Howie Morenz: Hockey’s First Legend

 

Discover Library and Archives Canada presents “Unscripted”—a series that shares some of our live events with audiences everywhere. Each episode features insightful discussions with authors and other subject matter experts, showcasing how Library and Archives Canada collections often inform their compelling bodies of work.

In this episode, we feature a discussion between Andrew Ross, Director, Research Support at Library and Archives Canada and Donald Murray, author of Howie Morenz: The Greatest Season in the Life of Hockey’s First Legend. Join us as we unravel what made Howie Morenz one of hockey’s most compelling figures, on and off the ice.

Duration: 31:39

File size: 45.6 MB Download MP3

Publish Date: June 2, 2026

• Transcript of Unscripted episode 1

  Jennifer Woodley (JW): The opinions and perspectives shared in this episode are entirely those of the speakers. They do not reflect, in whole or in part, the official views, policies, or positions of Library and Archives Canada or the Government of Canada.

  Discover Library and Archives Canada presents “Unscripted”—a series that shares our live events with audiences everywhere. Each episode features insightful discussions with authors and other subject matter experts, showcasing how Library and Archives Canada collections often inform their compelling bodies of work.

  Join us for the launch of Howie Morenz: The Greatest Season in the Life of Hockey’s First Legend by Donald Murray, presented by Library and Archives Canada.

  Donald Murray grew up in Lachine on the island of Montréal, Quebec, during the Richard, Beliveau and Lafleur eras of hockey’s Montreal Canadiens. He acquired a cultural research background and factual analytical discipline over the course of his career as a barrister.

  Howie Morenz: The Greatest Season in the Life of Hockey’s First Legend is a biography and cultural assessment of Howie Morenz’s hockey career, told through a game-by-game examination of his 1930–1931 season in the National Hockey League. The narrative carries him from his birth in Mitchell, Ontario, through his efforts to secure a second consecutive Stanley Cup Championship for himself, his teammates and his fans.

  The reader will have the opportunity to learn about the unique physical skills that he brought to competitive hockey as well as to understand the physical and psychological burdens that his approach to the game imposed upon him.

  By rigorously testing anecdotal accounts against actual game reports and reliable collateral sources, Murray has reconstructed a reliable account of the season when Howie Morenz definitively established his own contribution to the enduring character and mystique of the Canadiens hockey club. In doing so, Murray has been able to both fill gaps in the historical record of Morenz’s athletic achievements as well as identify new understandings of how Morenz proposed the professional game could be played.

  And now, onto the conversation.

  Andrew Ross (AR): Library and Archives Canada understands that without truth, there can be no reconciliation. That is why we are committed to giving voice to and sharing the stories of those whom history has silenced. Library and Archives Canada, for those of you who don't know, is a national repository for stories, some of which are written in books, and others are waiting to be revealed through careful research of archival documents. That's what we're going to be talking about tonight. We are committed to protecting these stories so that future generations of Canadians can see, hear, and learn these stories for themselves.

  Tonight, LAC is proud to partner with Sutherland House Publishing for the book launch of Howie Morenz: The Greatest Season in the Life of Hockey's First Legend by Donald Murray. I'd like to extend my welcome and thanks on behalf of Library and Archives Canada to you, the audience, for being here this evening.

  Donald Murray (DM): Very much so. Thank you.

  AR: So, Donald, you grew up in Lachine as a fan of the Montréal Canadiens.

  DM: I did.

  AR: But went on to practise criminal defence and human rights law in Nova Scotia.

  DM: I did.

  AR: So, what brought you to decide to write a book about Howie Morenz?

  DM: It was an interesting journey, but the whole time you're growing up in Montréal as a child and as a preteen and then a teenager, you hear the stories about the history, because hockey was always better before. Even when you had great teams of Guy Lafleur—Béliveau’s teams were pretty good. And of course, Béliveau’s teams—"the Rocket” was great. And so, it was very hard to beat the historical figures.

