FIFTEEN

APRIL 15, 1952

The Red Wings win the Stanley Cup, the first team ever to achieve a clean sweep of the postseason. The team is dominated by the core group of players known as “The Production Line,” but sputters to a halt when the team trades Ted Lindsay in retaliation for his efforts to establish a players union. Since Detroit is one of America’s preeminent union towns, the defeat is particularly bitter.

It was the opening day of the baseball season, and the Detroit Free Press devoted an entire page to the Tigers’ prospects. Tucked away on the following page was a small story about game 4 of the Stanley Cup, to be played that evening at Olympia. The hockey match turned out to be the more memorable event by far. Metro Prystai, a Canadian with Ukrainian ancestry, scored the first goal after six minutes and fifty seconds. Glen Skov, a Canadian of Danish ancestry, scored again in the second period, and Prystai completed the win with a third goal in the third period. The Red Wings had swept the Montreal Canadiens, winning all four games. Having done the same to the Toronto Maple Leafs in the semifinals, the Red Wings became the first team to sweep the postseason, a feat only ever repeated by the Montreal Canadiens in 1960.1

Hockey is played by teams of six players, one goaltender, two defensemen, and three forwards. The three forwards, playing at center, left wing, and right wing, form “the line,” and the Red Wings’ most famous one consisted of Sid Abel at center, Ted Lindsay on the left, and Gordie Howe on the right. In an homage to Detroit’s industrial identity, the three, who had started to play together in 1947–48, were christened “The Production Line,” and even though they did not score in game 4—the team rotated through three different lines—no one doubted that those three were the source of the Red Wings’ dominance.2

Sid Abel was the team captain, though Lindsay was the guy who made it his business to keep the team together. Gordie Howe was the star and, without a doubt, the greatest Red Wings player in history. His name is big enough for major infrastructure: the new bridge to Canada, paid for entirely by the Canadian government, will be called the “Gordie Howe International Bridge.” Construction began in 2018, and the bridge will lead to Canada from the spot where the River Rouge empties into the Detroit River, about five miles from the downtown on I-75. It will compete with the Ambassador Bridge a couple of miles upstream, completed in 1929 when Gordie Howe was one year old.

Howe was born near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, a small city about 1,600 miles northwest of Detroit. Set up by teetotalers trying the escape the liquor trade, it was a struggling community that depended largely on the quality of the harvest in any given year. Howe grew up in a poor family, and his early life was not easy. But in a world where every kid played hockey, his extraordinary talent stood out—and he was ambidextrous. Roy MacSkimming, to whose account of Howe’s life much of this chapter is indebted, says that the scouts came to watch Howe when he was still a kid.³

In 1943, the New York Rangers invited him to their training camp, but he didn’t think the team was right for him—advantage Red Wings, who persuaded him to sign at their own camp in Windsor the next year. He put in one season for the Omaha Knights farm team before he debuted in Detroit in 1946. In the early days, having forgotten to arrange for a place to stay, he slept on the benches at Olympia, along with a number of other players. He didn’t find it all that uncomfortable, he’d later recall, but he did mind the rats scurrying up close to borrow some body warmth. In retaliation, they would use any rat they could catch for pucks in pick-up games.⁴

He soon started to break records—between 1950–51 and 1954–55, he led the league in scoring, and even though that was an era of relatively low scores in the NHL, he still ranks as one of the most prolific players in history. But he didn’t just score—he was just as happy to create assists so his teammates could share in the glory, and unlike many goal scorers, he was a fighter to boot.

Violence, often of a quite spectacular nature, has always been part and parcel of hockey, especially Canadian hockey, and Gordie Howe was happy to mix it up. The fans coined the idea of a “Gordie Howe hat trick”—a goal, an assist, and a fight.5 In 1950, one of those brawls almost cost him his life: seeking to hit another player on the boards, he instead collided with a railing, fracturing his nose and cheekbone and lacerating his eyeball, which caused him to hemorrhage from the brain. The surgeon saved his life by drilling a hole in his skull to release the fluid.⁶

Those injuries happened in game 1 of the Stanley Cup semifinals in March 1950. Even without Howe, Detroit went on to beat the Toronto Maple Leafs four games to three; more spectacularly, the finals saw them come back from 3–0 down to win the cup 4–3, with the last two games played at Olympia. This was the team’s fourth Stanley Cup victory in twenty-four years.⁷ After recovering from his near-death experience, Howe was in the starting lineup in the first game of the following season, on October 11.⁸ The Red Wings would go on to win four more Stanley Cups in the next six seasons, with Gordie Howe leading the team in scoring.⁹

In those years, the Production Line truly came into its own. In the early years, Howe and Lindsay were the rookies, and it was the experienced Abel who had held things together. In 1950–51, the team led the league in regular-season points but fell to Montreal in the semifinal of the Stanley Cup. In 1951–52, the Red Wings closed the regular season on top again and then finished the job to win their fifth Stanley Cup.

