one hundred years of GALT ARENA GARDENS
TIME CAPSULE TO A CENTURY
by David Menary
Most biographers of Gordie Howe, Terry Sawchuk and Bobby Hull pay scant attention to them having played junior hockey in Galt (now Cambridge), Ontario.
All three are hockey icons, known throughout the hockey world as among the very best to have ever played the game.
Nor are they inclined to mention the arena they played and practiced in, Galt Arena Gardens. But the names are remembered in Cambridge. And so too is the name of Hilda Ranscombe, who was the heart and should of the famed Preston Rivulettes ladies hockey team. Like Howe, Hull and Sawchuck, she too played at Galt Arena during the 1930s. And like the better-known male hockey stars, she was regarded as the finest female hockey player of her era, and by some, as the best to ever play the game.
Also known as the Shade Street Arena, Galt’s rink was essentially completed by the end of 1921, in time for the home-opener on January 20, 1922, when the Galt Intermediates, reigning Ontario champions, hosted the nearby Preston club. In the pone hundred years since that night, Galt Arena, despite some difficult times, has gained prestige with the years.
Nearly 4,000 spectators crammed into the arena on that cold January night one hundred years ago to watch the hometown Galt Terriers defeat Preston 5-0. Howe had yet to be born; instead, there were other superstars playing that night, including Normie Himes. And Galt's coach, Percy LeSueur, was a former goalie who gained induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1961 and became known to later generations as one of the original members of Hockey Night in Canada's 'Hot Stove League" panel. But on that cold wintry night in 1922, Galt arena was a star unto itself, the pride and joy of a small industrial southwestern community. In general appearance, it was similar to the “Arena” in Ottawa, where Galt played twice for the Stanley Cup a decade earlier.
In those days the Temperance Society had succeeded in removing alcoholic beverages from the hotels in Galt, claiming alcohol was not good for Galtonians, recalled Bill Vrooman, who played on early Galt teams that played out of the Queen's Square rink, Galt' Arena's predecessor. During one game a decade before Galt Arena opened, a game which pitted the Galt Pro Hockey Club, champions of the Ontario league in 1911, against the famed Ottawa squad, an Ottawa player charged a Galt player and bolted him almost out of the Queen's Square Arena. Yet when Galt challenged Ottawa for the Stanley Cup--they did this twice; in January 1910 and March 1911--it was Galt that was the rougher team.
The old Queen's Square arena, built in 1887, was another place, another time. At one game, an irate Galt fan clenched his fists and threatened the star player for the visiting Ottawa squad, Newsy Lalonde: "If I ever get close enough to you I'll punch you in the f…ing nose," the Galt supporter hollered. Lalonde was dating a pretty Galt girl at the time and after the game he escorted her home only to meet the girl's brother for the first time. It was the same guy who had threatened Lalonde. By then, cooler heads prevailed.
Who was the driving force behind the new Galt Arena Gardens? Galt businessman W.W. Wilkinson formed the Galt Arena Company, a private enterprise comprising public-minded citizens intent on building a modern arena.
Wilkinson and the GAAA stepped forward to build the city a decent arena, especially given the success of the Galt Intermediates, OHA champions from 1921—the existing Queen’s Square arena, built in 1887, had limited seating and a small ice surface, though not as small as the arena in nearby Ayr.
The Ayr arena and building could fit in its entirety on the ice surface of the Queen’s Square rink, and the Queen’s Square building and ice surface, in turn, could fit onto the new ice surface of the Galt Arena. Bodley, who had been born in England and was the son of the distinguished British architect George Frederick Bodley (1827-1907), was responsible for several other arenas, notably Brantford’s 3500-seat Arctic Arena and Fort Erie’s 5,000-seat Peace Bridge Arena (1928). He was also the architect behind the PUC building at the corner of Dickson and Wellington streets in Galt.