  But there was a fourth era among the Canadiens, which is the Howie Morenz era, which ran from 1924 to 1934, and in his first eight years, he won three Stanley Cups with the Montréal Canadiens. The very first cup is probably dependent on just two people, him and Georges Vézina in goal. But numbers two and three that he achieved were really a testament first to his ability, but also his ability to rally team members to play with him and to play at their best. And it's interesting that after that season of winning the Stanley Cup in 1931, which was his greatest season, the Canadiens didn't win another Stanley Cup for 12 years until “the Rocket” appeared in 1942.

  So, Howie Morenz was a very necessary and important part of the Stanley Cup tradition for the Canadiens. But as great as he was, he could never do it by himself. He needed a whole team of people around him who were also playing their best. And if you read the book, you will see how, during this greatest season, one of the greatest things that he did was make everybody else on the team better.

  AR: It's funny you mentioned those eras because some of us were here at an event a few months ago where we interviewed someone who was 90—how old was he, Sean, 97? 97 years old. Someone asked him who his favourite hockey player was and he said, Howie Morenz. So, we were all sitting there stunned. The audience knew Howie Morenz, but the idea that someone alive had cited him as the Jean Béliveau, the Guy Lafleur, the Wayne Gretzky of his time was sort of amazing. Because that pre-war era, it's a hundred years ago now, right? Like that is really fading from contemporary memory.

  DM: And this was a guy that played very elite hockey.

  AR: That's right. So, tell us a little bit more about Morenz and why he was so important to hockey.

  DM: The professional people will tell you that the important thing about Howie Morenz was he was able to sell hockey to people who didn't know hockey, and it was on the back and the skates of Howie Morenz that the NHL expanded to the important cities of the US at the time: New York, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and a failed attempt in Philadelphia at that time. But it was Howie Morenz playing hockey the way he played hockey that excited people, even though they didn't understand the game particularly well. And King Clancy of the Leafs and Senators…

  AR: And the Senators, yes. Be careful here, we're in Ottawa.

  Audience: [Laughter]

  DM: … expressed it best when he said, watching Morenz play hockey was like watching Babe Ruth play baseball. It didn't matter whether Babe Ruth struck out; he was magnificent when he struck out. And when Morenz failed to score a goal, he was magnificent when he failed to score a goal. It was interesting. It was fascinating. People saw things that they could not have imagined a player on skates could do, and that was the attraction.

  AR: It's interesting. When I read your book, I was very much interested in thinking about hockey stars and how they're different from today or they're the same. Right? And this is really the era you're talking about, is when those stars are created. And Morenz, as you say, is that first star. He's the guy who's on the ice when they go to New York in 1925 and open up in Madison Square Garden. And really get Americans and the American businessmen who were involved in backing the sport excited about the sport. As Tex Rickard of New York City called it, “that foreign game,” he called it. So that's really interesting. Is being a star back then the same as today, or what was Howie Morenz and some of his contemporaries, what were they creating?

  DM: I'll go back to the comment I just made, which is, he was exciting to watch. And for people who knew hockey or thought they knew hockey in Canada, he would do things that they could not imagine doing on the ice, but he did them, and that was exciting. For people who didn't know hockey and seeing somebody on skates doing things at speed, that was fascinating for them. And that drew them to the arena.

  Many times—Howie Morenz would appear in New York eight times a season. And his appearances there, in the newspapers they'd say, “Howie Morenz is going to be playing tonight.” Or “Howie Morenz is going to be playing on Saturday night” and the arenas would fill. And he consistently played to sold-out houses. The New York Americans sometimes had a hard time drawing crowds, but if Howie Morenz was coming to town, the building was full. Because people wanted to see Howie Morenz.

  What's different, or what people might think is different today, is the salaries have gone out of control. But in 1931, there were players from Ottawa who were playing for the Philadelphia Quakers for $800 a season. Howie Morenz was making $15,000 that year. So, the multiples may well have been the same between the bottom level of the league and the top players in the league.