That summer, Sid Abel was traded to the Chicago Black Hawks, but by the 1952–53 season, Alex Delvecchio had taken his place on the Production Line, where he would play for another twenty-three years. Those who were there during those golden years often attributed their success to the team’s extraordinary cohesion. Many of them roomed together at boarding houses close to Olympia. Between 1930 and the end of the 1950s, Minnie “Ma” Shaw ran one of the most famous of those, and it’s estimated that 175 Red Wings lived at Ma Shaw’s at one time or another, including Gordie Howe and Ted Lindsay.¹⁰ When not practicing, the players hung out together in the evenings, catching movies, drinking, and even attending ballroom dances. On Monday evenings, the team rented out an entire Italian restaurant, so they could bond in peace. MacSkimming sums it up thus: “Living together at home as well as on the road, they bonded by doing practically everything together, from playing cards and drinking beer to dating women and worshipping God.”11 It’s always hard to judge whether cohesive teams lead to success of whether success leads to cohesive teams, but the 1950s Red Wings clearly excelled on both fronts. Ted Lindsay was at the heart of those bonds, and his relationship with Gordie Howe was particularly strong. After they left Ma Shaw’s, they bought a house together and formally agreed to share bonuses—each believing that his game was crucially enhanced by the other.

After the back-to-back Stanley Cup wins in 53–54 and 54–55, nobody could have imagined that the Cup would not be theirs again for almost half a century. The team did not collapse immediately, but in retrospect, the 1956–57 season was something of a swan song. In the semifinals at the end of March, the Bruins eliminated the Red Wings in five games. It was to be Ted Lindsay’s last series for Detroit.

During that winter, Lindsay had started to take an interest in player pensions—the league ran the pension scheme in such a secretive fashion that the players themselves could not get any details on it. Lindsay, sensibly, wanted more information, and moreover, he planned to establish a players’ association that would represent the players in this and other matters, such as standard contract negotiation. Other sports had paved the way: the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) had been formed in 1953, the National Basketball Players Association in 1954, and in 1957, the NFL players were beginning the process of starting theirs. Lindsay sought advice from the lawyers representing the MLBPA, and in February of 1957, he announced not only that the players would form the National Hockey League Players’ Association (NHLPA) but that all but one of the 112 players in the NHL had agreed to join. Well aware of the distrust of “unionism” among both owners and significant numbers of players, the association, Lindsay said, would not seek conflict with the owners but partner with them. They were not a “trade union,” he stressed, and their goal was not to negotiate individual salaries—the focus would be on general issues of shared interest.¹²

His carefully conciliatory approach did not save him from the owners’ wrath. This was the era of McCarthyism, and some owners quickly started wondering aloud if they had communists in their midst—a most convenient storyline at the time. Jack Adams, the Red Wings’ general manager, confronted the team and demanded that they denounce the Association. He smeared Lindsay to journalists, describing him as “a cancer” and “the ruination of the team.”13 It may beggar belief that in 1950s Detroit, of all places, you could disparage what was not even a full-fledged union in those terms, but by summer, Lindsay had been traded to the Black Hawks.

The owners refused to recognize the Association, and in September, the NHLPA filed a grievance against the NHL with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), for unfair labor practices. However, once Lindsay, the driving force behind the endeavor, had left Detroit, Adams managed to persuade the remaining Red Wings players to withdraw from the Association. The Montreal players soon followed suit. The owners agreed to meet with player representatives at the NHL winter meetings in Palm Beach, Florida, but, crucially, they insisted that there could be no lawyers present. After thirteen hours of talks, Lindsay and the players agreed to dissolve the Association in exchange for some minor concessions by the owners. They agreed to set up an owner-player council to hear grievances, but its findings were not binding upon the owners. It was a bitter defeat.

It would take the players another decade of watching the experience of the other professional leagues to fully grasp the benefits of a players’ union and to revive the NHLPA. Collective bargaining would pay off: when Lindsay had first tried to organize them, the players were paid about 37 percent of the revenues generated by the league. By the end of the millennium, the figure was 57 percent, largely thanks to collective bargaining.¹⁴ Suffice it to say that unionization did not, in fact, destroy the NHL, as the owners, like bosses everywhere, had proclaimed it would.

