That picture above includes my grandfather, Francis Gordon Mirtle, back in 1941. He was only 15 years old here, in jersey No. 16 for the local Saskatoon Bruins team.

(Gordie Howe actually played for them two years later. He’s No. 13 in this very similar looking photo.)

Born in 1926, between two World Wars that he was lucky enough to avoid fighting in, my grandfather — who went by Gordie but our family simply always called “Pops” — grew up on a farm in Saskatoon. He was the only son of a young Scottish immigrant named Henry Mirtle and his wife, Rose.

Pops didn’t grow up with much. I remember he once explained he left home as a teenager because he could make more than his father, thanks to his athletic talent. He showed a lot of early promise as a hockey player, so much so that he began playing pro before he would have finished high school.

I had heard bits and pieces of stories about Pops’ playing career growing up, and how he had left it behind to work on the railway in Kamloops, where my father and his three siblings (and later me) grew up. Mostly, the stories were about senior leagues and a cup of coffee in California, which is all that really shows in his HockeyDB entry.

What I never realized was just how close Pops had gotten to the big leagues.

Two weeks ago, Ralph Slate from HockeyDB contacted me saying he had found my grandfather in an old Philadelphia Falcons program. Slate does all kinds of historical research as part of his website and is a wonderful source of knowledge on all those old leagues.

Lately, he has been digging deeper and deeper, completing some of the oldest entries on his site, including “Gord Mirtle.”

In this case, the Falcons played in what was known as the EAHL, or Eastern Amateur Hockey League, which was one of the many hardscrabble leagues a rung below the Original Six NHL. According to the Society for International Hockey Research, Pops played seven games for the Falcons when he was 17 years old, not that long after that picture with the Saskatoon Bruins was taken.

That’s the most complete hockey bio I have ever seen for Pops’ career — and it’s full of gaps and weird, defunct teams. (Hollywood Wolves?) But Slate mentioning him appearing in an EAHL program didn’t surprise me.

Here’s what it said:

I thanked Slate for sending it to me and added off hand: “What I’d love to find is something from his NHL training camps.”

I wasn’t expecting much because I had looked in the past and had come up empty. I was never sure if Pops getting close to making the NHL was simply a family myth.

I didn’t even know Pops attended NHL training camps until I was in my late 20s. He didn’t talk about it much. I think in his mind he had been a failure because so many of his friends and acquaintances had made it and he did not.

But when I started covering the NHL at The Globe and Mail, my name was mentioned on Hockey Night in Canada a couple times. My grandfather watched those games without fail on Saturdays, from start to end. The fact a Mirtle was being mentioned on the air, by Ron MacLean, made a big impression on him. He was clearly very proud.

Pops was then in his 80s and his health was failing, including his eyesight, which robbed him of his ability to watch hockey. But he would still sit there in an armchair, listening. That was when he started to open up about his playing career, when I would go home to Kamloops at Christmas.

In particular, I remember he once talked about trying to make the Blackhawks, when he was very young. He made it sound like it was going into battle. He believed that his size — he was only 5-foot-9 and 150 pounds, he said — was what held him back.

I never knew more about it than that.

To my surprise, though, Slate was able to unearth several newspapers articles that told more of the story. They also showed that Pops was one of the final cuts from the 1944-45 Blackhawks team.

In fact, the front page of the Chicago Tribune on Oct. 13, 1944, had Gordon Mirtle penciled in as the Blackhawks potential fourth-line left winger on opening night, which was set for Oct. 29 at the old Chicago Stadium.

Against the Maple Leafs, of all teams.

Back then, the roster size limit for games was 14 — which typically meant three forward lines, four defencemen and a goalie. So even if Pops was on the fourth line, he likely wouldn’t have been in the lineup.

But it appeared, at least to the Tribune‘s sportswriter, that he had a very good chance of making the team as one of the reserves:

(The ages in these old articles are all over the place. Pops would have been 18 at this point, not 19.)