  The other thing that Morenz did was he was a star outside of hockey. By the playoffs of 1931, the radio stations in Montréal were asking him to host radio programs. And for example, there was a musical half hour and Howie Morenz was going to be the host, and that was advertised in the newspaper because that would attract listeners. Before the very first playoff game that year, they wanted Howie Morenz to do a pre-game interview for half an hour, and he found that extremely stressful because that had not been part of hockey up until that time. But all of a sudden in 1931, because of how the Canadiens were playing and who he was, he needed to promote the game as well and be the star before a game as well as on the ice.

  AR: And you're talking 1931, which is, of course, the next season is the season of the General Motors Hockey Broadcast, which becomes Hockey Night in Canada. So, you're talking the—he's one of the first people, as you say, who has to be media savvy or media trained now. Where these players nowadays are probably getting this from the age of 15, how to talk to the press. It's part of their job. Whereas he's the one who's learning it's now part of his job. You also mentioned his philanthropy, visiting hospitals and some of that charitable stuff too, which is interesting.

  DM: And the philanthropy…being involved with kids who are sick and that being in the newspaper, that was a very interesting thing because Babe Ruth had done it with one guy, Sylvester, in the States, and Léo Dandurand being a very savvy media guy who owned the Canadiens at the time—there was a kid in Montréal who was a fan of Howie Morenz. His father was a city alderman in Montréal, and he was an altar boy at church. And between his duties as the altar boy, there was a very short period of time to get to school on time. But he was a devoted kid. And he tried to walk between train cars as a train was travelling along. He lost both legs. And that day Léo Dandurand said, “Howie, you've got to go see this guy.” And he did. And it was a very short event. There was a photograph taken, which is a whole other story. There was a photograph taken, and he goes off to Toronto to play the next game. Over the next week, kids in hospitals in Ontario and Quebec are saying, “Well, could Howie Morenz come and see me?” Because it's all in the news. And of course, now the Montréal Canadiens, that's one of their cardinal values, is if you join the Canadiens, you go to see kids in hospitals. And it's become a junior hockey thing as well.

  AR: Yeah, that's right, a lot of the fundraising. P. K. Subban famously gave millions of dollars to the Montréal—was it the children's hospital or just the hospital? Supporting that. So, yes, there's a hundred-year tradition. So, it's fascinating.

  Curious why you think this was—I don't just necessarily disagree—but maybe you'd like to tell us why is this Morenz's greatest season? So 1930–31.

  DM: The first biographer of Morenz, who's Dean Robinson, and I owe a debt to him for all the work that he did because he knew the family, he talked to people that had seen Morenz play many times. And in his first book, he said, arguably the 1930–31 season is his best year. But he asked me the very same question a month ago. He said, “Why do you think this is the best season?” This is the best season because this is the season it all came together. He won his second Hart Trophy as the most valuable player. He won his third Stanley Cup, his second in a row and third in eight years. He never won anything again. He also won the scoring championship that year.

  And so, a lot of things came together. And I'll go back to the point I made earlier: he made everybody else on his team play better that year as well, because they never won anything else again.

  AR: And what I liked about the structure of your book is you take it game by game and are able to pull out some of the themes of each game. And you, of course, like any good hockey historian, are very precise about the statistics for Howie Morenz: goals, penalties, assists. But you also talk a lot about the games where he didn't appear on the scoreboard and the effect he had on the play. And inspiring the team, sometimes on crutches in the stands but sometimes on the ice. All those intangibles, as the hockey coaches would say today, of being a character player and a leader on the ice. I think that's quite interesting as well.

  Because we're at the archives, we have to talk about the archives and about the library. How did archives and libraries, particularly maybe LAC, help you get to the heart of the Howie Morenz story?

  DM: Because you have a lot of stuff here.

  AR: We have a lot of stuff. And you can all come see it. We don't hoard it. We don't keep it secret. Come see it.

  DM: It's a great facility. There are the newspapers here, not everything is on newspapers.com. There's the city directories here, which tell you where all the players lived during those particular years that we were talking about. We are here in the Morley Callaghan Room. And Howie Morenz is a character in Mr. Callaghan's first novel. And he appears twice. And so, he's not only a person in the book, but he sets a mood. Because the book called Strange Fugitive is about an immigrant man trying to find his place in Canadian society. And unfortunately, he goes to a hockey game in Toronto, cheers for Morenz, and everybody wants to beat him up too.

