In the aftermath of Smythe’s victory over Ottawa, the spring of 1945 should have been a time of relative tranquility. Smythe was fifty years old, hardly an old man, and had accomplished a great deal. His hockey team was an enormous success and his arena was almost always filled. People from across the country made their way to Maple Leaf Gardens just to stand and gawk. He had built two profitable businesses, starting with nothing and fuelled by little more than his own fierce determination and willingness to take a risk.
He had a wife who loved him and who attracted admiration for her kindly nature, her devotion to him, and her willingness to tolerate his difficult personality. “God knows what she must put up with,” was the kind of remark women made in praising Irene while shaking their heads at her husband. No matter what others thought, the Smythes gave every indication of being a family that enjoyed being together and sharing their good fortune.
He’d come home from his second war in one piece, more or less. The parts were all there, though they didn’t all work as well as they once had. By March he was well enough to attend a game at the Gardens, photographed leaning on his cane with a beaming Irene at his side. He had many admirers, not only for his hockey achievements but also for the courage and patriotism that had driven him to endanger all he had to once again defend his country and beliefs. He had challenged the government on a point of principle and won, standing up under immense pressure on behalf of young men fighting overseas.
And, perhaps best of all, the Leafs were champions once again. Against all the odds, after a mediocre season, they surprised everyone by defeating the Montreal Canadiens in a semifinal series they had been universally expected to lose. The Habs were the class of the league that year. They ran away with the regular season, finishing thirteen points ahead of Detroit and twenty-eight ahead of the third-place Leafs. Elmer Lach, Rocket Richard, and Toe Blake finished 1-2-3 in the scoring race, with Richard scoring an inconceivable fifty goals in fifty games. Lach won the Hart Trophy as most valuable player, and Bill Durnan won the Vezina as the best goalie. When the 1945 all-star team was named, Montreal players took five of the six positions, plus Irvin as coach.
The Leafs, in comparison, had one player in the top ten: the young Ted Kennedy, already dubbed “Teeder” at age eighteen and hailed as the obvious successor to the veteran Syl Apps. Neither Apps nor Broda was back from the war, so the team made due in net with the famously nervous Frank McCool, who was photographed during the playoffs gulping milk from a bottle to ease his roiling stomach.
Toronto won just two more games than it lost during the regular season, scoring forty fewer goals than Montreal and allowing forty more to be scored against them. They placed third only because the bottom three teams – Boston, New York, and Chicago – were in terrible shape, stripped of talent and derided as a pack of “palookas” that shouldn’t even be in the league. Since there had to be four teams in the playoffs Boston got in by default, despite winning just sixteen games out of fifty. Everyone had great fun repeating a remark by Art Ross, who had let slip that “I am now piloting the worst hockey team at which it was ever my misfortune to look.”1 Earlier that season, Ross had offered one hundred dollars to anyone who could come up with a nickname for his famed “Kraut Line” that didn’t include the word Kraut in it.2
So great was Montreal’s advantage that Dick Irvin felt free to take a few jabs at his old team, telling reporters that if Toronto won a game in Montreal he would slit his own throat with a dull knife. Yet the Leafs pulled it off. They won the first two games in Montreal – presenting a serious threat to Irvin’s throat – lost two of the next three, including a 10–3 pummelling in Montreal, then shocked just about everyone, including themselves, by wrapping up the series in six games with a victory at home on the last day of March.
They were the underdogs again against Detroit, though on the day the series opened the morning paper carried two pieces of news that would have made Smythe smile. First, the war was going exceedingly well. Canadian tanks had entered Holland and were gobbling up ground quickly against the fleeing Nazis. The Allies were 290 kilometres from Berlin and a Nazi newspaper acknowledged Germany was “perhaps only a few days or weeks” from collapse.3
The second bit of news must have made Smythe slap his aching leg with pleasure. Ross, his old nemesis, had announced he was retiring as coach of the Bruins and would henceforth occupy an unspecified “executive position.”
Their feud had cooled after Ross visited Smythe in his sick bed and offered his best wishes. He had two sons in the air force, one of whom had been forced to bail out of his burning plane in mid-air. Smythe couldn’t continue to hold a grudge against someone with sons like that. Still, it must have pleased him to know he’d outlasted the one man in the league as single-minded, thick-skinned, and unyielding as himself.
