Jack Parker’s Wiseguys, page 16
Hockey’s all-time king of good times, Dick Lamby places his NCAA trophy in the same category with his participation in the 1976 Olympic Winter Games and a bizarre NHL fight with his hero, Bobby Orr.
After helping his photographer friend hop the Providence Civic Center glass, Jim Craig (right) takes a well-deserved victory lap. He had just beaten the four hottest goalies in the East in succession, the early chapters in his championship story that would culminate in Lake Placid. Dave Sigadel
With his Harley and his reputation as a wild child, Dave Silk embodied the good times of college hockey in the 1970s.
Conquering hero Jack O’Callahan returned to BU days after capturing gold in Lake Placid. Remarkably, he rates the NCAA title at BU as more important to him because “It was the first big thing I ever won.”
Parker’s ouster of Todd Johnson from BU hockey in 1980 triggered a chain of events that led Parker to take inventory of his life and led to a personal evolution both inside and outside the rink.
15
THE BLIZZARD OF ’78
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Jackie Parker was a man of morning rituals: coffee, cigarette, a quick glance at the paper, TV on in the background. This was no ordinary Monday, however; the annual Beanpot tournament would commence in less than twelve hours. At 7:30 a.m., Channel 7 weatherman Harvey Leonard’s face filled the screen. Parker looked up from the paper to hear Leonard’s ominous warning: “We are going to get hit hard.” In Parker’s hand was the Boston Globe, which ran a feature on its cover with the headline, “Pretend It’s Summer.”
Parker’s daughters Allison and Jacqueline would be staying home today in anticipation of the major winter storm. Like so many other New Englanders, Parker did not fully trust weathermen. Satellite technology was in its infancy, and meteorologists were hired more for their personality than their accuracy. On last night’s news they were predicting up to two feet of snow, but those forecasts were strictly a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. Two weeks earlier a predicted rainstorm preceded a twenty-one-inch dump throughout New England, snow so heavy that the roof of the Hartford Civic Center collapsed. There was clearly a credibility gap between the prognosticators and the public.
Just before 8:00 a.m., Parker stubbed out his cigarette, flipped off the TV, and headed for the door. He did not notice his wife Phyllis’ ashen complexion as he walked out; she would have a tough day indoors minding the two children. Parker also had his hands full, guiding two dozen of his own post-adolescents for the next three months. He did notice the sunless sky, however, as he stepped outside to his car—boilerplate gray and threatening. Like so many veterans of the Northeast, Parker conducted his own forecast, and he could smell snow’s arrival.
By 10 o’clock, Parker was in his Babcock Street office nursing a cup of coffee, perusing a carbon copy of the Boston College scoring leaders. A tiny flicker of motion outside the window caught his attention. Big white flakes were tacking down from the colorless sky. He decided to follow his gut. He picked up the phone and requested a bus to take his team to the Garden that night.
“First of all, we never took the bus to the Beanpot,” said Parker. “Kids would come in their own cars. But I knew there was a bad storm coming, so I decided to get a bus.”
Unbeknownst to Parker and the rest of the urban masses on the Northeast corridor, the skies above were churning like mad. February 6, 1978, was nearly two decades prior to the book The Perfect Storm, but this may have been a precursor to Sebastian Junger’s classic. Massive amounts of warm moisture were collecting over the South Carolina coast in a cyclone classified as extratropical. It was piled into by a blast of dry arctic air moving west-to-east from the Appalachians. Next, a bitterly cold front arrived from the plains of Manitoba with freakishly high barometric pressure, locking these two warring fronts into place for three days, unable to drift off the coast into the Atlantic. The result was over two feet of snow, hundred-mile-per-hour winds, and bitter cold. Perfect indeed.
In the 1970s, meteorological science was not revered as it is today. Nowadays, major social events are frequently canceled in anticipation of major storms, especially when modern tech generates satellite images of thousand-mile cyclones. Such was not the case a generation ago in Boston. It was a city full of hardy New Englanders who believed hockey and severe winter weather were suitable bedfellows. The magic of the Beanpot is the accessibility of its historic venue, Boston Garden. Students could all travel there by trolley, or even by foot, if necessary. In the minds of many fans, the beloved ’Pot was unaffected by weather, or so they thought. In the words of P. T. Barnum, whose circus was the oldest client in Boston Garden history, “The Show Must Go On.” And, mistakenly, it did.
The Terriers were playing the late game that night, so following routine, the team convened at the local eatery, T. Anthony’s, early that afternoon for their pregame meal. But it was a daunting task just to get across Commonwealth Avenue. “I remember walking back from class saying this storm is unbelievable,” said John Melanson, a Massachusetts native who was not easily impressed by winter. “It was a brutal blizzard.”
But while seasoned commuters realized it was time to get the hell out of Dodge, the Terriers conducted business as usual. Steak, potato, peas—that was the standard pregame fare for all BU athletes at T. Anthony’s. Melanson recalls tiny details from that meal, like Silk being the only one to eat the peas, and the innovative Fidler going off the board with an order of pasta, the first hockey Terrier to carbo-load. Had they known that there would be no sleep for the next twenty-four hours, the team might have been wise to follow Fidler’s lead.
It is exactly four miles from the Case Athletic Facilities at Boston University to the Boston Garden. If you hop on Storrow Drive, you can drive there in ten minutes, twenty during rush hour. But this afternoon the BU team bus was caught in a mass exodus from Boston due to the mounting snow. “It took about forty minutes,” said Silk in a Beanpot history video. “It felt like we had gone to UNH, not Boston Garden.” Despite the dire conditions outside, 11,666 hard-core fans clicked through the Garden turnstiles inside. Opening night excitement overpowered any weather-related fears of these die-hards, who piled into the Garden in blissful ignorance. For a few hundred, this was the beginning of a bizarre multinight stay inside Boston’s dingy old sports barn.