It should not have taken this long—Detroit had been a union town since the 1930s, a victory won in bloody battles, some of which we will describe in chapter 21. Although, by now, most of the union jobs had since left the city, Detroit’s allegiance to unions, which was instrumental in creating the American middle class, was still going strong. This is the city where an eighteen-year-old Jimmy Hoffa organized a strike on the loading docks of a food warehouse, starting a career that would catapult him to the presidency of the Teamsters—and would get him killed. It’s the city of Walter Reuther, whose organization forced the car industry to accept the UAW—they called him “the most dangerous man in Detroit” in turn. It is hardly surprising, then, that the idea of the NHLPA was born in Detroit—but it stings that it was defeated there at first. In a way, the NHL owners’ victory foreshadowed future defeats: today, the narrative that unions are ruinous for business, a narrative always popular with owners of teams and of factories, has taken hold across the country.

The 1950s were a turbulent decade in Detroit labor politics. The Great Migration had brought large numbers of black workers and their families from the South over the previous four decades, and the city, while still predominantly white, had become a biracial metropolis. In the 1950 census, African Americans counted for 16 percent of the population—by 1960, the number had reached 29 percent. Heather Thompson points out that “as a result of this massive migration, African Americans fundamentally altered the city’s geography, dramatically recomposed its working class, and unwittingly unsettled both the civic and labor order.” The city had taken a turn to the political right after the war, and in the UAW a rift between left-liberal forces and a reformist center had opened up—in part driven by the African American workers’ demand for greater representation and power.15 The memory of the horrific 1943 riot was still alive; Detroit was bursting at the seams, leading to severe housing shortages; and conflicts between various political factions were common. The commitment to unions ran strong, but not everybody agreed that black workers were entitled to equal protection. A 1951 survey found that a mere 18 percent of CIO members in Detroit were “in favor of full racial equality,” with 65 percent opposed.¹⁶ Those numbers, shocking as they are, were still better than those in the AFL and other unions, where 8 percent favored full equality, with 58 percent opposed—figures suggesting, perhaps, that the CIO members were more polarized and had a stronger civil rights wing than other unions. As the author of the survey notes, these results came after the unions, at least officially, had persistently opposed discrimination and had protected black workers from retaliation.

While many Americans now associate the protests of the 1950s and 1960s with the deep South, the North looked just as grim. In the South segregation was supported by the law; in the North it was simply the everyday reality. As Detroiter Clyde Cleveland would later recall, “The North was just as segregated as the South when I was growing up, particularly in terms of housing…. The experiences that I had of not being served at a restaurant were not in Georgia or Alabama or Mississippi—they were right here in the City of Detroit.”17 The abysmal relationship between the police and the community added further tensions. Yet despite all this, the Detroit civil rights movement made important strides in the 1950s, often side by side with the unions.

While union membership may have had a long way to go to accept integration, union leadership was largely supportive, though its efforts at times tended to be lukewarm. David M. Lewis-Colman notes that in 1952, the UAW “launched a bold-sounding ‘four-pronged attack on discrimination at the hiring gate’ in Detroit and Michigan.” Reuther and his men, however, refused to frame those demands in terms of racial equity, and black civil rights leaders were underwhelmed with the effort—even if it led to some positive results. At the same time, the UAW had not managed to force the Big Three to include its model non-discrimination clause in all contracts. Lewis-Colman writes, “The union took a cautious and conciliatory approach to bargaining with the Big Three and resisted attempts by black workers to launch a more vigorous campaign to secure a non-discrimination clause.” Nonetheless, the union did lobby for fair employment legislation throughout the 1950s, worked closely with the NAACP, and managed to see fair practice laws enacted in twelve states, including Michigan.¹⁸ While their commitment, under Reuther’s centrist leadership, may have struck black civil rights leaders as lacking, the unions’ partnership with the civil rights movement, even if uneasy at times, is certain to have contributed to the antiunion sentiment that doomed the players’ union.

Gordie Howe will get his bridge, but Ted Lindsay, the failed unionizer, has been largely forgotten, along with the rest of the Production Line and the fabulously successful team of the 1950s. Today, only sports historians, statisticians, and the most committed Red Wings fans remember them, and they have left few traces. Olympia is long gone, without even a plaque to commemorate the site, and most of the players have passed away. Nonetheless, one Red Wings ritual remains: in the final game of the 1952 Stanley Cup, when the team had thoroughly vanquished the Canadiens, Pete and Jerry Cusimano, brothers and storeowners in Detroit’s Eastern Market, hurled an octopus onto the ice, its eight arms symbolizing the number of victories required to win the Stanley Cup. To this day, during each home game of the playoffs, at least one octopus, and as many as thirty-six, will sail through the air to commemorate the glory and inspire its return.