  AR: Which might have been confusing for an immigrant.

  DM: And it didn't end well. I don't want to give anything away, but Strange Fugitive does not end well for the main character. So, there's a lot of connections that this building pulls together, its collections pull together, when you're talking about someone like Howie Morenz, who you think is just a hockey player. But he caught the attention of novelists. He caught the attention of the people who covered his games.

  The Charles Mayer Fonds are the most substantial source of information that I was able to find, better than the Hockey Hall of Fame Research [LG1] Centre, to find out about all the players that he played with and how he played. Mr. Charles Mayer was an 18 year old when Howie Morenz won the first Stanley Cup in 1924. He became a sportswriter, followed him throughout his career, took the wrong side of him in 1934 when he got traded. He thought it was a good trade. But if you follow the fonds all the way through to the 1960s, here's Charles Mayer still, he's writing TV treatments and trying to get publications done about Howie Morenz, trying to generate interest about this guy that he'd followed forever.

  Charles Mayer also translated and had Howie Morenz become a journalist, talking about his playoff experiences as they were happening, in La Patrie. So, it's a great source of information. The mistake he made, which maybe a lot of sportswriters at the time made, was he had a big clipping file and he clipped the stories and not say where they were from or what page they appeared on.

  AR: I'm sure it wasn't a mistake to him. It's a mistake to future historians. I've been there.

  DM: And some of you may know him from the 1960s as Charlie Three Stars because he used to pick the three stars for the French broadcast. So, there's also other fonds that were useful. Tommy Gorman's materials are here.

  AR: Owner of the Ottawa Senators.

  DM: Yes. F.R. Scott's materials are here. F.R. Scott has a wonderful poem called “Enemies,” about how the English and French get along in Montréal…

  AR: … or don’t.

  DM: This book used to be three times as long as it is. That became an important part of one chapter, was the way you could look at the game the whole way the poem was structured. But that's one of the things that fell by the wayside. But again, I repeat the city directories, all of the archival kinds of material that aren't necessarily in the fonds. The bibliography, genealogy materials are also helpful. Because census data isn't always what it says. And so, all of those things were very helpful.

  AR: I second what you say about the Charles Mayer Fonds, it was a surprise to me when I was doing some of my own research in, if you read older hockey history, which is very much written by journalists, you have the name Elmer Ferguson comes up a lot as a person who's very close to the league. And it turns out that Charles Mayer was essentially the French version of Elmer Ferguson. He worked for the league sort of as a publicist, did a lot of translations for the league. So, he had a very close relationship with him. And it's not a story that I think is well known, probably because Elmer was a very good publicist of himself, and for those reasons. So, this is something that when you dig into the archives, you start seeing these, not necessarily alternate histories but complementary histories, and ones that kind of show you a different perspective. So, we're glad you were able to use this for that. Were there other—sorry, go ahead.

  DM: One other thing, just because you mentioned Elmer Ferguson, he ate out for a lot of years on his stories about Howie Morenz, which if you track them down and try to fit them with a particular historical fact, they don't work. And Red Fisher would tell you—he's another journalist from Montréal—Red Fisher would tell you that Elmer was more interested in getting paid for his stories than being accurate about his stories.

  AR: And some of the work that you're doing and other historians are doing is scratching at the surface of that, maybe coming up with different stories that are a little bit perhaps more accurate.

  Any other archives, other than LAC, that you wound up using? A lot of newspapers, right? Your book is full of the—I think the advantage you had of doing one season is you're really able to go in depth into newspapers. And if any of you tried this kind of research, it depends on the subscriptions you have access to. It depends on how much you can read. Sometimes you get lucky with clipping files. Mayer’s got some as well. And the one season probably allowed you to go a lot deeper than ordinarily you'd be able to.

  DM: And doing research about games in Ottawa, it was particularly good because there are at least four newspaper outlets from Montréal, four newspaper outlets in Ottawa, all covering the same game, and you could match all of their work and see what some people say happened and what the outliers were. And so, the result is that we can be fairly confident about what most of the newspapers were reporting as being a success. And we're going to talk in a moment about a very exciting moment that all the papers covered consistently in a game in Ottawa 95 years ago.

