1945–46  ·  Omaha, Nebraska

Before Detroit
Gordie Howe's One Season in Omaha

Before the Red Wings and before anyone called him Mr. Hockey, a seventeen-year-old right wing spent one winter in a Nebraska barn, on a Detroit farm club, under the coach who would win him his first Stanley Cup.

On the night of April 6, 1946, 6,875 people packed into the Ak-Sar-Ben Coliseum in Omaha, Nebraska for the seventh game of a playoff series and saw the home team's coach carried off the ice. Tommy Ivan, the thirty-five-year-old coach in his first season running the Omaha Knights, had been standing at the bench when Red Kane, a Tulsa defenseman, took a body check from an eighteen-year-old Omaha right wing named Gordon Howe. Kane went, in the words of the Omaha World-Herald, "head over heels" and Kane's skate caught Ivan in the groin. Ivan was carried from the rink, and the man who walked down from the stands to run the Omaha bench for the rest of the game was the legendary Jack Adams, general manager and coach of the Detroit Red Wings, who was in town watching his "AA" farm team in the playoffs. It was the last game Howe would ever play for Omaha, and the first time Adams coached him in a game that mattered.

Hockey fans know what happened after that night for Gordon "Gordie" Howe in Detroit. And in case there's any question, four years later Ivan and Howe would be on the same bench again in Detroit, lifting the 1950 Stanley Cup. But what came before Detroit was one winter in Nebraska, and this is a retelling through the Omaha newspaper writers who recorded it as it happened.

Cut loose in 1944

Howe had failed with the Red Wings once already. In October 1944, at sixteen years old, he went to Detroit's training camp in Windsor, Ontario, and on October 13 the Detroit Free Press listed him among five rookies Adams "cut loose." The other four players who were cut ended up playing a grand total of zero NHL games. Detroit kept Howe's rights and parked him with its junior club in Galt, Ontario, where a Canadian Amateur Hockey Association transfer rule kept him out of games all season. The Kitchener Record, in December 1944, mentioned him as one of two "Western Canada stars" Galt couldn't use. That winter Howe was stuck practicing with, but not playing for, the Galt Red Wings.

Omaha in Red Wings sweaters

A year later, his first professional game was not in Omaha. It was in a Detroit sweater, on September 29, 1945, at the University of Michigan rink in Ann Arbor, an exhibition against the defending AHL champion Cleveland Barons. The Free Press called it an all-rookie squad, and the starting six were Harvey Jessiman in goal, Frank Melong on defense, Gordon Petrie at center, Bernie McCarthy and Howe on the wings. So it wasn't really the Red Wings so much as it was the Omaha Knights lineup in Detroit sweaters. The Wings won 5-4 that night with Howe setting up the first two goals, and he notched one himself in the second period. The Free Press took the trouble to note he wasn't a relative of the Red Wings veteran Syd Howe. One of the Cleveland goals that night was scored by a defenseman named Harry Dick, whom Howe would meet again in December, in a Kansas City sweater, with the gloves off.

Back in Omaha, the World-Herald called Howe "one of the brightest prospects in years," five feet eleven and 175 pounds, and "tall, tow-haired, and somewhat shy." Ivan announced him for the Omaha roster on October 5. Over the next three weeks the Red Wings played their new farm club three times in exhibitions in Detroit, St. Catharines, and Galt, and each time the big league club borrowed Howe. He scored for Detroit against Omaha twice and assisted on two others before he had scored for Omaha at all. Detroit won the three games by a combined 23-9, and Adams, watching the exhibitions, suggested to Ivan that the Omaha youngsters could use more shooting practice.

Not that USHL

The league Howe was joining needs to be clarified, because its name back then didn't mean what it does today. The United States Hockey League of 1945 was not a junior league. It was the American Hockey Association coming back from its wartime shutdown under a new name, in seven cities, minor professional, and as Floyd Olds, the World-Herald's sports editor laid out in an October column, mostly aligned with the NHL. Detroit owned Omaha outright, as a second-tier farm club below the Indianapolis Capitals of the AHL. The Kansas City Pla-Mors were Chicago's farm club. The St. Paul Saints had a working agreement with the New York Rangers. The Tulsa Oilers stocked their talent from Toronto. The Dallas Texans partnered with Buffalo of the American League. The Fort Worth Rangers belonged to Eddie Shore, the former Boston Bruins defenseman, and had no true NHL tie but, as Olds wrote, did not need one. The Minneapolis Millers were the other independent, run by Lyle Wright, the same man who had handled the business end of the Knights before the war. The Knights themselves played in the Coliseum at the Ak-Sar-Ben grounds, a building named for a civic order that had spelled Nebraska backwards.