At the time, Himes, who would later become a golf pro in the summers, was the team's star and one of the top athletes in the region. He went on to a standout career in the NHL with the New York Americans where he hob-robbed with friends like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Still later he went on to coach the Galt Junior Red Wings and the Galt Junior Black Hawks in the 1940s and 1950s after his playing days were done. When he died, King Clancy and host of other former players were at the funeral at Galt's Knox Presbyterian Church.
Local hockey collector Randy Faist, who treasures a picture of him with King Clancy, a friend and former opponent of Himes, made history of sorts, given that the photo is likely the last ever taken of Clancy; Clancy died shortly afterward. That photograph was likely the last one ever taken of King; it was, in a way, a link with Himes and a long-gone era just after the Great War when Galt Arena opened.
Future NHL star Carl Liscombe, who snuck into the arena for the opening game at Galt Arena the he was a youngster, lived to the west of the rink on Beverly Street, across Mill Creek, which ran through Soper Park and under the back corner of the arena; the creek continued through downtown Galt to the Grand River. Just down the street from the arena was the old mill pond where Galt children played shinny in the early days of the community from at least the 1860s on, and likely long before that.
MOUNT VIEW: Galt's Garden Cemetery
by David Menary
Mount View Cemetery, off Blenheim Road, was designed by the English-born and raised landscape gardener Henry Wyatt between 1869-70. Wyatt was engaged by the town of Galt to design a “garden cemetery,” on the heavily-treed lot in an area west of town known as Dickson’s Bush.
Today it’s an area that has remained largely unchanged in general appearance for more than 100 years.
The cemetery and mausoleum contain some of Galt's most prominent early residents, as does the adjacent Trinity Anglican Cemetery, which can be accessed off Blenheim Road.
The city has an impressive pedigree of the wealthy and notable, with connections to the Seagrams, the Wilks and Astors of New York, and to the Masseys of Toronto, among others. This elite, which included the Dickson family, was responsible for what is now the West Galt heritage district known as Dickson Hill, and its two west-side cemeteries and Victoria Park, which collectively staked out a Victorian-era green belt that held firm when the city grew around it.
Two of the most visited gravestones at Mount View are those of Toronto Maple Leaf legend Syl Apps and schoolteacher Milicent Miroy.
Apps, whose roots in nearby Paris, and indeed, in Galt, where his grandparents--the Wrigleys--lived, go deep; he returned to familiar territory in the late fall of 1936 when he was invited to his first Toronto Maple Leaf training camp in this southwestern Ontario city.
Two years earlier, in 1934, the Leafs held their training camp in Preston (dryland) and Galt (on ice). They stayed at the Preston Springs Hotel (formerly the Hotel Del Monte).
Years later Apps and his wife were buried in the family plot at Mount View, but in the years between his first training camp and 1998, when he died, Apps carved out one of hockeys most legendary NHL careers.
Not far from the Apps grave is that if Millicent Millroy. Her gravestone holds the distinction of being the most-visited grave at the cemetery. She was a single schoolteacher when she was purported to have met the visiting Edward, Prince of Wales in 1919.
Mount View's stories are both factual and fictional, as Milroy's stone reveals. On her stone is an inscription saying she was the wife of Edward, later the King of England until his abdication to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.
Milroy was a single and attractive young schoolteacher when Edward officially visited Galt in 1919. She claimed to have had a tryst in 1919—resulting in a secret marriage—with the Duke of Windsor. At her death, Alan Ferris of the Guelph Daily Mercury (Oct. 16, 1985) wrote: "Area woman takes answer to mystery with her to grave." Milroy, who died in 1985 at 95, was born at Galt and claimed her secret marriage took place in Western Canada. A respected schoolteacher for 35 years, she was described as private and quiet.
Yes, Edward was a well-known ladies' man, whose trysts have become the stuff of legend. But there is no documented proof that the two ever married. Years ago, when I worked for the Cambridge Reporter, the newspaper had a room called "The Morgue," where past issues of the paper going back to its beginning, were housed. The room also held important photographs, including, according to the late Bob Green, himself a former reporter at the paper, a photograph showing the prince in Galt at some official function. At the far end of the photograph was Millicent Milroy, the only known evidence that can place the two at the same place and time.
