1945 Hockey Scrapbook

I recently was gifted two fantastic old hockey scrapbooks from a friend of my wife. The friends' father had passed away and nobody in the family had any interest in a couple old scrapbooks that he had assembled as a child. She knew I was a fan of hockey history and offered to give them to me, of course I enthusiastically agreed. 

Her father was living in Hamilton, Ontario at the time and as most youngsters in Southern Ontario, was a huge Toronto Maple Leafs fan. The large scrapbooks were compiled during the 1945/46 and 46/47 NHL seasons and once I started flipping through them, I found some really cool stuff. On the cover of the scrapbook labelled 1946/47 was pasted the image at the top. I'm not sure if it's from a magazine, newspaper or storybook, but it's a fantastic image. 

Inside the books were the expected cut-out newspaper stories and pictures which were carefully glued onto the pages. There are at least sixty pages in the two books and in amongst all of the newsprint were some real gems. On one page, I found a Maple Leafs pocket schedule for the 1945/46 season. I carefully removed it from the glue and placed it among my vintage NHL schedule collection, this one is by far the oldest I have now.

Scattered throughout both books were also, to my delight, many players autographs. The youngster had neatly cut them out from the notebook of lined paper on which most were signed...in PENCIL. He then glued with most of the signatures a small cut-out headshot of the player.  I decided that in order to display these beautiful autographs that I'd carefully cut out each to fit in a hard plastic card holder. A few of these are below.

A very early signature from a likely still 19-year old Teeder Kennedy.

Gus Bodnar, soon to assist on all three of Bill Mosienko's record-breaking hat trick goals.

Mell "Sudden Death" Hill in his final NHL season.

Defenceman, Wally Stanowski.

Bob Gold, just returning from Navy duty to the Leafs lineup.

Billy "Record 7 Assists in a Game" Taylor.

Pretty damn cool, eh? There are also autographs without attached photos, the one of main interest being the legendary Foster Hewitt.

35-year old Lorne Carr entering his last NHL campaign.

The question is, where did this youngster meet all these NHL players and obtain their signatures? His daughter mentioned to me that she believes he attended a game in Hamilton, Ontario around this time. He may have went to an exhibition game between the Maple Leafs and their farm club, Pittsburgh Hornets on October 8, 1946.  The clipping below was dutifully placed into the scrapbook. 

Another neat thing I found in the scrapbook were lots of small cards from Kellogg's cereal. I have one of these already in my collection, so could tell that he had trimmed the edges of these before glueing them in. Even still they look really nice after carefully removing them and once again putting into hard card holders.

As well, there are lots of nice illustrations and cartoons pasted throughout, the best ones are below.

All in all, an extremely cool find for a hockey history lover like myself. Even though his family was not interested in the scrapbooks, I certainly appreciate the passion and hard work he put into being a young hockey fan.