Toronto had beaten Detroit just twice in ten chances that season, but nervous little Frank McCool pulled off something akin to a miracle, racking up three straight shutouts. Toronto scored just four goals, but found itself with a three-game lead. They almost let it get away from them, as they lost the next three. McCool’s stomach was in such agony during the seventh and deciding game he fled the ice midway through and clomped to the dressing room, where he sat gulping powders for his angry ulcer. Coach Hap Day followed him and pointed out that without him they were finished. There was no backup, the spare goalie having quit in mid-season. McCool steeled himself and returned to the ice, doubling over between whistles, but somehow holding on for a 2–1 win, a victory almost as improbable as the 1942 come-from-behind championship over the same Detroit Red Wings.
All this should have had Smythe wondering what he’d done to be treated so well by The Man Upstairs. And for a time it did, but the summer of 1945 began a period of troubles that started with a tragedy and ended with a broken friendship.
If there was a person in the world who could melt Smythe’s heart it was his daughter, Patricia. She was just nine years old that summer, and he’d been away from her for the better part of four years. During the war she sent him letters in her childish printing, relating how “ofly hot” the summer was and that she was saving up money from selling golf balls. When he was released from the hospital she would run home at lunch to play games with him, which he never let her win and which sent her running to Irene or Jessie complaining that Daddy cheated. She held his hand as he took his first few steps around his upstairs bedroom, and then, as he recovered, on short walks around the yard.
Like Stafford, she had health problems. She suffered from food allergies and asthma, and if she accidentally ate a peanut “her eyes would just about pop out of her head.”4 Smythe mourned the fact that her health would make her life difficult. Far less was known about allergies at the time and dealing with them was a much greater burden than it would be in later years. Stafford’s asthma was so constricting he spent entire nights in a little room filled with the burning fumes of medication intended to clear his passages.
A few months after the season ended, Irene and Conn were at the cottage for the summer as usual, with Patricia and Jessie. They were awaiting a visit from Dorothea and Stafford, who had only recently returned home after four years in the navy. While they waited, Smythe beat Patricia – again – at a game of croquet. Then he and Irene left to pay a short visit to friends nearby. When they returned, Patricia was lying dead on the veranda.
The cause was never established. There was no autopsy, a fact both Irene and Conn later regretted, when they wondered which of her ailments had killed their daughter. Irene was devastated and sick for months afterwards. Conn, who had watched many men die in battle, was shaken to his core from the loss of the little girl he considered an angel sent to help him. “Irene and I never really got over it,” he wrote. “Yet I always felt that there was some kind of fate involved, that she had been sent to look after me, and get me better, hold my hand on our little walks, and then she was needed more elsewhere.”5 He rationalized that she had been saved from a life her health would have made difficult and had “gone to a better place.”
Albert Smythe, well into his eighties and in poor health himself, wrote a poem for the theosophist journal, which he still edited. It’s not hard to find echoes of her father in the little girl portrayed in its opening lines:
Patricia, darling, your goodbye
Was like your sudden change of moods,
One moment with a laughing eye,
Then all reluctance, coy and shy
As when an enemy stands by
And danger looms
Perhaps to fend off his grief, Smythe buried himself in the business of the new season, warning that no one should take another championship run for granted. He had directed there would be no formal celebration of the Cup triumph while there were still Canadians fighting in the Pacific, but after the Japanese surrender in August he organized a victory dinner at a golf club close to the Smythe home. Invitations went out to an extended list of friends and colleagues representing a cross-section of his life with the Leafs, the league, the business world, and his private friendships.
All the current players were there, as well as sons Hugh and Stafford and a select group from earlier teams that included Primeau, Conacher, Horner, Clancy, and Bailey. George Drew and George McCullagh, his allies in the assault on Ottawa, were invited, as were friends Larkin Maloney and Bob Laidlaw, a lumberman who had been among Smythe’s earliest customers at C. Smythe Ltd. Red Dutton was invited, along with the Black Hawks’ Bill Tobin and even Jack Adams, who had replaced Art Ross as Smythe’s longest-serving feuding partner. There was a full company of team officials – W.A. Hewitt, Frank Selke, and Harold Ballard, who was now managing the Leafs’ Toronto Marlboros organization. Smythe – or more probably Selke, who was den mother to the press pack that covered the team – had even set up a golf tournament for the many reporters who now followed Leafs activities on a year-round basis.