Prince Edward visited Galt during his royal tour of Canada in the fall of 1919.
Both Mount View and Trinity offer insight into Galt's history. At Trinity can be found town co-founder Absalom Shade's grave, as well as the Dickson family plot, where William Dickson's granddaughter Florence, is buried, among other members of the family. Florence was largely responsible for the layout and character of the Dickson Hill subdivision. Unlike Shade, William Dickson is buried at St. Mark's Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake, where he lived most of his adult life.
Trinity is more of a traditional church cemetery, though situated not beside the church but within easy walking distance. Mount View was Galt's answer to the growing proliferation of Garden cemeteries, where layout, landscaping and gardening were important so that visitors could reflect on the departed in an appealing setting.
Wyatt, the man town councillor James Warnock selected to head the creation of the town's new cemetery, was from an esteemed English family noted for their background in architectural and landscape gardening. By the 1860s Wyatt was living in what is now present-day Burlington.
Warnock, one of Galt's leading citizens and father of writer Amelia Beers Warnock—she wrote under the pen name Katherine Hale—was one of Galt's leading citizens and the owner of a thriving hardware business and a large textile manufacturing company; with Wyatt, he was the man responsible for Mount View Cemetery, as well as the avenue of trees leading to both cemeteries, lining Blenheim Road.
Just as one can walk through the years from Trinity to Mount View, experiencing cemetery evolution first-hand, a walk-through, within Mount View itself, reveals its evolution during the twenty-first century. The old section of Mount View shows its ties to the nineteenth century; the newer section to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Not far away, Dickson Park was named after its donor family, the Dicksons, while Shade contributed substantially to Trinity Anglican Church and cemetery, as did Katherine Langdon Wilks, a descendant of John Jacob Astor, and James Young, whose family donated the Young Memorial Chapel which straddles Trinity and Mount View Cemeteries.
david menary artwork
Galt Arena has been called the oldest continuously-operating hockey arena in North America, if not the world. But Stratford's arena—the William Allman Arena—built two years after Galt Arena, has also claimed the distinction. Yet Galt Arena never lost a hockey season despite the massive renovation it underwent in 1996.
Another arena in Calumet, Michigan--there are others--stakes a similar claim. One man who had a connection to both Galt Arena and the Calumet arena, Detroit Red Wings' legendary manager Jack Adams, once played at the Calumet rink.
Adams, who served overseas with the Canadian army during the First World War, left his home town of Fort William (Thunder Bay) to play hockey in Calumet, eventually working his way up to the Toronto Arenas in 1917-18.
Galt Arena is evidently the oldest in Canada and stands its ground with any others in North America, though the Matthews Arena in Boston is technically older (1910), but like the arena in Calumet, which served as an American Legion for many years, it has experienced significant periods of downtime due to fires and reconstruction. Another old arena, the Hobey Baker Memorial rink in Princeton, N.J., opened January 5, 1923, almost a year after Galt Arena.
Other stadiums of note from that era include the Rose Bowl, built the same year as Galt Arena, and Soldier Field in Chicago, which was built in 1924. Each of these venues and stadiums offers history buffs a rare opportunity to walk back in time.
In addition to being home away from home for many juniors like Howe, Sawchuk and Hull, Galt Arena was the home rink on many occasions for Hilda Ranscombe and the famed Preston Rivulettes, who played many of their playoff games at Galt Arena during the 1930s, a decade in which they dominated women’ hockey in Canada.
During the Rivulettes’ reign, and midway through the Depression, in the fall of 1934, the Toronto Maple Leafs came to Galt Arena for their training camp; players stayed at the Preston Springs Hotel (the former Del Monte Hotel) and walked to nearby Riverside Park for dryland training.