Omaha's roster averaged about twenty years old, one of the youngest in the league. Minneapolis, the opening-night opponent, averaged twenty-four years. At seventeen, Howe was the youngest player in the league, according to the World-Herald.

One lonely assist

He started slowly. After four games the World-Herald's team scoring list for the Knights had him tenth, with one lonely assist. Ivan then put him on the right side of a line with Fred Gibbon, a twenty-three-year-old center who had won the Allan Cup with the Quebec Aces the spring before, and Carl "Winkie" Smith, a twenty-eight-year-old wing who weighed 137 pounds and whom the paper kept calling little. In the weeks that followed, something took hold for Howe. Against Minneapolis in mid-November the paper credited him with "brilliant all-around play." On November 27, in a 4-3 overtime win over Tulsa before 6,100, he had three assists and a hooking penalty, and John Bentley, the World-Herald staff writer who covered the club, called a Smith-Howe-Gibbon passing play "the smoothest play of the evening."

In late November and early December, the Knights traveled to Texas for games against Fort Worth and Dallas. Howe told this part of the story himself in 2002, at seventy-three, to Eric Olson of the World-Herald, when the Coliseum was about to close: a fight along the boards early in the season, a Fort Worth player getting the better of a teammate, the veterans on the bench not moving, and Howe going over the boards to win his first professional fight. Ivan asked him afterward whether he had something against the man, and Howe told his coach he did not like anybody out there. "I was like a dogcatcher," he said. "Anything that moved, I was after it."

We weren't able to verify his account of the fight in the papers, but that doesn't mean it's not true. The Omaha-Fort Worth games in the World-Herald and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that winter have fights in them, but not Howe's. What the paper printed was Dallas, November 30, 1945: a stick-swinging duel between Paul Waldner, a Dallas defenseman, and Gibbon, after which "Right Wing Gordon Howe challenged Waldner and the fists started flying." Waldner and Gibbon drew the majors. Howe drew nothing. The first major penalty the World-Herald recorded against him came a month later, at home, against Harry Dick of Kansas City, in a scrap the paper called "a bit of blood-letting."

The next night in Fort Worth, where the Star-Telegram had run Howe's photograph in the morning ahead of the match, he scored with thirty seconds left in the first period. Then he caught the flu. He would miss an 8-1 win over Minneapolis on December 4, packed his bag for the next southern trip anyway, and somewhere on the road a wire came from Saskatoon saying his mother was going into emergency surgery. At the time, Jimmy Skinner, the Knights' twenty-seven-year-old captain, was back home in Omaha nursing three cracked ribs. Bentley reported that Skinner spent the day walking to and from the telegraph office, and when the wire arrived that Mrs. Howe had come through surgery as well as could be expected, he put in a long-distance call to Tulsa and read it to Howe. Skinner had told Bentley that Omaha was the best hockey town he had seen in the States. A decade later Skinner would coach the Red Wings to the 1955 Stanley Cup, with Howe leading the team with twenty-nine goals.

Rough and rugged

Bentley profiled Howe on December 14, 1945, under the headline "Youngest, but Best Shot!" The boy who had weighed 175 pounds in October now weighed 185. He was the youngest of nine children, three brothers and five sisters. He was, the paper noted again for the benefit of Red Wings fans, no relation to Sid Howe, the veteran Detroit forward who would be the NHL's all-time leading scorer through 1947. Gordie planned to spend the summer on a construction job to stay in shape. He had five goals, against ten each for Gibbon and Don Morrison, but Bentley noted that many considered his way of faking a goaltender out of position and then shooting the most accurate in the lineup. On the recent trip to Dallas, Bentley reported that Howe had walked against a red light in the middle of a police crackdown on jaywalking, and the cop who stopped him was convinced Howe's Saskatchewan accent was a put-on, while Howe was convinced the officer's Texas drawl was. It was settled amicably. Asked why he liked hockey, Howe gave Bentley the only first-person answer that survives from that season: "Because it's rough and rugged!"

It certainly was, especially back then. On December 29, the season's largest crowd to that point, 6,200, watched Kansas City win 6-4 with Howe and Harry Dick taking matching majors. On February 3 in Kansas City, in a game Omahans who made the trip described as "bloodier than a bullfight," Howe and Maurice Vaillancourt, a Pla-Mors wing, swung sticks at each other, and Howe left with a cut over his left eye. The World-Herald said he needed seven stitches and he played the next game in a helmet. Kansas City beat Omaha seven times in their first seven meetings. After the seventh, Ivan said what the numbers already showed. "That is a National League hockey team," he told Olds. A fan leaving the Coliseum the same night said the Knights were willing young boys playing their hearts out against men, and Olds printed that too.

