The success of his various ventures meant Smythe could afford to live well, even while much of the country was flat on its back. His salary as managing director was $12,500 through the end of the 1936–37 season, when it jumped to $15,000. In addition, he had his income from C. Smythe Ltd., which he deliberately kept to a minimum, plus income and dividends from other investments. Although it didn’t provide immediate cash, the equity value of his shareholdings in the Gardens and his sand and gravel business increased steadily despite the Depression. It was an enormous amount of money at a time when a family could live comfortably enough on $50 a week. Smythe’s hockey salary was more than double what most players made, a sharp contrast to the current NHL norm in which even the best-paid general managers make the equivalent of a fourth-line checker or spare defenceman. He wasn’t a millionaire yet, but he was a wealthy man at a time when people had very little. The mortgage on the Baby Point home was easily managed (Smythe claimed he had no mortgage, but his financial documents from the period indicate otherwise), he owned a cottage and at least one rental property, and could indulge his taste for cars: in addition to Irene’s lumbering Franklin sedan, he had a McLaughlin Buick convertible with big white sidewall tires and a rumble seat, just like the ones driven by his two young hotshots, Conacher and Jackson. He liked convertibles and drove them despite the Toronto winter, sticking one of the kids in the front seat and someone else in the rumble seat and tooling down the Lakeshore into the city. He was personally acquainted with Col. Samuel McLaughlin, the Canadian entrepreneur who had established the McLaughlin Motor Car Co. in 1907 and later sold it to General Motors, and took great pride in owning what he considered an all-Canadian car.
The Smythe children lived pampered lives. They attended expensive private schools – Stafford and later Hugh enrolled at Upper Canada College while Miriam attended Branksome Hall in Rosedale. There was no showing up at school clutching term fees in a little paper bag or scrounging leftovers from the food parcels of richer friends for the Smythe children, though Stafford, like his father, disliked UCC and left to attend a public school closer to home. If they wanted something, they got it. Even as a young man Stafford had a convertible of his own. Moira Davis, Conn’s sister from his father’s second marriage, visited occasionally, but felt “like a poor country mouse” around Miriam and Stafford, who she thought had too much money and looked down on her.1 Stafford, forced to deal with the challenges facing the oldest son of a wealthy, well-known man and domineering father, was in regular trouble. If there was a choice to be made between two potential friends, Smythe said, Stafford would pick the wrong one every time.2 Miriam was high-spirited and popular and often similarly in trouble at school, to the point that Conn and Irene moved her from Branksome Hall to Alma College in the southwest Ontario town of St. Thomas, where they hoped distance would reduce the temptations of city life. Hugh, the younger son, had none of his brother’s demons and had inherited his mother’s gentle and friendly nature. Hugh didn’t share Stafford’s need to compete with their father; he looked up to him frankly and admiringly and would enjoy his company in a way Stafford never could.
Irene, accustomed to her husband’s frequent absences, developed a wide circle of friends and interests of her own. She was partial to golf and played often – at one point the Smythes were members at four clubs, in Toronto, Mississauga, and at the cottage on Lake Simcoe. In 1935, they sailed to England for the silver jubilee of King George V and afterwards toured Europe, where Smythe formed a poor opinion of preparations for the war that was already in the wind. When they returned – he was forty-one and Irene in her late thirties – she discovered she was pregnant again. They named the little girl Constance Patricia and for the short time she had on earth Smythe doted on her.
His wife, according to Conn, was not a disciplinarian, and much of that was left to Jessie Watson, a young Toronto woman who had come to work for the family after the birth of Hugh and stayed to the end of Conn’s life. He grew deeply attached to Jessie, as did all the family; in his last years she was his main source of domestic care and comfort. Smythe seemed to be aware of the dangers of indulging his children, but did it anyway. He was a self-made man and proud of it. He dressed well, he lived well, he owned expensive cars, and he was more than generous with his children. It was all a proclamation to the world that a kid who’d started with nothing could now afford the best and didn’t care who knew it. He knew his drive to succeed derived from his early poverty and his determination to escape it. If he worried he might rob his children of that same motivation, he didn’t show it.
From early on he was determined Stafford should succeed him at the helm of his businesses and steered him toward that end. Stafford resisted for a time, but to no effect. It was difficult for even the strongest of personalities to divert Smythe from a course he was set on and even harder for his son. Eventually, Stafford bowed to the inevitable: he would be groomed to run the Toronto Maple Leafs when the time came, and he might as well accept it.
Smythe’s outsized personality meant that even when he was away from home, he was a dominant presence. Life centred around him, his hockey team, and his schedule. Irene regularly attended the games, while both Stafford and Hugh served as stick boy in their turn, blessed with the privilege of hanging around the Gardens, meeting the men who were legends to most Canadian boys their age. On Sundays, when the Gardens was unused, the Smythes, Selkes, Irvins, Hewitts, and others would gather with their children for family skates – though even then Foster Hewitt tended to glide off on his own, a little separated from everyone else.3
With Conn’s help Hugh organized a team composed largely of friends, known as the Leaf Imps, which competed in a local league. Even for them Conn set high standards and expected them to be met. Frank Selke Jr. played goal for the team, his skinny legs protected by cricket pads while he clutched a sawed-off regulation stick in place of the goalie’s larger and wider version. Even standing up straight his head didn’t touch the crossbar, and he was on the ice one day when a photographer from a local magazine arrived at Smythe’s behest to shoot some pictures. Selke was in the net, doing his eight-year-old best to guard its vast expanse, when Smythe appeared in the stands, surveyed the scene, and spotted something that didn’t please him. Hustling down through the seats to ice level, he reached the boards, fixed Selke with a glare, leaned out over the ice, and barked, “Get yourself a goddamn goal stick!”4
A magazine writer, telling a story from around the same time, recounted a similar example of Smythe’s implacable determination to have the world follow his rules. Standing alone at centre ice one day, spraying water over the frozen surface, a Gardens worker puffed contentedly at his pipe. The big building was quiet and seemingly empty, but as he worked he became aware he was being watched. Looking around, he spotted Smythe in the stands, following his progress. He called out a greeting. Smythe, at first, ignored him. Eventually, though, he raised a finger, pointed at a No Smoking sign, and snapped, “Can’t you read?”5
If he allowed little leeway to eight-year-olds and hourly workers, he wasn’t about to offer it to anyone else. He believed people, like horses, could be judged by their “bloodlines,” and some lines were just flat out better than others. Most of the players he favoured over the years had premium bloodlines, in his view. It was certainly true for Hap Day, Joe Primeau, and King Clancy and would later be true for Syl Apps, Ted Kennedy, and George Armstrong.
Good bloodlines didn’t necessarily mean they came from wealthy, prominent, or important families. It was more a reflection of upbringing, character, and work ethic. They were the “right sort.” They were stoic, dependable. They didn’t have to be told what to do or supervised while they did it. A first-rate horse gave you everything it had, without complaint, and could be counted on when money was at stake. People, he suggested once, could be handicapped “just like horses.”
Syl Apps was an example. “He was the stake horse. When he was out there, his opposing centreman was busy. Very busy. Apps put weight on all the opposing clubs. They had to use their best lines just to keep track of Apps. Take Apps out and all the other centres in the league are carrying that much less weight.”6
His love of horses had grown during the war, when he commanded teams of them to haul his heavy artillery guns through the mud and mayhem, working themselves to death if pushed to do so, rarely balking at the demands made of them. He spoke of them with deep admiration, as if they possessed something that was hard to find in men – the unswerving loyalty and perseverance he demanded but felt he too seldom received. They were strong, dependable, stoical, and enduring.
He shared his passion with his friend, Larkin Maloney. Before the rise of professional football and basketball, horse racing was the biggest competitor to hockey as Canada’s most popular sports activity. When he wasn’t at the office or the arena, he was often at one of the numerous tracks sprinkled around the city, where he and Maloney and other cronies would happily spend hours assessing the passing horses and laying down wagers. He took Irene to the Kentucky Derby most years, and they made an annual pilgrimage to Saratoga Springs in New York, leaving Jessie to look after the kids.
He enjoyed gambling and wasn’t afraid to bet heavily, a habit that had earned many a lecture from his father. Late in the 1930s, he and Maloney calculated his losses for the decade and came to a figure of $30,000. They set out to recoup it in a series of bets and only managed to make back about half.7 Such setbacks didn’t bother him. If he’d lost similar amounts on the Maple Leafs it would have left him desolated, but he viewed the pleasures of horse racing as rewards in themselves.
An ugly court battle in the summer of 1933 revealed some of the details of his gambling and other less-than-salubrious goings-on in the hockey world. The case centred on a claim for wrongful dismissal brought by Gardens manager Andy Taylor, whom Smythe had hired away from the Mutual Street rink in the fall of 1931 and fired less than a year later.
Smythe claimed Taylor had authorized another man named William D’Alesandro to cash thousands of dollars in cheques without his authority.8 Taylor insisted Smythe was aware of his dealings, but was using it as an excuse because he was under pressure to cut costs at the Gardens.
Taylor won the case, and Smythe’s personal reputation took several knocks in the process. Testimony showed Smythe was not only familiar with D’Alesandro but was partners with him in running the Marlboros junior team, along with Selke. Smythe had bought a share of the club on behalf of the Gardens, but hadn’t notified the directors, and had also involved the Gardens in an ill-advised investment in professional lacrosse. When the lacrosse team ran short of cash, Smythe sought to make it up by withdrawing seven hundred dollars from the Marlboros’ trust account and betting it on a horse.
He’d made similar wagers before, of course, the best known being the bets that let him buy a share of the St. Pats and bring King Clancy to Toronto. This time was different, though – he wasn’t betting his own money, and the horse he placed it on strolled to the finish line in eleventh place.9
The case galvanized the press. As an amateur team, the Marlboros weren’t supposed to earn a profit – extra cash was to be pumped back into the trust that financed operations. The seven hundred dollars, the judge suggested, looked a lot like it was Smythe’s share of the surplus, being surreptitiously skimmed off in violation of the rules. Smythe objected strenuously to the suggestion, but the judge was unmoved, especially after he discovered Smythe, to hide his link with the Marlies, had destroyed his copy of an ownership agreement on the day the court case opened. He was even more upset when he learned that D’Alesandro’s chief function – the reason he’d been busy cashing cheques – was to lure “amateur” players to sign with the Marlies in return for illicit payments.
The judge, Mr. Justice McEvoy, denounced it as “shamateurism” and suggested people like Smythe were destroying the high-minded ideals of amateur sports. He added to the public shaming when he announced that, in his opinion, Smythe had only hired Taylor to learn the business of arena management, then discarded him once he’d “squeezed the sponge pretty dry.”10
The prosperity that clung to Smythe and his ventures stood out not only against the gloom that gripped the economy but the fortunes of the NHL as well. The short-lived expansion to ten teams had gone bust with the stock market, and clubs were withering and dying like crops on the Prairies. Toronto with its reliable fans and stable bottom line was the exception to the rule. Everywhere else teams were struggling.
The Philadelphia Quakers had disappeared after one miserable season. While the Quakers’ demise was not a surprise, the collapse of the Ottawa Senators was cause for alarm. Ottawa had iced strong teams since before the Stanley Cup was created, but was hobbled by its small rink and limited population. Desperate to survive, the team approached Smythe about playing games at the Gardens, but the cost was too high. In 1931, the Senators took a year off, renting out its players to the remaining teams, then returned for two more seasons and finally, in an act of desperation, moved to St. Louis for a year as the Eagles. In 1935, the franchise fell into a slumber that would last almost sixty years.
Next to go were the Montreal Maroons, the pride of English Quebec. One of the great teams of the era, a rough, tough, no-nonsense gang that dominated the Leafs and won two Stanley Cups, they nonetheless played before empty seats in the increasingly shabby Forum. Montreal just wasn’t big enough for two teams, and the 1937–38 season was the Maroons’ last.
The demise of the Quakers, Senators, and Maroons left behind seven teams in varying stages of financial health. Toronto was at the top of the heap. The club made a profit every year, though in 1933 money was so tight Smythe had to ask his Stanley Cup champions to take a pay cut. On the day the Gardens opened it was almost $2 million in debt11 and the directors had installed a financial watchdog named George Cottrelle12 to keep track of the money. Frank Selke called him “the most cold-blooded businessman I ever met.”13 One of his first acts was to cut wages. Smythe regularly butted heads with Cottrelle, protesting when he was directed to prepare a budget for the team that he’d do so as soon as Cottrelle could predict how many playoff games they would play in.14
Even with Cottrelle squeezing the purse strings, the Leafs were head and shoulders ahead of their floundering competitors. The New York Americans struggled from paycheque to paycheque, doomed since the end of Prohibition brought a close to Big Bill Dwyer’s bootlegging riches. Dwyer became increasingly dependent on “loans” from manager Red Dutton, who only managed to pay the wages at one training camp thanks to a fortuitous crap game.15 Eventually the league took over the club and ran it as a charity case.
Other teams would almost certainly have folded if not for the clandestine intervention of Chicago grain magnate James Norris. Norris bought the Detroit Falcons for next to nothing in 1932, saved them from bankruptcy, and renamed them the Red Wings. He quietly loaned money to Boston’s Charles F. Adams to keep the Bruins afloat and just as quietly bought a major piece of Madison Square Garden.16 He badly wanted a team in Chicago too, and tried to buy and relocate the Ottawa Senators, but when that plan was foiled he invested in the new Chicago Stadium, making him landlord of the Black Hawks and putting him in a position to torment Maj. Frederic McLaughlin, their eccentric owner.17
McLaughlin was a dapper, polo-playing, Harvard-educated millionaire with a clipped moustache who had a habit of firing his coach almost every year, no matter how well the club was performing. He knew the other owners looked down on him and, in turn, considered them a collection of ill-bred parvenus, mailing off caustic letters to Calder complaining about the lack of respect he received. It was McLaughlin who’d blocked Norris’s bid to buy the Senators.18 Norris got even by raising McLaughlin’s rent and starting a rival team and rival league to compete with the Hawks.
Norris was a big, bluff, overweight man who could easily have bought and sold anyone else in the NHL several times over. The NHL’s shoddy bylaws allowed him to operate via false fronts, decoy managers, and dummy companies, so it was years before anyone realized how much he had come to control the league. He shunned the spotlight to avoid drawing attention to his extensive involvement in professional boxing, as crooked a racket as existed at the time. As late as the early 1950s, Smythe would have to spark an interleague showdown to get an honest answer as to the extent of Norris’s holdings in the league. His reticence, coupled with the other owners’ financial problems, let Smythe hog the limelight more than was strictly his due. The last thing “Big Jim” Norris wanted was to talk to a bunch of reporters or have his picture in the newspaper; Conn Smythe, in comparison, was not only willing but often eager.
Press coverage was good for seat sales. Although Smythe had a fairly low opinion of the press – for fifty dollars they’d write whatever he wanted – it was part of the business and Smythe was a realist. He learned to control his message the way he did everything else, and to a degree that wouldn’t become commonplace in the sport until decades later. In the thirty years starting in 1931, the name Smythe appeared in the sports pages of the Toronto Star more than seven thousand times, or almost 250 times a year. If only a third of those referred to the Leafs owner – an extremely conservative assumption – it still works out to more than once a week, every week over three decades. And that’s only one paper in a city that had three or four throughout that time.
The Star was the quickest to seize on the Smythe phenomenon. Although they were poles apart on politics, the conservative Smythe and liberal Joseph Atkinson, the Star’s publisher, shared a mutual respect and an affinity for the wonders of marketing. They understood the benefits to be had from the drawing power of the Leafs. Hockey fans read newspapers, and newspapers helped attract more hockey fans. While the Globe and Telegram were slow on the uptake – usually sending a lone reporter to provide standard goal-by-goal coverage of the game – the Star assigned three and sometimes four writers and columnists, offering not only the score and the play-by-play, but colour, analysis, opinion, gossip, and personalities as well. Eventually Smythe began to demand higher standards from the low-paid men – and occasional woman – who haunted the Gardens looking for stories. Complaining that too many had their hands out (in addition to the free meals and travel that were customary), he went to Atkinson and agreed to buy a regular quota of advertising if the publisher would increase their wages. One time, he assigned Selke to mimic the writing style of the Star’s Andy Lytle for several days when the columnist went on a bender that would have cost him his job had the abstemious Atkinson found out.19
It didn’t make the reporters like him, but they did appreciate the regular material his team provided. He was always willing to be quoted – unlike Hap Day, who believed reporters should be seen and not trusted. Smythe didn’t mince words, he didn’t retract statements, and he didn’t deny anything he’d said. When the Leafs travelled to other arenas, there was always a crowd of local reporters jostling for a few words from the Leafs boss. His frequent appearances in the press added another layer to the caricature of a hot-headed, scrappy little terror who hustled around his rink in perpetual pursuit of recalcitrant referees. He was also recognized as a superior judge of talent and master of the game.
Most newspapers at the time openly supported the hometown team, and Toronto was no different. Lytle called the players “the boys,” or “your Leafs,” or “the Smythians.” The Star’s Gordon Sinclair, in his column “Hook Line and Sinclair,” called them the “Lambasting Leaferinos.” Smythe, said Lytle, “doesn’t masquerade to deceive as so many sports characters like to do. He may employ the humour of pretending despair about his team or he may be curt to the point of insolence if he thinks you are prying into affairs that aren’t your concern. But he’ll either be frank with you or he won’t discuss it. What he tells you, when he does talk, is the truth, though he may embellish it or slant it in a Leaf direction. It’s up to the individual what he does with what he’s given.”20
Hugh Smythe maintains his father’s public performances were usually just that – an act. Even when he went into his “Herr Hitler routine,” waving his fists while his eyes popped from their sockets, it was a calculated display intended to produce a specific effect, he argues, whether to unsettle an opponent, energize his team, divert attention, or sell even more tickets.21
Soon Smythe was being treated as the league’s dominant figure, smartest operator, and quickest thinker. If that was an exaggeration, he wasn’t about to tell anyone. He was easily the best known, most quoted, and highest profile sports figure in Canada, not as celestial as Foster Hewitt, perhaps, but held in equal awe. It was taken for granted by fans across the country that Conn Smythe called the shots at Maple Leaf Gardens and to a large degree within the NHL as well. Smythe exulted in the image, which he took as his due. A visitor coming across the league for the first time could have been forgiven for believing the NHL consisted of some struggling teams in the United States, a struggling team in Montreal, and the Toronto Maple Leafs.