They returned to Galt Arena after Syl Apps joined the Leafs in 1936, fresh from the Berlin Olympics—he won gold in the pole vault at the 1934 British Empire Games. Also competing in those Olympics was Preston distance runner Scotty Rankine. A decade later, when Sault Ste. Marie native Marty Pavelich played for the Galt Jr. A Red Wings, he lived close to Canadian marathon champion Ab Morton and would often see Morton and Rankine running through Soper Park. For Apps, who spent a lot of time in Galt with his grandparents, the Wrigleys--Apps and his wife are buried at Galt's Mount View Cemetery--he counted Galt's Lex Chisholm as his linemate with the Leafs at one time. Chisholm's best playing years were taken by war service.
Known by many locals as Soper Park Arena, or Shade Street Arena, Galt Arena is a place of memory for generations of fans and athletes, and though hockey has been its bread and butter for the last century, the pedigree of athletes who have known this arena, in sports other than hockey, is surprising given that the arena is relatively unknown beyond southern Ontario. One of the earliest skaters to train at Galt Arena was speed skater and barrel jumper Harris Legg.
small Town, big names
tIn 1944–the year Marty Pavelich, Lee Fogolin and Gordie Howe were with the Galt Junior A Red Wings—fire broke out at the arena and firefighters were called one evening at 8:25 p.m. They narrowly averted a catastrophe, saving the arena.
Howe’s connection with Galt Arena spanned one hockey season, beginning in the fall of 1944 and concluding in the Spring of 1945 when the war was coming to an end. On VE Day Howe worked a full day at Galt Metal and then joined in a road hockey game with local kids, one of whom was Herb Morton, an avid young athlete who, a few short years later, served in Canada’s Navy during the Korean War. On the same day, Scott shoe, where Pavelich worked, as did Sam Collard, whose sister Beatrice, was a chaperone with the Rivulettes, was let out early as the celebration overflowed out onto city streets. The long war had come to an end in Europe and people were in a celebratory mood.
Decades later, when touring Galt Arena before its major renovation in 1996-97, Howe recalled having to duck to go from the player’s bench to the dressing room under the stands. Another arena that Brantford architect Frederick Charles Bodley designed had a similar quirk; Brantford’s 3,500 seat Arctic Arena was built a handful of years later, and notably had boards that were exceptionally tall.
The British born and educated Bodley met and married a Brantford woman, Lil, and over the ensuing four decades, designed many of Brantford’s schools as well as another arena, the 5,000-seat Peace Bridge Arena in Fort Erie; built in 1928, it served not only the Fort Erie community, but Buffalo hockey as well.
Hiring the British born and educated Bodley to build Galt’s arena followed the hiring by Galt town council, a half-century earlier, of a British-born landscape gardener, Henry Wyatt—himself from one of Britain’s most distinguished family architectural dynasties—to design the new Garden cemetery on Galt’s western hill known today as Mount View Cemetery where, notably, Apps and Normie Himes are buried. Also buried there, in the mausoleum, is Reid "Speedy" Oliver, Himes' teammate who scored the first goal at Galt Arena.
Although the hockey notables who grew up in Galt or played junior hockey there comprise a long list, other behind-the-scenes characters have also epitomized the arena from its earliest days. By the time Len Gaudette took over as Galt Arena’s manager in the mid-1950s, the NHL’s Blackhawks had pulled their sponsorship of Junior hockey in Galt. The Black Hawks followed the Red Wings as sponsors of Jr. A hockey in Galt. Gaudette was instrumental in the birth of the Senior Galt Terriers, and when they folded following their 1961 Allan Cup and 1962 silver medal at the World Hockey Championships, he helped champion the birth of the Galt Senior A Hornets, being aided by local hockey legend Bill ‘Wiggie’ Wylie and a few Galt businessmen such as Jack Scott and John Pinchen.