Between the beatings, Howe scored. Two goals at St. Paul on January 6, before 7,559, the largest crowd in that city's hockey history as of that date. Two more goals at Dallas on January 18, both assisted by Smith, in a game with two fights on the ice and one in the stands that stopped play because the players paused to watch. Two more goals at Fort Worth on February 23 in a 4-0 shutout. Two more three nights later against Dallas, the second of them a thirty-foot angle shot that went in off a Dallas player's skate, in the win that clinched Omaha's playoff spot. A goal and two assists in a tie at Minneapolis the next week, and on March 5, 1946, a solo rush against Tulsa that ended with Howe faking Bud LaMarche and lifting the puck over the goalie's shoulder into the top of the net. The World-Herald ran a photograph of it, and the caption identified him as Gordon Howe, number 12, not the classic 9 he famously wore in Detroit.

Inside the Coliseum

The Coliseum in Omaha where Howe played was a true old school barn, with old school charm and attractions. It held about six thousand and regularly held more. The scoreboard was electric. The goal light was a red beacon that, Bentley complained, the goal judge sometimes lit when the puck had not gone in. Public skating followed the practices. As a special attraction for Thanksgiving 1945, Ivan split his squad into East and West, Canadians from each side of the country, and let the public in to watch them settle an argument about which half of Canada produced better hockey players. Howe, from Saskatoon, skated for the West team. On another night in December, with Minneapolis in town, a linesman came down with the flu and both teams agreed to use Frank Melong, an Omaha defenseman, as the linesman for the night in the two-referee system. Nobody wore a helmet, except for the spell when Howe wore one because of the stitches.

Two cakes and a second-team all-star

By March 1946, Howe had outgrown Omaha in the literal sense, not only on the ice. Bentley reported that the suits Howe had arrived in no longer fit him, and neither did the skates he had started the season on. He had traded those with a Tulsa player for a new pair on the Oilers' last visit to Nebraska. He also had both knees banged up in a game against Kansas City on March 16, and he missed the trip to the Twin Cities that week. Before the March 23 game, with Howe out of uniform, three Omaha boys named Wayne Bartley, Charles Bradford and Jerry Bartley brought him a pair of birthday cakes at the Coliseum, a week early, prior to his turning eighteen on March 31.

The Omaha press box, casting the city's one vote for the league all-star team, had put him on the first team, the only Omaha player among five from Kansas City. When the league's writers finished voting, the first team had three Knights; Jessiman, Forbes and Smith, and Howe was on the second all-star team at wing. He finished the regular season with twenty-two goals and forty-eight points in fifty-one games, third on the club behind Smith and Don Morrison. Omaha finished second, 31-22-3, nine points behind the first-place Pla-Mors, and drew Tulsa in the first round.

Seven games against Tulsa

The playoff series between Omaha and Tulsa went the distance and Howe missed the middle of it. Omaha took the first game at home, 6-2, in front of what the World-Herald called a "disappointingly small" crowd of 5,500. In the second game, a 2-1 overtime loss, Howe fought Vic Myles, a Tulsa defenseman the paper listed at 225 pounds, and both sat five minutes. Later in the same game he broke away alone on LaMarche but couldn't put it past the Oilers' netminder. In the third game, in Tulsa on March 30, he twisted the knee that had been bothering him, tried to skate in the second period, and had to give up. Omaha lost 5-1 and found themselves in a 2-1 hole in the series. He sat out the fourth game the next afternoon, another loss, on his eighteenth birthday. What a way to spend a birthday. He was back on the ice for the fifth game, on April 2, and Bentley wrote that his return "served as a tonic." Howe tied the game at 5:55 of the second period on passes from Smith and Rod Morrison. Al Dewsbury, a Knights defenseman and future Red Wing and Blackhawk, won it with a goal the referee had not seen and allowed only after Conrad Poitras, the Knights' French-Canadian wing, suggested he ask the goal judge.

