Thursday, May 03, 2018

 

Sixty years ago, Mighty Macs ruled Canadian senior hockey





By Paul Svoboda, The Intelligencer









Belleville went bonkers.
Sixty years ago today — May 1, 1958 — the city's senior hockey club, the McFarlands, captured the Allan Cup as national champions and with it, a ticket to Czechoslovakia for the 1959 world championships, which they would also win.
Down 3-1 in the best-of-seven Allan Cup final against the Kelowna Packers, with the entire series played in the Okanagan valley town, the Mighty Macs battled back with three straight wins to claim Canadian senior hockey supremacy. Game 7 ended 8-5 in favour of the MacFarlands and loyal Belleville fans, listening back home on radio, went nuts.
Days later, when the team returned home via cross-Canada train, the lead headline on the front page of The Intelligencer proclaimed: “Fifty thousand welcome Macs home.”
Wearing cowboy hats, which they'd picked up during a stopover in Calgary, the Macs were thrown a victory parade unlike anything Belleville had ever experienced before. Riding in convertibles, players and team officials waved and cheered and hollered along with what appeared to be twice the population of Belleville at that time, all crammed downtown and seemingly delirious with joy.
"Never in the history of this city has Front Street rocked and rolled to the acclaim of thousands,” read The Intelligencer story. “People stood in some places 10 deep, cheering and waving as the motorcade went by.”
Macs goaltender, Gordie Bell, was especially moved by the outpouring of love from Belleville's hockey faithful.
"I think this is the most wonderful reception I've ever experienced,” Bell told The Intelligencer. “I'm very glad we won because I would hate to lose and have to come back and face such a swell bunch of people.”
Team owner, Harvey McFarland, simply called it “the proudest moment of my life.”
Reporter Denny Boyd saluted the Macs and their stunning comeback with these words in a story that appeared in the Vancouver Sun after the Allan Cup final:
"Those Macs, a rag-tag Senior B team two years ago, used courage for a crutch as they plodded up what seemed an insurmountable hill to become the senior amateur hockey champions of Canada. Thursday night, they reached the summit. They defeated the Packers 8-5 with a defeat-defying rally that shook the blossoms of fruit trees for miles around.”
May 1, 1958. A date never to be forgotten in Belleville. The day the city ruled Canadian senior hockey.
Belleville McFarlands 1958 Allan Cup national championship roster: Eddie Marineau, Jean-Paul Payette, Wayne (Weiner) Brown, Barton Bradley, Keith MacDonald, Lionel Botly, Armand (Bep) Guidolin, Joe Lepine, Keith Montgomery, Davey Jones, Donald (Turk) Barclay, Floyd Crawford (captain), John Muretich, Gordie Bell, Maurice (Moe) Benoit, Russell Kowalchuk, Gerry Goyer, Hilary (Minnie) Menard, Ike Hildebrand (player-coach), Drury Denyes (manager) and Arthur Charlton (trainer).
NEED TO KNOW: The 1958 McFarlands were inducted into the Belleville Sports Hall of Fame in 1989.



Minnie Menard

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