The players’ bonus for winning the Cup was the biggest ever awarded at $1,700, about half what many of them were making for a full season. The Depression and the war had combined to push down salaries, so many postwar NHLers toiled for significantly less than Horner or Clancy would have considered acceptable. In April, Smythe had donated the proceeds from a rodeo at the Gardens to help establish a new centre for veterans suffering spinal injuries. Now he announced that proceeds from the annual blue-and-white game – held just before the season opened – would be used to endow three beds at the Hospital for Sick Children in memory of three “Leafs” who had lost their lives in the war. Jack Fox, Dudley Garrett, and Red Tillson had all been somewhere in the Leafs system before the conflict began, though none had ever played an NHL game in a Leafs uniform.6
Smythe also wanted to use opening night at the Gardens to honour Canadian troops, and invited all surviving recipients of the Victoria Cross to attend, at the team’s expense.7
The war had changed him and altered public perceptions of him. He was continually bothered by the cold, even in warm weather, and sat through Leafs practices huddled in a thick fur-lined flight jacket, a blanket on his knees, and warm boots in place of the spats he loved. Less often was he portrayed as madcap Connie Smythe, the galloping general manager who took off like a jackrabbit after fleeing referees. More and more he was referred to as Major Smythe, war veteran and “militant patriot” in the words of Andy Lytle. Selke had worked hard to turn Lytle into a faithful purveyor of the Leafs message, but with mixed results; determinedly irreverent, he had long portrayed Smythe as “the little corporal” in reference to his Napoleonic tendencies. Now he accorded him an unofficial promotion to “the little Major.”
At training camp in Owen Sound he sat in the stands accompanied by officials from the Leafs’ new Pittsburgh affiliate, a blunt reminder that players who underperformed could be shipped off forthwith. He had promised that every member of the Cup-winning team had an automatic place in the lineup “until he shows he can’t hold it.” Players returning from active service in the war were guaranteed a job “for at least this year.”8
At first everything looked promising. The forward positions were expected to remain little changed. The defence was anchored by Babe Pratt and Wally Stanowski, backed by a group of young players that included Bob Goldham, Jim Thomson, Doug Baldwin, and Ernie Dickens.
Pratt was a fun-loving twenty-nine-year-old acquired from New York three years earlier. He’d won the Hart Memorial Trophy in 1944 and was considered one of the best defencemen of the era. At more than six feet and two hundred pounds he was a giant for the time, but could rush the puck or flatten an opponent with equal alacrity. Goldham had played briefly before the war and ranked high on everyone’s list of hot prospects, as did eighteen-year-old Thomson, who Smythe predicted was the team’s “coming No. 1 star.”9
Lytle predicted a strong year. Declaring the team a notable improvement over the “wartime lurgons and semi-ossified oafs” of recent campaigns, he advised that “there isn’t a body of rival directors in the league who wouldn’t settle for that fourteen and go with it on the fair enough assumption that it could make the playoffs.”10
Almost nothing turned out as anticipated. Frank McCool arrived in Toronto beset by doubts about his stomach and his future. The moment he stepped off the train, he said, his ulcers started kicking up. He visited Smythe at his Gardens office and said he wasn’t sure he could carry on. He didn’t like to let down the team, but wasn’t looking forward to another season gulping ulcer elixirs between periods. Smythe delivered one of his patented pep talks, and by the time he left the office, McCool recounted he would have entered a den of lions for the team.
His ardour quickly cooled, however, and on October 27 – the day of the opening game – McCool announced his retirement. “Actually I’ve never liked to play hockey,” he told reporters. “I was thrust into goal first against my will when I was a kid by the captain of a team. That’s how it’s been with me ever since.” This time there was more at issue than his stomach problems. He’d agreed to play for $4,500, but now considered the sum inadequate. He wanted $5,000, but neither Day nor Smythe would budge. “Smythe, when I talked with him, said no. He said I’d get $4,500 even if I sat all season on the bench,” he said. “It’s all over and I’m going home. I don’t know what I’m going to do except that I’m through with hockey and it’s a personal relief.”
He remained retired for the first thirteen games, by which point the Leafs had just three wins. In his first game back, on December 1, Chicago put eight goals past him. But by then it was just one flake in the avalanche that was engulfing the team.
The returning veterans – Apps, Billy Taylor, Bob Goldham – didn’t rebound as quickly as hoped. Ted Kennedy was hurt in an early game and never fully recovered, finishing the year with just three goals in twenty-one games. It took seven starts for the Leafs to get their first win, and by Christmas they were deep in the lower reaches, with only seven wins in twenty-three games. When Pratt was hurt in late December they lost five matches in a row. He had been back a few days when Red Dutton announced Pratt had been suspended indefinitely after admitting he’d placed bets on Leafs games.
The ruling attracted widescale mockery. It was no secret that many of the league’s brass were gambling men. Jim Norris, Conn Smythe and Frank Selke all owned racehorses. Heavy bettors frequented an area of the Gardens known as as the “bull ring,” with Smythe’s blessing. Smythe once joked that between his teens and his thirties he’d have bet on anything that moved. Pratt insisted that, while he’d bet on Leafs games, he’d always picked them to win.
“Pratt, in my opinion, is a goof,” Dutton declared. He’d been warned several times about gambling but kept at it anyway. Since he lost most of his bets, Dutton feared he might be tempted to bet against the Leafs and play accordingly. “Pratt’s expulsion is effected partly to serve as a sharp warning that betting on hockey games and playing in them, do not mix.”11
The suspension was lifted after just seventeen days when the league governors voted unanimously that Dutton had made the right decision, then unanimously reversed it.12 Pratt lost nine hundred dollars in salary, which Smythe noted could quickly be recouped if he made the all-star team. (He didn’t.) But it was far too late for the Leafs. McCool’s play was mediocre and he appeared in just twenty-two games before Turk Broda returned to replace him. Lorne Carr and Sweeney Schriner, both important cogs in previous teams, were on their last legs. Smythe acknowledged neither was playing well, but pledged to keep them in the lineup as a tribute to their past contributions. The promising young defence he’d been counting on proved to need more seasoning. During Pratt’s suspension Smythe let it be known that he considered only three players were playing to “big-league” standards: Gaye Stewart, Bob Goldham, and pint-sized Billy “the Kid” Taylor.
By February, Smythe had given up on the season and became increasingly critical in his assessment of the team’s woes. His wrath was directed mainly at Selke, who now began to pay the price for the wartime letters Smythe had received from Squib Walker. Although Smythe insisted he hadn’t returned home bent on retribution, he had obviously turned against his long-time assistant. Selke had been “disloyal” by getting involved in the trade for Kennedy, which still rankled with Smythe even as Kennedy was establishing himself as a star. He’d failed to abide by the instructions Smythe had left behind, sticking his nose into the hockey operations that were supposed to be Hap Day’s bailiwick. He’d proved himself unreliable and vulnerable to ambition.
It was without question an unfair judgment. The team had won two Stanley Cups while Smythe was away. Business at the Gardens was never better. In the twenty years Smythe and Selke had worked together, nobody had worked harder or more diligently on his behalf. Many of the stars of the 1930s had come up through his minor-league operations. The Gardens might not have been built without his intervention. He did much to establish and maintain the Leafs’ clean-cut, all-Canadian image and handled the crucial job of press management with great skill, providing the balm to soothe the many cuts inflicted on underpaid reporters by Smythe’s sharp-edged style. He was popular around the Gardens and intensely proud of his role in its success.
But Smythe had decided he was unreliable. “I have warned you about him before,” he wrote Walker in the months before Normandy. “He has a strange way of taking all credit for anything accomplished and washing his hands completely of anything that goes wrong or undone.” He warned Walker not to push his complaints too hard or he could wind up behind the eight ball, “and Frank will say Ed Bickle or Bill MacB or someone wouldn’t go for it. And if it goes [well] then of course FJS arranged it all and you owe it all to him.”
He assured Walker he’d take care of things after the war. “I expect there will have to be a showdown when I get back, as heads swell easily with success,” he wrote, adding, “As you know, I’ll either be the boss or not work at the old place.”13
Selke’s misfortune was to get caught in the clash that had been looming since Smythe surrendered his Gardens’ responsibilities before the war. His belief that Bickle was trying to get rid of him only grew stronger with each perceived slight. There was little he could do about either Bickle or Bill MacBrien, the Gardens’ president, as both held more senior positions than he did. But Selke was vulnerable. Like Smythe he was merely an employee, and Smythe’s employee at that.