The Blackhawks training camp that year took place in Hibbing, Minnesota — which is Bob Dylan’s hometown. That area, known as the Iron Range, is somewhat remote: three hours north of Minneapolis but a nine-hour drive from Chicago and 13 from Saskatoon.

Chicago was coming off an appearance in the Stanley Cup final the previous spring: They were pounded in a four-game sweep by the Habs. But 1944-45 was not going to be nearly as kind.

Coach Paul Thompson — a long-time Blackhawks player — lost his job one game into the season, an NHL record that I’m guessing will never be matched. Johnny Gottselig took over (after making the roster out of camp and playing one game) and they won just 13 of 50 games all season, missing the playoffs.

Amazingly they were better than the Rangers, who managed only 11 wins.

The Blackhawks’ biggest problem was they couldn’t score, perhaps in part due to Thompson’s insistence on size and toughness. He dedicated some of that training camp to beating the tar out of his smaller players, especially the new rookies trying to make the team. It was an odd mandate given pint-sized Bill Mosienko — who still holds the NHL record for fastest hat trick — was the team’s superstar.

But the old articles back up what Pops used to say about just how tough it was in an NHL training camp.

In the beginning, Thompson and his veteran players were fond of their skilled rookies, including Gordon Mirtle, who got some good early press in the Tribune:



That good old pony express line! (Hockey needs to bring back names like Mush March, as soon as possible.)

And poor Al Papike. There sure was a lot of focus on weight at this camp. No wonder Pops was talking about it 65 years later.

Two days later, it was reported that some of the other rookies would be headed home. But coach Thompson was still spending “considerable time” working with Beach, Mirtle and Belbin to see if they had what it took to make the team:

The next mention of Pops that I could find in the press, however, wasn’t good.

Twelve days after getting some extra work in with the coach, and four days after appearing on the front of the Tribune in the “opening night” lineup story, he was cut. It was apparently the result of a particularly nasty Thompson practice:

Gordie Mirtle.

World War II had a massive impact on NHL rosters at the time. Several star players weren’t allowed to cross the border due to National War Labor Board restrictions. Not having Bentley (their captain and a future Hall of Famer) and Allen for an entire season certainly contributed to the Blackhawks plummeting in the standings.

It was always incredibly hard to make the Original Six league, given how few teams there were and how small rosters were, but my grandfather was fortunate in that he was too young to be shipped overseas to fight but old enough to play pro hockey. He was fortunate he could get over the border. He was fortunate to play the same position as Bentley and Allen, too. That almost opened a spot.

Alas, he didn’t quite make it. And, as far as I can tell, he didn’t get another glorious chance at an NHL camp.

Pops ended up spending most of that 1944-45 season in California in the Pacific Coast Hockey League. I’m sure he saw a lot of interesting things there, in the ‘40s, in the infancy of hockey in the western U.S., but he never talked about it.

He played another six years of pro and senior league hockey before retiring in 1951, at 25 years old. My dad was born the next year. (Pops never put him in minor hockey.)

It was interesting, reading through the old clippings, to contemplate what could have been, if he had stuck on as a bottom-of-the-roster player in Chicago. The money back then wasn’t life changing. There were no guarantees of a long career, either. It’s too bad he passed away five years ago or I could have shown him all this and learned more about what it was like.

It’s possible everything could have turned out differently, had he made the team. Maybe he never would have met my grandmother in Vancouver, in 1946? Maybe he wouldn’t have settled in B.C. and had a large family and long career riding the rails?

I never knew how close that was to happening, until I saw these stories.

***

I reached out to the Chicago Blackhawks, the Hockey Hall of Fame and the Tribune for photos or documentation from that 1944 training camp, but they weren’t able to come up with any. If you know of a good source for very old hockey artifacts like this, I’d be interested in hearing about it.

My thanks to Ralph Slate from HockeyDB, Adam Rogowin with the Blackhawks and Craig Campbell at the HHOF for their help with this story.

Below is one of the few team photos of the 1944-45 Blackhawks I was able to find online: