The last original Canuck
Credit to Author: John Mackie| Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2019 17:00:32 +0000
The Vancouver Canucks are celebrating their 50th season in the National Hockey League. But the name didn’t originate with the NHL — the Canucks was the name of a minor league team that started playing at the Forum in 1945-46.
Only one player is left from the original Canucks — Ernie Dougherty. But he cautions he wasn’t a regular on the 1945-46 squad.
“You’ve got to let the people know I was strictly a utility player,” said Dougherty. “But I outlasted everybody else.”
He did. Dougherty was born at St. Paul’s Hospital on Nov. 23, 1924, which makes him 95 next month.
He grew up at 2727 Triumph Street, a block-and-a-half west of the PNE grounds at Hastings Park. The PNE would have a prominent place in his life — he got his first job at the fair in 1936, setting up a hamburger stand.
The next year he started working for White Spot’s Nat Bailey, who ran concessions at several PNE buildings.
“I was a peanut hustler to start with in the Forum,” Dougherty recounts.
“At lacrosse games I was selling peanuts to the crowd. ‘Peanuts here, crisp and nice, only a nickel!’ Then I was a rink rat at the Forum (cleaning the ice with a shovel between periods of hockey games).”
He was a star in junior hockey — on March 25, 1945, he scored six goals in a “challenge series” game between New Westminster and Nanaimo. The next week he was in Regina, one of three British Columbia juniors invited to a tryout camp for the Chicago Blackhawks.
“I think there was 26 of us, all juniors from across Canada. The only guy who made the NHL from that camp was Bill Gadsby, he ended up playing for Chicago.”
The original Vancouver Canucks in the Pacific Coast Hockey League, 1945-46. Ernie Dougherty is at the end of the bottom row on the right. Courtesy of the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame.
Chicago offered him a chance to play for their Kansas City farm team, so he phoned Nat Bailey from Regina to ask for his advice.
“I told Nat what they offered me, plus a new pair of Tacks (skates),” he said.
“Nat says ‘Ernie, stick with me and you can wear Tacks all summer.’ When I got back to town he sat me down and said ‘(If) you go to Kansas City, what do you think you and the rest of the guys on that team will be doing seven, eight years from now? You’re going to be looking for a job. Right now, you’ve got a good job.’”
So instead of playing in Kansas City, he wound up with the first edition of the Canucks.
“The first year that was about a 60 game schedule, and I must have played about 40 of the games,” said Dougherty.
“A lot of times I didn’t get ice time, I rode the bench. There were really two (forward) lines and four defensemen, and me and one extra person. One goalie — we had another goalie who sat in the stands, just in case.”
Dougherty has a wall of old hockey photos in his home in West Van, including a lovely team photo of the 1945-46 Canucks. Asked who were the best players, he got up to check it out.
“Andy Clovechok was our leading scorer,” he said.
“Bill Carse had played in the NHL. Another one of the top players was Elmer Kreller. Bernie Bathgate (Andy Bathgate’s brother) was one of the better players too.”
The older vets looked after the youthful Dougherty.
“(One game) a guy cross-checked me into boards, and (defenseman) Chuck Millman flattened him,” he recounts.
“While he was laying on the ice Chuck said ‘Hit the kid again and you’re going to get a lot worse.’ Chuck was a big guy, he was a physical-ed instructor in the navy.”
The original Canucks played in the Pacific Coast Hockey League, which had nine teams from here to San Diego. They won the PCHL championship over the Hollywood Wolves, then took the U.S. Amateur Championship over the Boston Olympics.
But they weren’t amateurs, they were pros. Well, semi-pros.
“I got paid $45 a week,” Dougherty recounts. “It wasn’t bad. I think the top players were $100 or $125. (But) a person had to have (another) job.”
In Dougherty’s case, this was working for Nat Bailey and his then-partner, Les Smith at their concessions company, Maple Spot. When the Canucks wanted him to sign for the 1946-47 season, Bailey made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
“The next year Nat told me ‘Don’t sign, I want you to manage everything,” said Dougherty.
“Because we had seven stands on the fairgrounds — two hamburger stands, a half-interest in two bingos, two gambling wheels and the soft ice cream trailer. And we had the (concessions at the) Forum, the Gardens and Callister Park as well.”
In 2012 the Vancouver Giants played in replica 1945-46 Canucks jerseys, and Ernie Dougherty (left) donned one for a photo with coach Don Hay (centre) and Giants forward Marek Tvrdon.
He still wound up playing for the Canucks, though in a diminished role.
“The Canucks still only had two lines and four defensemen, so they kept me on as a practice player for another three years,” he said.
“I still practiced with them, and got $35 a week. In that three years, they called me up four times.”
His last game as Canuck was on Jan. 4, 1952 against the Tacoma Rockets. As luck would have it, he scored his only goal as a Canuck that night.
“I passed it to a guy, he shot, the rebound came out to me and I let it go and caught the top corner,” he said. “I’ll never forget the goal.”
After Maple Spot sold the concessions he had been managing Dougherty decided to give his hockey career another whirl.
“I went back to work out with the Canucks, and got sent back to Troy, New York in the Eastern Hockey League,” he said.
“That would be 1952-53. I had a disagreement there with the coach and they traded me to Milwaukee. I didn’t want to go there, so I phoned the guy who owned the hockey team in San Bernardino and ended up playing that season in San Bernardino.”
Ernie Dougherty with some of his memorabilia at his home in West Vancouver,
He then went to England, where he played two seasons for the Nottingham Panthers.
“That was great,” he said. “Travel was easy, we had a fantastic bus. We played exhibition games in Europe. I got married over there, too.”
Back in Vancouver he got involved in the taxi business, and bootlegging.
“I was in the taxi business with Dana Quesnel, Reliable Taxi, 808 Hornby, right next to the Hornby Liquor Store,” he said.
“He had eight cabs, and he said ‘do you want own one-eighth of the business? I want to get back to Saskatchewan, shoot pool and play golf with my friends. But somebody’s got to run the bootlegging.’
“See, the liquor store closed at six o’clock, so we had a stock of booze for us to peddle. You could hail a cab and say ‘Any idea where we can get a bottle of booze?’ The cab would say ‘I can get you one.’”
In 1958 he opened up a Dairy Queen in north Burnaby. He sold the property in 1986 and went into semi-retirement. But he kept an ice cream concession at the PNE until 2004.
“I got to know Dal Richards really good,” he said. “Dal used to come down for a strawberry sundae every day at the ice cream trailer.”
Sadly Richards passed away in 2015 at the age of 97. Another long-time PNE stalwart, Jack Hunter, also passed away in 2015 at 84.
This means Ernie Dougherty is not only the last living original Canuck, he’s the oldest living PNE vet, as well.
A wall of team photos at Dougherty’s home.
Dougherty (right) with Marcus Naslund of the Canucks in 2003, when the team adopted retro jerseys.
Ernie Dougherty (center) used to play for White Spot in the commercial league. In 2011 he donned a replica jersey and showed an old team photo to Vancouver Giants Brendan Gallagher, Neil Manning, James Henry and Wes Vannieuwenhuizen (left to right) at the Pacific Coliseum. The Giants wore the jerseys in a game.
(L-R) PNE veterans Dal Richards, Ernie Dougherty, and Jack Hunter outside Dougherty’s ice cream trailer at the fair in 2013.
Vancouver Sun story on the first Vancouver Canucks teamn on Oct. 13, 1945. Ernie Dougherty is on the right, four from the top.
Vancouver Sun story on the Canucks game where Ernie Dougherty scored a goal on Jan. 4, 1952.
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