For many, there was another name closely associated with Galt Arena: Toots Last. A few decades after Howe’s year at Galt Arena, his sons Mark and Marty were playing in the nearby Hespeler Minor Hockey Olympics—Hespeler and Preston amalgamated with Galt in 1973 to form Cambridge. Toots was a fixture not only with the Junior A teams and players in the forties and fifties, but years later with the Allan Cup champion Terriers and Galt Hornets.
When Howe returned to Galt Arena in the late 1990s the arena had undergone a massive renovation after the public lobbied to save the old place.It was the first time he’d ever been in Galt Arena when he didn’t have to duck to get into the dressing room under the stands.
For decades it was reported that Howe never played a regulation game at Galt Arena Gardens with the Galt Junior A Red Wings, but the Galt Reporter, local newspaper of record and Canada’s oldest operating newspaper when it was closed by Torstar Corporation September 19, 2003, told a different tale.Howe, in fact, did play in the home-opener on Saturday, November 18, 1944 before a crowd of 1,848 at Galt Arena when the Red Wings hosted Hamilton, scoring a goal and adding an assist on a Terry Cavanagh goal.
If Galt’s newspaper was Canada’s oldest in the year of its demise, Galt Arena Gardens is itself purported to be Canada’s oldest continuously-operating arena and one of the oldest—if not the oldest—hockey arena in the world. Aside from Himes, who played in the old Boston Arena (now Matthews Arena) when the Americans visited Boston, two other hockey players are known to have played in both arenas. One was Jim Martel, a record-setting Division 1 hockey and baseball star at Northeastern University and later, a member of the Cambridge Hornets Sr. A team. He played at both arenas for several seasons. The other player who played in both arenas was Pavelich, who played at the Matthews Arena at least once, when the Garden was not available to the hometown Bruins. As a result, they had to host the visiting Detroit Red Wings at the Matthews Arena. Whereas Martel went from Matthews to Galt Arena, Pavelich went from Galt Arena to the Matthews Arena.
That previously-mentioned third arena that enters the conversation as among the oldest, along with the Matthews Arena and Galt Arena, is the 700-seat Calumet Colosseum Ice Rink in Calumet, Michigan. Pavelich is familiar with that rink , passing by it on his way back from Detroit to his hometown of Sault Ste. Marie. It was built eight years before Galt Arena, having opened on January 1, 1914; it has been in use since then—though not always as an arena—and is billed as the oldest operating continuous-use ice rink in North America, and perhaps the world.
Learn More
Clockwise, from top left: Gordie Howe, Bill Curik, Joe Krmpotich, Lee Fogolin, Terry Cavanagh, Elwood Small (middle), Marty Pavelich, Raymond ‘Frenchy’ Mayer and Joe Brklacich. The players were out for a walk around town and stopped in front of Canada Bread.
Howe, Fogolin and Pavelich went on to NHL careers while Cavanagh became mayor of Edmonton. Cavanagh died in 2017. Only Pavelich, Howe, Fogolin and Sawchuck made it to the NHL from those Junior Red Wings teams. Another member of the Galt team, Freddy Glover, was a tremendous American Hockey League player.
MEETING HER HERO
Legg had access to the arena on Sundays, a day when Galt was virtually shut down. In 1956, when the Canadian Figure Skating Championships were held at Galt Arena, figure skater Linda Ward was a starry-eyed eight year old who idolized young Donald Jackson, then competing as a junior.
In 1963, after gruelling years of practice at Galt Arena, Ward and her pairs partner, Neil Carpenter, won the Canadian Junior Pairs championship and competed at the Worlds in Cortina, Italy—the last world figure skating championships held on outdoor ice—and Jackson presented his young admirer with an enlarged portrait of the photo taken six years earlier in Galt.
The place resonates not only for Carpenter and Ward, but for several Galt hockey players such as the late Don Rope, who competed at the 1956 Winter Olympics on the same ice the figure skaters would compete on a few years later.
Eight-year-old Linda Ward greets her hero, Don Jackson, during the 1956 Canadian Championships.
