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).
Minnie Menard
# posted by James Hurst @ 5:19 AM 
