the negotiation list had a negative side too.
Eddie Finnigan: So after that game I got the offer from the Montreal Maroons to come down and have a tryout. If I didn't make it for the Maroons, I was going to play for the Montreal Royals and they'd get me a job in Montreal. Well then the Ottawa Senators picked me back up again. Yes, Ottawa stepped in and said, "Hey, Finnigan's our property. You've no business touching him. You've no business offering him a contract or anything else." In other words this is why they put you on a negotiation list. You'd almost think at that time -- Toronto did it too -- and you'd almost think at that time that they're holding you if they need you and if they want you then they'd take you; if they don't -- well, nobody else can get you and make a better team. Dog in the manger. They claimed at one time that Toronto had eight hundred players on the list.
So I had to go back to Ottawa then. I played Senior City League with Rideau Seniors who won the championship that year, and then the next year I played for New Edinburgh and we won the championship that year.
Even minor league hockey paid $2000 a year in the 1930s, during the Great Depression.
Eddie Finnigan: The next year the Boston Cubs disbanded. I was still Boston property and I was to go to Providence. It was sixty dollars a week plus a split of the gate receipts. Less money. Half the money. I think my original contract with Boston was four thousand dollars if you played for the season in the N.H.L., and if you "went down" it was either two thousand or twenty-four hundred. I didn't go. So then I got a letter in Ottawa that I was suspended from playing anywhere. I was Boston's property. I couldn't play for anybody else. And nobody else would take you if you were Boston's property. I was untouchable.
And the same went for other clubs. There was like a "Gentlemen's Agreement." And I stayed home and I didn't have an amateur card so I couldn't play. But I played for Cranes Printing and played for the government team and some exhibition games.
The decline of Ottawa hockey in the 1930s
Old-timers Eddie Albert and Jim McKnight mentioned that Ottawa was a civil service town, so money was tight.
Eddie: Why did they go out of the N.H.L.? Money. It was quite obvious. It was a civil service town.
Jim: Everybody in a civil service town budgets their money. You get a factory town, they get paid Friday and they go spend it. They go for three days and they say, "We've only got another day to go till it's pay day." Friday night they get paid again. And Frank Ahearn, of course, things were getting pretty tight as far as money and that was the reason he sold Clancy. He sold Clancy for $35,000 and that kept the operation going eh?
Frank Finnigan also mentioned the civil servants were poorly paid.
Frank Finnigan: Frank Ahearn, I don't think he ever told me how he got interested in hockey. I think he just liked it as a boy and then he managed some hockey teams before he got into the N.H.L. He lost money every year on the Ottawa Senators. Ottawa, even though it was the cradle of hockey, wasn't large enough to draw big enough crowds to make money enough to keep a professional team. In those days the roads weren't ploughed in winter, so the crowds dwindled in bad weather. The Depression was on and the civil servants were poorly paid.
Frank Finnigan: In the Thirties there wasn't a whole lot of money in Ottawa and Hull -- the Depression was on -- the federal government, Ahearn's Ottawa Street Railway and Ottawa Electric companies, Booths in Hull -- those were the big employers.
Nobody says it right out, but I would tie the decline of hockey in Ottawa to the decline of the lumber industry in Ottawa and the growth of the civil service.
8 July 1908 These days, Ottawa has become a synonym for “the government” much to the chagrin of the city’s residents. Newspapers constantly complain about things that “Ottawa” has done. This is understandable since government is the principal industry of the city. One in five jobs in the...
www.historicalsocietyottawa.ca
These days, Ottawa has become a synonym for “the government” much to the chagrin of the city’s residents. Newspapers constantly complain about things that “Ottawa” has done. This is understandable since government is the principal industry of the city. One in five jobs in the Ottawa-Gatineau area is with the federal government, a fraction that rises to one in four if you include other levels of administration. This wasn’t always the case. At the beginning of the twentieth century, trees, not politics, were central to the economic prosperity of Ottawa, and of Hull, its sister community on the other side of the Ottawa River. Saw mills and pulp and paper factories which crowded the shores of the Ottawa River, especially in the Chaudière district, employed thousands. Communities the length of the Ottawa Valley also depended on the forestry business, felling and shipping logs to Ottawa and Hull for processing.
After peaking during the beginning the twentieth century, the Ottawa Valley timber industry entered a long decline as its supply of wood dwindled. By the mid-1920s, it was estimated that less than four percent of the Ottawa Valley’s original, old-growth forest remained, consisting of not more than 10 billion feet of pine of saw-sized timber, with a further 5 billion feet of other soft woods and 4 billion feet of hard woods. Secondary growth of soft and hard woods was deemed suitable only for pulp and firewood.