A Long history
On January 6, 1973, just months after the Summit Series, the Cambridge Hornets hosted Moscow Dynamo at Galt Arena. Egoff, born in 1918, knew Galt Arena when it was in its infancy. And like Egoff’s family who moved to Galt from Maine, so too did the Legg family come to Galt from New England early in the twentieth century. Galt was an industrial powerhouse; soon the Legg youngsters Harris and Mildred were skating on the frozen Grand River and frequenting the newly-built Galt Arena, becoming champion speed skaters. When he retired he was invited to return to his home town, and Galt Arena, for the annual ice skating show in 1957.
Years earlier his father, George, had sharpened skates for the visiting Leaf players, who preferred his sharpening to that of Abbie Kilgour’s at the arena. For Legg, it was the only sour note he ever experienced in connection with Galt Arena. Years later, at age 70, Legg, who served on the organizing committee for the Squaw Valley Olympics in 1960 in which Rope competed, rode his bicycle from his home in San Rafael, California—he owned two ice rinks in San Francisco by then—to Galt, visiting the old arena.Other buildings had not survived but Galt Arena was still standing.
Dr. Soper, after whom the park adjacent to the arena is named, and whose home looked down on the park and the arena, had nothing but praise for its architectural aesthetics. Said Soper: “…Galt Arena is one of the boldest and most effective of recently constructed public buildings.” Far from appearing barn-like, as most large buildings at the time were, we have in this case a fairly sumptuous architectural style which gives it a rather pleasing effect without interfering in any way with the practical requirements of the interior.”
By the early 1990s, long after Brantford’s Arctic Arena had closed, there was much discussion about the future of Galt Arena Gardens. John Muckler, one of the architects of the Edmonton Oiler dynasty, who once played at Galt Arena for the Galt Junior A Black Hawks, was surprised to hear, in the early 1990s, that Galt Arena hadn’t yet been demolished.
In addition to Legg, the arena had spawned such Olympic medalists as Derrick Campbell and Cindy and Kevin Overland (Crocket), who got their start at the arena and spent many hours there, all the way up to the time they made the national team. For retired dentist Dave Ridsdale, wrestling was a big part of the aura of Galt Arena Gardens in the middle of the twentieth century, but he also fondly remembered his days as a kid playing hockey there.
Galt Arena had artificial ice installed in 1929, and this meant ice conditions were generally pretty good, but in one game at Woodstock, Ridsdale recalled his teammate, John Reid, trying to retrieve a puck, still in play, that was stuck in a puddle on the ice.Eddy Martin—“Lucky Eddy” they called him—was once treated to a night out for a hockey game at Galt Arena after having just recovered from some misfortunes.
Eddy boarded with Alex “Sandy” Ford on Beverley Street, just out behind Galt Arena where Liscombe once lived.Olympic champion Barbara Ann Scott, who was once linked romantically to Howe by enthusiastic publicists—they were, in fact, friends and mutual admirers—put on a special performance at Galt Arena the year Howe made his NHL debut.
Years later she reminisced about Galt Arena when she attended and spoke at the G.O.A.L Gala Fund Raising Dinner at the Hespeler Arena. Just four years after Galt’s Junior A hockey days came to an end, one of Scott’s British ice skating show colleagues, Len Gaudette, came to Galt Arena as the new manager when Albert Lamond retired. Gaudette, who became the general manager for the Galt Terriers senior hockey club, played the villainous Black Eagle in Scott’s show before going to Switzerland to play hockey.
In 1952 he returned to Canada and became arena manager in various towns such as Lucan, Aylmer and Trenton, before arriving in Galt. Along the way he took numerous arena, recreation and refrigeration courses, but it was his hockey know-how and organizational ability that played a major part in bringing hockey back to Galt when the Terriers were first organized on June 18th, 1959. Soon after he arrived in Galt he solved a lingering problem at the arena. Women were writing crude remarks on the washroom walls in red lipstick. Gaudette’s solution? Paint the womens’ washroom lipstick red.
