Marquette Iron Rangers: The Stories of Karen Koch, Oakie Brumm, and the Hanson Brothers

September 17, 2023  |  Whitley Marcum

A semi-pro team in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that won five championships, hired the first woman ever paid to play hockey, and put three brothers on screen in the best hockey movie ever made.

In October 1969, four goaltenders skated out for tryouts at the Palestra in Marquette, Michigan. One of them was a slight, quick eighteen-year-old with obvious skill, and it took the captain pointing it out before coach Leonard “Oakie” Brumm realized she was a woman. By the end of the season Karen Koch had been paid, heckled, cheered, and released, and she had become the first female hockey player in history to earn a paycheck.

She is one of three reasons the Marquette Iron Rangers are worth your time. The team took the ice from 1964 to 1976 in the United States Hockey League, won five championships, and collected a cast of characters wildly out of proportion to its size: a coach who founded a hockey league in Kuwait and ran another one inside a state prison, and three brothers who would skate straight from the Upper Peninsula into Slap Shot.

Eight Hundred Season Tickets

The Iron Rangers came together in 1964 out of nothing more complicated than a group of local players who wanted to stop leaving town to play. Brumm has said he had decided he was done going away for hockey, and that Marquette wanted a senior team of its own.

“The people in Marquette wanted a senior team.”

Leonard “Oakie” Brumm, recalling the founding

He put the organization together with Dewey St. Cyr, Jack McCracken, and Bill Todd. The USHL would not grant the franchise until the group could guarantee eight hundred season tickets sold, a condition meant to keep both team and league solvent. Marquette cleared it, and the Iron Rangers made their home debut in October 1964 with a 5–3 loss to the Green Bay Bobcats.

The building had its own history. The Palestra had housed some of the earliest professional hockey in North America, including the Calumet Miners from 1904 to 1907 in the International Professional Hockey League, the first fully professional league anywhere. Sixty years on, it was still unheated. The Iron Rangers warmed it for the first time in 1964 using four large portable heaters, with the fire department’s permission.

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Karen Koch, the First Woman Paid to Play

Koch grew up in Gibraltar, Michigan, near Detroit, where no team would give her a tryout. In 1969 she enrolled at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, and some accounts hold that she chose the school for its proximity to the Palestra and the Iron Rangers. When the team held open tryouts that October, she showed up in full gear.

Brumm was coming off a championship season and watched four goaltenders take the ice. Brian Lunney, on loan from the Toronto Maple Leafs and a product of Canada’s Olympic system, was a lock to start. Of the rest, one was a young man with little athletic ability, one was a local named Lonnie Lytaikainen with some potential, and one was a five-foot-five goaltender who was quick and plainly skilled. That was Koch, and Brumm did not know she was a woman until his captain, Brian Cook, told him.

What followed was, by his own account, one of the few times in his life he did not know what to do. He worried about injury, about where she would change, about how good she actually was. None of it was a reason to cut her.

“She had done nothing to justify cutting her.”

Leonard “Oakie” Brumm, recalling the 1969 tryout in 2000

So he gave her a fair look, and she earned a spot. She also turned out to have a quality Brumm had not anticipated. Once word got out that the Iron Rangers had a woman in net, Brumm and the rest of the league saw the gate receipts coming. Goaltending was the position for daredevils, and crowds would travel to watch her. Brumm carried seventeen skaters and three goaltenders that season so there would be room for her, at forty dollars a game. No woman had ever been paid to play hockey before.

Koch told interviewers she loved the game enough that she would have played for free. She had tried to get into senior leagues repeatedly and been turned away every time.

The season took a toll. Her own teammates were not behind Brumm’s decision, and they called her names and needled her constantly, though Brumm noted that even the worst of them eventually came around. If that was the treatment from her own bench, the heckling from opposing rinks and the coverage in the press can be imagined. At one point she was taking tranquilizers before games to steady her nerves. She did not think of herself as a novelty act. She thought of herself as a goaltender.