  AR: Other than LAC, were there any other archival repositories that you went to, or…?

  DM: As you go through the book, you understand, we talked about music quite a bit. We’ll talk about music a little more. There's actually been a musical play written about Howie Morenz, and it came out in 1980. And I was very fortunate to track that down with the help of the author of the play, who didn't know whether or not this existed. There's actually a recording of the Blyth Festival performance of this musical about Howie Morenz. And the University of Guelph is the archive where that is kept. Surprise.

  AR: There you go.

  DM: And they were kind enough, because it was COVID, to send me a digital copy of that recording. And I quoted one of the songs in the book.

  AR: Okay, so I was going to ask you about the most compelling document you found. Is that maybe the one that you're most excited by?

  Donald: One of the most fun.

  AR: Excellent. I have, I think from an auction site, I have a copy of Howie Morenz’s playing contract, of which you might have a few of those too, but the old standard contract. But I have the clipping. I didn't buy it, I didn't pay the $15,000 for it. Historical research… you just take pictures of it.

  Morenz grew up in Stratford, southwestern Ontario. My wife came with me tonight and she says, “Is that the picture I took of you outside Mitchell, Ontario, of a giant Montréal Canadiens C on the side of the road?” Have you ever seen this? Some of you may have. Outside Mitchell, Ontario, which is not a very big town, there is a six-foot-wide, six-foot-tall giant Montréal Canadiens C, which is basically because Howie Morenz was born and lived there. The “Mitchell Meteor”; when he went to Stratford, the “Stratford Streak.” So, he spent his early career in southwestern Ontario, and then, of course, his hockey career travelling between the various NHL cities: Ottawa, Montréal, where he is based, Boston, Detroit, New York, Chicago.

  DM: Atlantic City.

  AR: Atlantic City, that's right. We could talk about gambling later if you wanted to. Because I think there's elements there that might be interesting.

  So, tell us about his connections to Ottawa, and you’ve alluded to music. What is it about music in Ottawa that was important to your story and to Howie's story?

  DM: If we go back a hundred years, Ottawa was the centre of hockey and had been the centre of hockey for some time.

  AR: Amen.

  DM: So, if you wanted to prove yourself as a hockey player, you came to the Ottawa Auditorium and you played here and you won. And so, what the Forum eventually became for a number of hockey players, the Ottawa Aud[itorium] was the place to be. And the two places in the National Hockey League that consistently had fans who sang their way through the game, or played music through a game, were Ottawa and Montréal. And there was a game, 95 years ago a week from now, December 11, 1930, where all of those factors came together and the Canadiens came to town and Howie Morenz was playing well. The Ottawa Senators grabbed a lead by the end of the second period, 4–2. And the Canadiens were going nowhere.

  Between—the Governor General's Foot Guards Band came and played the national anthem. They played intermissions between the first and second period, French folk songs in the second period intermission. The newspapers talk about the rowdy college students who were singing even during the team warmups. And that singing continued throughout the game. Ottawa, of course, had its “Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here.” The Canadiens already had “Les Canadiens sont là!” And so, the fans are going back and forth, and the Canadiens are pressing for the equalizer. They narrowed the score to 4–3 late in the third period.

  And all of a sudden, Coach Hart decides to send five forwards out instead of—no defenceman, and he puts Howie Morenz on defence instead of forward. And so, there's George Hainsworth in the goal. Everybody else is in the Ottawa end. And the puck comes to the blue line, the Ottawa blue line—I’m just going to diagram this out for you.

  AR: Are you going to be able to talk and draw at the same time? Do you want me to hold the mic for you?

  Donald: Hold the mic? So, George Hainsworth is down here, and this is the Ottawa end. And you know the coaches always send a player out and say you're going to play defence. And so, Coach Hart's instruction was to Howie Morenz, and there's reasons for this, you're going to play defence. So, Howie Morenz is down here against the boards, right behind the net, and he's supposed to be playing defence, right?