He had inadvertently hurt his own case in letters he’d written at the same time Smythe was fielding complaints from Walker. Tapped out laboriously on a typewriter at his farm north of Toronto, they were filled with praise for Smythe, news and gossip from the Gardens, and chatter about horses. The consistent message was one of deference. Selke was self-effacing by nature, his in-built inclination being to avoid conflict or confrontation. He portrayed himself to Smythe as a loyal No. 2, who was doing his best to hold the fort in the boss’s absence. “Of course I lack the colour and aggressiveness you always showed,” he related in a January 1944 letter, adding, “You know I remember every lesson you taught me but have not always had the confidence to put them into practice.”
In the same letter he asked for patience and understanding. “Please do not intercede with any bosses here,” he pleaded. “Let me stand on my own till you get back the better job I do the better it will be for you when you take over once again and every kick in the pants will make me so much stronger if anyone attempts to horse me around. Good luck Boss, I’m grateful as hell for your kind and encouraging letters and will stick by you come hell or high water in any going.” He signed it, “Yours forever and a day, Frank J. Selke.”14
His biggest mistake may have been in offering regular enthusiastic updates on the Gardens’ ongoing financial success, much of which resulted from his own efforts. In Smythe’s absence he had worked extensively with a New York agency, filling the Gardens with acts it had never seen before. The Ice Capades, Ice Follies, and other similar spectaculars “have revolutionized the business of arena management in the United States,” he enthused, adding that he was keen to get as many of them as he could.
“We have booked Col. Jim Eskews Rodeo, with five special features acts and Roy Rogers, King of the Cowboys with his horse Trigger for a five-day showing,” he reported. “We are now selling Ice Follies of 1944. In ten days selling we are four thousand dollars ahead of Ice Capades on 1944 for a similar period. Ice Capades grossed $106,000 … in five nights. If we could maintain this slight increase we could sell out for five nights and then be well away. To the best of my recollection the Skating Club carnival top gross was $112,000. We were worried about the shift in dates from March to February … Are now hoping that it will make no difference.”
Selke was right – people loved the ice shows and rodeos, the clowns and circuses, the Hollywood stars and travelling opera divas, and thanks to the strong wartime economy anyone who wasn’t in uniform had money to spend. But his success just aggravated Smythe. He recognized the importance of keeping the Gardens busy between hockey games, but to him the Leafs came first and the rest was just something to keep the lights on and help pay the bills.
No one had ever booked non-hockey events with the enthusiasm Selke showed, and the results were self-evident. Paid attendance grew from 950,000 in 1940 to 1.7 million in 1946. Profits in the years from 1942–1945 were among the best ever. Selke reported on January 14 that a cheque for $80,000 had been sent to Sun Life, wiping out the remaining mortgage on the Gardens. The Leafs organization had also been able to buy $150,000 in war bonds, another show of its support for the boys overseas.
Smythe could hardly complain about the Gardens making money, but he grumbled to Walker that Selke was spending too much time on ice shows and not enough on hockey. The roster he left behind was wearing down, and nothing was being done to rebuild it, he complained. Selke provided fuel for the fire when he observed in mid-1944 that the Leafs were playing “quite bad … We have so little experienced first-class material that we sort of fall apart when Babe Pratt plays a bad game, and when he goes bad he is really stinkeroo.”
In fact, Day and Selke were keenly aware of the need for fresh prospects. It was concern for the future that had prompted the Kennedy trade. Day wrote Smythe in 1943 that, with so many young men wearing army uniforms, the competition for those that remained was intense. He advocated an intensified scouting program, especially in western Canada. “Ross has scouts out there as have all the teams, including Buffalo and Cleveland.”15 He added that neither he nor Selke had run into any interference from Bickle or MacBrien, and there was plenty of scouting work for Walker if he wanted it.