There was also money on the ice, and it had started on the Tulsa side. For the first game hosted by Tulsa, Oilers backers had put up cash prizes for every Tulsa goal, and the public-address announcer read out after each one what it had just earned the man who scored it. Omaha businessmen answered in kind. Before the fifth game, John Rosenblatt wired the Knights on their behalf: about six hundred dollars for a win, plus ninety-eight dollars a goal and sixty-three an assist (roughly $1,700 a goal in today's money). The Knights voted before the game to pool it, on the theory that Jessiman, the goalie, along with the team's defensemen would otherwise never see a dime of it. The Tulsa players had kept theirs at first, which Bentley reported caused a few hard feelings, and by the fourth game they had agreed to pool it too. Myles's goal in the fifth game paid $297.05, the nickel donated by a young fan.

Game six, back in Omaha, drew 6,550, a record. Skinner won it in overtime from forty-five feet, tying the series at three games each, and it was only in the dressing room afterward that the players learned Adams had been in the building; he had slipped in before the game and stayed out of sight so as not to rattle them. Game seven in Omaha drew 6,875, a record again. With less than two minutes left in the first period, Johnny Holota scored on a pass from Dewsbury, and thirty seconds later Howe took a rebound of Steve Wochy's shot in front of the net, shimmied the puck until LaMarche was off balance, and drilled it home, in what Bentley called "a neat piece of dipsy-doodle stick handling." Omaha led 2-0 after two periods and, in the paper's words, decided to play cozy hockey. Then Winkie Smith, trying to drag a rebound away from his own net, accidentally put it in. Tulsa scored twice more to take a 3-2 lead. Wochy tied it from thirty feet on a pass from Howe, and Bentley noticed that for a moment every figure on the scoreboard was a three: third period, 3:33 to play, three-all. It was three minutes for all the marbles. John McCormick, a Tulsa center who played without pads, beat Jessiman with eighteen seconds left to spoil it for Howe and the home crowd.

Somewhere in all of that Game seven scoring, Ivan left because of his injury when Kane spilled over the boards, and Adams came down to coach the Knights' bench. The World-Herald reported that Ivan didn't need to be hospitalized and was answering calls after the game.

Ex-Knights shine

In September 1946, the World-Herald's Detroit correspondent reported from training camp that two members of last year's Omaha squad, Jessiman and Howe, had drawn considerable praise from the Red Wings coaching staff. However Jessiman, the Knights' goalie, wouldn't make it to the show and ended up with the AHL's Philadelphia Rockets for 1946-47. Ivan, the Knights' coach, had been promoted to coach the AHL's Indianapolis Capitals. Within a year he would be coaching Detroit, and he would have Howe for seven seasons and win three Stanley Cups.

Howe, as you rightly assumed, made the Red Wings roster in the fall of 1946. On November 4, the Evening World-Herald ran an Associated Press box score of a 3-1 Detroit win over the New York Rangers under the headline "Ex-Knights Shine." The two ex-Knights it meant were Eddie Bruneteau, from the prewar club, and Al Dewsbury, who had both scored in the game. Howe was named in the list of Detroit spares.

When Howe passed in June 2016, the World-Herald went looking for the Omaha boys who had presented him with birthday cakes in 1946 and found Jerry Bartley, eighty-one, in Grand Junction, Colorado, where he had lived since 1971. He had been eleven that night at the Coliseum. The cakes were his older brother Wayne's idea and Jerry, by his own account, tagged along. The Bartley brothers held season tickets to the Knights for years, and paid for them themselves, because their father had told them that if they wanted to go they could go out and earn the money, and if they didn't they could stay home. Bartley was around Howe exactly once in his life, for fifteen or twenty minutes in March 1946, and seventy years later what he remembered was a shy, reserved, pleasant young man. "The guy was just like your next-door neighbor," he told the paper. Which is close to what the World-Herald had printed itself in October 1945, before he had played a game in Omaha: tall, tow-haired, and somewhat shy, letting his skates do the talking.

Sources

• Omaha World-Herald and Evening World-Herald, various between October 1945 and November 1946. Columns and game stories by Floyd Olds and John Bentley.
• Eric Olson, "Gordie Howe had 'good times' at Ak," Omaha World-Herald, March 20, 2002.
• Tony Boone, "Omahans drawn by Howe charm," Omaha World-Herald, June 11, 2016.
• Fort Worth Star-Telegram, December 1945.
• Detroit Free Press, October 14, 1944, and September 30, 1945.
• The Plain Dealer (Cleveland), September 30, 1945.
• Kitchener-Waterloo Record, December 18, 1944.
• Associated Press, March 26 and November 4, 1946.
• hockeyDB, Omaha Knights 1945-46 roster and statistics.
• Photographs © Omaha World-Herald, licensed for this story.