  The puck comes loose here, 50 feet away from him. And Alex Smith, an Ottawa Senator defenceman, has an unobstructed race down to George Hainsworth. So, Smith takes off, nobody else is catching him. Howie Morenz starts from behind the net, 50 feet away. And—Trent Frayne tells this story as well, as one of his greatest moments—Howie Morenz caught up to him before Alex Smith could shoot and knocks the puck away. And then recovered the puck, brought it back up the ice, and there was a big flurry in front of the net and Montréal scored, tied the game. Game goes into overtime.

  AR: So, he was playing defence the whole time.

  DM: But after the game, the newspapers asked Howie Morenz, “How did you do that?” And he said, “Well, it was the hardest skating I ever did.” And that was an interesting comment for him to make because three times that season he had done similar things to catch players on breakaways. And he, being the most offensive player on the team, is the one that's committed enough to go back and prevent a score.

  AR: Very interesting.

  DM: Now that wasn't the end of the story. [Laughter]

  AR: Okay. Keep going.

  DM: Because after the teams go into overtime, he gets a breakaway and scores the winning goal. Canadiens win 5–4. And of course, everybody's singing at that point. So that was a pretty wonderful moment.

  AR: And now I'm asking myself, when did they stop singing? If you've been to a modern game, you get, I won't say tortured, but you get to hear a lot of classic rock, a lot of Van Halen, a lot of “Cotton Eye Joe,” and things like this. And there seems to be not as much of a tradition of singing in games anymore. I wonder when it disappeared.

  DM: I seem to remember some singing at the Bell Centre, the last couple of nights.

  AR: Okay. At the end? Or did they do “Les Canadiens sont là!”?

  DM: They do “Les Canadiens sont là!” But then they do the “Na, Na, Na.”

  In the 2008 World Championships, which were partly in Halifax and partly in Québec City, I had the opportunity to attend a game involving the German team. The German fans sang throughout the game. They sat in the far end from where we were sitting, and they just had song after song after song while the game was going on. And I said, that's the soccer tradition.

  AR: Yes, it is.

  DM: And they brought it into the hockey arena, which was what Ottawa Senator[s] fans and Montréal Canadiens fans were doing. And the Montréal Canadiens fans at the Forum, they would invent songs for their players. And so, every year to mark the accomplishments or some special event in a player's life, they would create a song and sing it about them.

  AR: Thanks, Donald, for this stimulating and rich conversation. Really great to hear about Howie Morenz, and you always have ideas when your historian is like, “People should do more about Howie Morenz.” So, when someone else does it, it's even more satisfying to read about their work and not have to do it yourself. And I very much enjoyed the book and some of the insights you brought to it. And so, thank you all again, and have a very great evening.

  [Applause]

  JW: Thank you for tuning in to “Unscripted,” a podcast series presented by Discover Library and Archives Canada. I'm your host, Jennifer Woodley. With each episode, we share fascinating conversations from a variety of vibrant events happening throughout the year. In this series, you’ll hear from authors, artists and many other inspiring voices who help shape our cultural landscape.

  A special thank-you to today’s guest, Donald Murray. Voiceover for the French equivalent of this episode was done by Gérard-Hubert Etienne and Théo Martin. To listen to the French equivalent of our episodes, visit our website or find us on your favourite podcast app. Simply search for “Découvrez Bibliothèque et Archives Canada.”

  The music you heard in this episode is courtesy of BlueDotSessions.com. To continue exploring, visit the Library and Archives Canada home page and type “podcast” in the search bar. As always, if you have questions, comments or suggestions, you can contact us at the email address located at the bottom of the episode page.

Facilitator: Andrew Ross, Director of Research Support, Digital Discovery & Access Branch

Guest: Donald Murray, author of Howie Morenz: The Greatest Season in the Life of Hockey’s First Legend

Host: Jennifer Woodley, Multimedia Production Specialist, Visitor & Collection Care Branch

Voiceover for the French version of this podcast: Gérard-Hubert Etienne, Senior Analyst, Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP), ATIP Branch and Théo Martin, Archivist, Performing Arts Archives, Private Archives and Published Heritage Branch

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