Smythe showed no particular hostility toward Selke in the months after his return, but a critical moment came in late 1945. The Leafs were fast playing themselves out of contention and Smythe was feeling the effect of his wounds. He’d been in and out of hospital and had recently been ordered by his doctor to take a rest. His mood was dark and aggravated by renewed frustration over his position at the Gardens. He felt that for too long he’d been taking orders from Bickle, MacBrien, and Cottrelle, people who knew far less about the game of hockey than he did, and was determined to force a change. He wanted to be named president.
Success wasn’t guaranteed. He owned the shares he’d purchased when the Gardens was launched, plus additional stock he’d bought since then, but remained just one of many small shareholders. While he had supporters on the board, wealthy men don’t like to be told what to do, and his habit of barking at people had annoyed any number of potential allies. When he approached directors and outlined his plan, some reacted with surprise and pointed out that MacBrien was expected to succeed Bickle when the time came. Realizing he might have to force a vote on the issue, he stepped up his stock-purchasing efforts, and near the end of the year he called Selke into his office and asked for his support. Selke still held the shares he’d mortgaged his house to buy in 1931. It wasn’t much of a holding, but Smythe needed whatever he could get. Selke was reluctant to commit. He’d worked congenially enough with Bickle and MacBrien in Smythe’s absence and wasn’t interested in getting caught in a civil war between them and Smythe. It was a reasonable enough position – no matter who won the showdown, Selke would have to get along with them, and taking sides wasn’t likely to make that any easier. But Smythe didn’t approach corporate politics any more gently than he did NHL hockey and warned Selke in blunt language that he was heading for trouble.
“You’re making a big mistake, Frankie. I’m going to be president here inside a year or two and if I get it without your help or votes then it would pretty well prove that I don’t need you, wouldn’t you say?”16
But his assistant wouldn’t budge, and not long after – with the Leafs floundering toward their first season out of the playoffs in fifteen years – Smythe began giving a series of interviews denigrating the quality of the team. He didn’t mention Selke by name, but they were plainly aimed at him and his handling of the club in the war years. He turned to Andy Lytle first, bemoaning that trying to run the Leafs was like trying to drive a five-year-old car that hadn’t been properly maintained.
“As the scoring records eloquently show, Leafs no longer possess the necessary class,” Lytle noted, choosing words that sounded like they’d come directly from Smythe. “Not since the Gardens was built and Smythe began soaring towards the heights has the quality of material been so low. From the heights to the nadir in one season is a perilously long fall … There is much deadwood to be struck from the club strength, and the explorers of this material scarcely know where to search for good replacements.”17
A month later, with the team officially out of the playoffs, Smythe told reporter Joe Perlove the defence had been “putrid.”18 “To me it looked like some of our veterans had been sucked dry by their efforts during the war years,” he said. He noted only eight players on the team had positive plus/minus records, meaning they’d been on the ice for more goals scored by the Leafs than were scored against them. It was a hint of the extensive record-keeping Smythe was already involved in, years before others in the league began obsessively keeping statistics. He could also quote figures for faceoffs won and lost and the “quality” of goals as opposed to the quantity. Thirteen players had negative records, and he didn’t see any good young material in the pipeline to replace them. He could name just three players in the minors with real potential – Gus Mortson, Jimmy Thomson, and Joe Klukay, plus junior prospect Tod Sloan on the St. Michael’s College junior team.
A week after unloading to Perlove, he told reporter Gordon Walker the team had been allowed to run down during the war. “We had no one feeding ’em in at the bottom for about five years. Our machine was good enough to run on its own power for four years, but it finally ran out of steam.” He announced he’d begun putting in place “a perpetual-motion” player machine, which would develop new stars and feed them to the NHL team. It would take time though: he might need five years to right the wrongs that had taken place in his absence.19
The reporters weren’t blind to Smythe’s target, and neither was Selke. The charges against him carried little merit. The notion that he’d somehow ignored a rich crop of promising seventeen- and eighteen-year-old prospects while Smythe was away didn’t take much inspection to be found wanting. The army had first call on healthy young men and hadn’t missed many. The other teams were all in the same boat, and for the most part were in worse shape than Toronto, which could still boast of winning two Stanley Cups in the years Smythe alleged they were being mishandled. Selke, well aware of the problems the team would have finding young talent, had advocated a plan to begin recruiting prospects at a younger age – before the army could get its hands on them – and had in fact assembled a promising squad of youngsters who would serve the Leafs well in coming years. Smythe could also muster little beyond bluster when he sought to portray Selke as disloyal, his chief evidence being the deal for Ted Kennedy. Kennedy had quickly established his status as the rock on which future Leafs teams would be built, a natural successor to Apps. Eddolls, meanwhile, was on his way to an indifferent career that would end while Kennedy was still starring at the Gardens. Smythe managed somehow to loudly extol the virtues of Kennedy while simultaneously alleging that Selke had betrayed him by bringing the young star into the fold. The fact that Hap Day had been just as intimately involved in the Kennedy transaction was ignored.