Gaudette brought country star Patsy Cline to Galt Arena on May 7, 1962, along with Cowboy Copas, Bill Anderson, Roy Drusky and The Chapparells, just months before she was killed in a plane crash.
Galt Arena continued to host other events, such as the Garden Brothers Circus, and wrestling, including stalwarts Whipper Billy Watson and Lord Athol Layton, as well as motorcycle racing and boxing.
Several years before Gaudette arrived, the Galt Figure Skating Club had formed, and when he appeared on the scene, in addition to his many other arena duties, he performed a clown act for the club. During the Leaf practices at Galt Arena, arena worker Tink Clark stood out. “Spread out before us like the players on…(a) tabletop hockey game, were the Leafs, including Syl Apps, Dit Clapper, Gordie Drillon, Red Horner and Turk Broda—names that Foster Hewitt hollered at us all winter,” wrote Bob Green.
Brantford architect Frederick Charles Bodley‘s Galt Arena as it looked in January, 1922. Photo credi
A place of memories and dreams
Two decades later Lillie, a member of the Hornets organization, would be in Galt Arena’s gondola, like Hewitt at Maple Leaf Gardens, calling Galt Hornet games as they chased the Allan Cup.
During reconstruction of the arena in 1997, the arena never lost a hockey season. Were it not for that seemingly small fact, which architect Patrick Simmons said presented challenges, Galt Arena would not be able to claim it is the oldest continuously-operating hockey arena in North America. Although it was true that Cambridge residents in the mid-1990s cried out for new facilities, the public overwhelmingly wanted Galt Arena Gardens saved.
Memories of the school skating races were among the reasons why.Galt Arena manager Dean Bevan remembered taking part in the races as a child at Lincoln Avenue School.Campbell, who trained for years at Galt Arena, would go on to become world champion and win a short track relay gold at the Nagano Olympics in 1996. Famed pairs figure skating coach Kerry Leitch, who coached several national champions and was a close personal friend of Barbara Ann Scott, never competed in the Skating Races, but knew Galt Arena well. He came regularly by train from Woodstock as a 14-year-old to train in Galt with Galt Figure Skating Club coach Alex Fulton, and later, with Felix Kasper.
It was the same train that, memorably, took Galt Black Hawks Junior A players Pete Conacher, Tony Poeta and Kenny Wharram on the overnight trip to Chicago Stadium where they played their first games in the NHL.So it was not surprising that hockey players and figure skaters would often square off at the old arena in the 1950s and early 1960s to see who the fastest skaters were.
Seeing who the fastest skater is has always been contested on every pond and rink in Canada, from the days in the 1860s when local Galt boys tied on skates and played shinny on the frozen Mill Creek pond at the top of Main Street, just down Shade Street from where Galt Arena was later built.There is something that binds together many of the people and young athletes who knew Galt Arena in their prime. For most, their Galt Arena days were coming-of-age years, times that loom large even after the passage of decades.
Today Galt Arena Gardens is home to the Cambridge Redhawks Junior B team of the Greater Ontario Junior Hockey league (GOJHL), one of the top developmental leagues in North America.In recent times COVID meant the arena was closed for almost two years; when the arena re-opened for public skating on November 1, 2021, one of the first skaters back was Glenda Livingstone, a transplanted Newfoundlander who arrived in the newly-created city of Cambridge in 1973. For generations of young and old alike, Galt Arena was, and still is, the best rink in the world.
Galt photographer Elliott Law captured Harris Legg jumping barrels on the frozen Grand River in the
Normie Himes
Wiggie Wylie and Toots Last
Normie Himes
Normie Himes played in the first game at Galt Arena.
Gordie Howe
Wiggie Wylie and Toots Last
Normie Himes
In front of Galt Arena during a visit in July, 1993.
Wiggie Wylie and Toots Last
Wiggie Wylie and Toots Last
Wiggie Wylie and Toots Last
In the dressing room under the stands, circa 1970.