Proving it took an exhibition game, filling in for Lunney, in which she stopped everything she faced. After that it moved quickly. Before a game in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, the Canadian Soo insisted she start, and the town’s mayor, a well-known former player, asked Brumm to let him take a penalty shot against her before the opening faceoff. Brumm agreed. The building filled. Koch stopped him cold, got a standing ovation, and the mayor was booed off the ice. She stopped ten of twelve shots in the first period and Marquette won 5–3, and nobody in the press wanted to talk about the score.

Everyone was getting what they wanted. Koch was being recognized for her goaltending rather than her gender, and the Iron Rangers were selling out buildings. Before a game in Green Bay later that season the auxiliary police had to be called in to handle the crowd, and Green Bay had phoned ahead to ask that she start.

Then came the part that ended it. Photographs of Koch from that season show stitches, scars, and black eyes. Brumm pushed her to wear a mask and more protective equipment. She refused, saying she saw better without one. Call it reckless or call it stubborn, but it became enough of a problem that Brumm released her with ten games left in the season.

The Iron Rangers won the USHL championship that year. Koch tried to keep playing in Canada and was eventually barred from men’s hockey. She earned a bachelor’s and a master’s in English literature from the University of Dayton, and holds a black belt in judo. Beyond that the record thins out, largely because she has wanted it to. She got as much limelight in 1969 as anyone could want and has lived quietly since.

The Hockey Life of Coach Leonard “Oakie” Brumm

Brumm could carry a post of his own, and in fairness he already wrote one himself. He was an army veteran who played tennis and hockey at the University of Michigan, founded the Kuwait National Hockey League, inspired a plot point in Slap Shot, served as athletic and recreation director at Marquette Branch Prison, wrote We Only Played Home Games, and coached the Iron Rangers. At the end of his life he was editing a hockey newspaper and coaching high school hockey while fighting pancreatic cancer.

He grew up in Marquette and spent most of his life building things there. With the Iron Rangers he worked constantly with Northern Michigan students, young men trying to sort out what came next. Inside the prison he worked with young men paying for decisions already made, and he started a hockey league for them, the Marquette Prison Pirates. The distance between those two benches is the thing people bring up whenever his name comes up in hockey circles.

Wherever he was and whatever he was doing, he found a way to use the game on the people around him. That is a better legacy than five championships.

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The Carlson Brothers

Jeff, Jack, and Steve Carlson spent the 1973–74 season together in Marquette under Brumm before working their way around the hockey circuit and, eventually, into a movie. Slap Shot turned them into the Hanson Brothers. Jeff and Steve played the parts modeled on themselves. Jack was in the WHA playoffs when filming started, so Dave Hanson, whose real surname the characters carry, took the third chair.

Away from Hollywood, each of them had a real career. Steve played 225 games in the WHA with the Whalers, Oilers, and Fighting Saints, and in the NHL with the Los Angeles Kings, and despite a few scattered fights he was regarded as a finesse player. Jack played in the WHA for the Fighting Saints, Oilers, and Whalers and in the NHL for the North Stars and Blues, and collected 1,111 penalty minutes doing it. Jeff had the shortest run of the three, with the Fighting Saints in the WHA and then minor league stops that included the Johnstown Jets, Mohawk Valley Comets, Phoenix Roadrunners, and Muskegon Mohawks.

Dave Hanson, the fourth Carlson, played for the Birmingham Bulls in the WHA and appeared for the Red Wings and North Stars in the NHL. Since 1977, Jeff and Steve Carlson and Dave Hanson have spent decades touring minor league rinks together, which is its own kind of career.

The Legacy of the Iron Rangers

Twelve seasons, five championships, and a building that predated the sport as a professional concern. The Iron Rangers hired the first woman ever paid to play hockey. They were run by a man who started leagues on two continents and inside a prison. They put three brothers on a roster who would go on to be the most quoted characters in hockey’s best movie. Call it shrewd promotion or call it luck, but a semi-pro club in the Upper Peninsula ended up touching more of hockey history than most franchises three times its size.

Sources

• Leonard Brumm, recollections published at marquetteironrangers.com (archived).
• Leonard Brumm, We Only Played Home Games.
• The Ice Garden, feature on Karen Koch.
• Hometown Hockey, “Leonard Brumm, Carlson Brothers” (2006).
• Wikipedia, Karen Koch.

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