Selke’s refusal to pledge his shares had been the trigger for Smythe’s outburst, but the conflict may have related as much to their very different personalities. Smythe was a straightforward, black-and-white, with-me-or-against-me type of person, who was comfortable dealing with people like Art Ross or Red Dutton or Jack Adams. Ross’s way of settling a dispute was to take a swing at somebody and live with the consequences. If Adams thought a player was underperforming, he exiled him to the minors or hustled him out of the league. There was little room for niceties or the finer points of human relations in their approach, and it was an attitude Smythe understood and shared. Selke, on the other hand, sought to avoid confrontation or unnecessary conflict and didn’t share Smythe’s overwhelming need to issue instructions and have them obeyed. Ted Reeve, like most reporters, found him much easier to deal with than Smythe and called him “the personification of good will.”“He just has that knack of making you feel that he is ready to help you and at his busiest seasons he was never too rushed to put his ability and his time at your disposal.”20
Smythe looked on Selke’s efforts at diplomacy with suspicion. He confessed to Walker that he didn’t understand how Selke could happily operate as a No. 2, taking orders and carrying them out as commanded. He could never have survived in the kind of atmosphere he imposed on his subordinates.
Selke read his boss’s comments in the paper and began making exit plans. He was interested in a hockey development in Cincinnati, where a group of investors was planning an arena modelled on Maple Leaf Gardens. There were other prospects in the United States as well. When he received a note from Smythe in May, demanding to be notified any time he left the building, he decided he’d had enough. He scribbled “Lincoln freed the slaves” on the memo and sent it back to Smythe as his resignation.21* He made no public announcement, but word quickly spread. Telephoned at home by reporters, Smythe was evasive. Hap Day conceded he’d heard some rumours, but nothing official. Eventually an enterprising reporter tracked down Selke in Buffalo, where he initially refused to comment, then conceded he’d handed in his resignation and had been persuaded by a remorseful Smythe to spend a week thinking about it.
He did mull it over, but didn’t change his mind. On May 31, 1946, a performance took place in Smythe’s office that mirrored the one put on by the Rangers when they’d fired Smythe twenty years earlier, only this time it was Selke who had to stand there looking uncomfortable while pretending everyone was parting as friends.
“I would like to say I am leaving here on the best of terms with everybody,” Selke insisted, to which Smythe responded, “Your job will be here any time you care to come back.”22
Later on, Smythe added, “It’s upsetting for me and I certainly wish Frank would change his mind.” The Globe’s Jim Vipond noted that Selke was “a gentleman and a sportsman at all times” and a popular figure around the Gardens. When the Montreal Star announced six weeks later that Selke had been hired as general manager of the Canadiens, it assured readers that Smythe, “who is a sentimentalist and a great fellow no matter how you find him, was horrified when Selke resigned, but no amount of persuasion could make him change his mind.”23
Smythe may indeed have regretted losing his loyal lieutenant. He was well aware that he made life difficult for many of the people who worked for him. The price for driving away a talented and effective ally would be the establishment in Montreal of one of the most potent Cup-winning machines the league would ever see. Many of Selke’s ideas were vindicated with the Habs, where he set up a feeder system that would funnel stars to the NHL team while revamping and upgrading the Forum into a profitable, well-run operation that rekindled the city’s love affair with the team. He and Smythe would eventually reconcile, but it would take years and saw them competing against each other as the leaders of two powerhouses rather than collaborating in what might have been a single overwhelming juggernaut.
* Smythe’s memo wasn’t the first or last time he’d insist on being notified when Gardens executives left the building. He had sent Selke a similar notice in 1940 and issued another in the early 1950s.