It took overtime for Harvard to edge Northeastern in the opening semifinals, so the Terriers did not get on the ice for warm-ups until just before 8 p.m. As BU took the ice, third-year Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis was on live radio in Boston, declaring a state of emergency in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Since there was no shortage of beer, popcorn, or hot dogs at the Garden, they played on.
There is no seeding for the Beanpot semifinals; teams play each other every year on a rotating basis. It was pure happenstance that BC and BU, the highest ranked of the four Boston schools that year, met in the semifinals. Having just played a riveting contest two weeks prior, this semifinal promised to be the best game of the entire tournament, one that helped fans justify staying in the Garden despite the dire warnings.
Boston College, however, was not up for BU’s challenge this first Monday in February. After suffering five third-period goals in their visit to Walter Brown Arena on January 21, BC’s slide continued unabated. Because of Skidmore’s ailing groin, the Eagles’ goal crease was a revolving door. It became an inviting target for the Terrier’s power play marksmen. BU’s total goals were piling up nearly as fast as the inches of snow outside.
Team manager Tony Ruvolo was compiling his nuanced stat sheet on press row, and throughout the game he would shuttle up and down the several flights to ice level. “I was in the press box, and I’d walk down once the game started.” said Ruvolo, “Back underneath the stands where the fire escapes were, I’d look out the window and go—Oh my God! The snow was getting really deep.”
A harbinger of bad tidings occurred when the Garden lights dimmed in the second period. Boston’s electrical grid was under a tremendous amount of strain, and the game action paused for a few moments until the lights came back to full strength. A decade later, the Boston Garden lights failed again in the infamous 1988 Stanley Cup Final between the Bruins and the Edmonton Oilers, forcing the fourth and final game to be replayed in Edmonton.
This night in 1978, downtown Boston’s electricity supply was hanging by a thread, with only hours left of artificial light. By the time both the snowfall accumulation and the BU goal totals reached double digits, a dire public address announcement rained on the fans’ parade.
“The last train will be leaving in fifteen minutes.” Tournament Director Steve Nazro had been notified by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) that all public transportation would be shutting down because the city was going into lockdown mode. Nazro notified Bruins PR man Nate Greenberg who got on the PA with a series of countdown announcements, giving everyone who wanted to travel home by train a fighting chance. Yet some zealous fans chose to stay and suffer unforeseen consequences rather than leave this lopsided contest. More announcements followed, yet the diehards remained. When the game-ending buzzer finally sounded, BC had been humiliated 12–5, and hundreds of fans were forced by law to stay in the Garden. Nazro and Greenberg provided cots and kept the concessions running. This was all new territory; it was the first and only example of forced camping in the history of Boston Garden.
The postgame provided the Terriers with more adversity than anything they faced on Garden ice this evening. The captain and the coach alternate in the telling of BU’s daunting journey home.
“I’m pushing everybody,” said O’Callahan. “I’m pushing Parker—‘C’mon!’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, let’s get the hell out of here.’”
“We get on the bus and drive down the ramp,” said Parker. “And there it is, mayhem.”
“The roads were brutal,” continued O’Callahan. “You couldn’t get on Storrow Drive to get back to BU. So we went right up Commonwealth Ave, on the wrong side of the road, because it was the only one. There were no cars, just tons and tons of snow.”
“People were on the streets walking, because there’s no cars anywhere,” said Parker. “Anybody we saw with BU stuff on, we would pick up—‘Going back to campus? C’mon, get in, we’ll take care of you.’”
For the record, the BU bus only stopped for fans wearing red and white. According to BC co-captain Rob Riley, BC’s bus also chugged along Commonwealth Avenue through that monstrous blizzard, and they collected the stranded BC fans wearing Maroon and Gold.
The Terriers’ equipment was not on the bus but inside the reliable old van of head trainer Carl James. Sarge had never been defeated by a snowstorm. In fact, he had been known to punch north into Maine during the worst winters in memory. James made a point of keeping chains on his tires, allowing the BU hockey van to be the only vehicle on Storrow Drive that infamous Monday night. Ruvolo, Pete Morris, and stick boy Billy Garrity sat in the van in awe as James negotiated the winding turns along the Charles River with no visibility. With the window down, a filterless Camel pinched between his lips, this former army master sergeant was a man on a mission. Once the van got to Babcock Street, however, James called an audible. “We’re not unloading. I’m going home.” So the three assistants rolled out onto the corner of Babcock and Commonwealth Avenue, and James motored home with all the wet equipment, stashed in bags that would freeze in his Waltham driveway for the next forty-eight hours. His young assistants shook their heads as James disappeared into the teeth of the storm, trailed by a plume of burning oil. “I never had a doubt he would make it home,” said Ruvolo years later. “He had a couple of Black Labels and a full pack of Camels, so I knew he was all set.”
Meanwhile, the team bus was two miles east on Commonwealth Avenue, filled past capacity. It was like a subway ride during New York City rush hour, faces pressed into armpits, only significantly slower. For most of the trip, captain O’Callahan was fielding requests from his victorious mates to make an early stop. The captain pushed to the front of the bus and squatted next to Parker.
“You know, we go all the way up to the dorms, to the rink to drop stuff off, the guys are going to walk down to the Dugout and party over there. Any chance you’ll let us get off at the Dugout? Drop us off there?”
Parker bought some time before answering. “I don’t know Jack, let me think about it.” He could see O’Callahan’s point: it was nearly a one-mile walk through this maniacal storm to get from Walter Brown Arena to the Dugout. But on the other hand, Athletic Director John Simpson was on the bus, and it wasn’t good politics to make a special stop to accommodate the boys’ thirst.
Just as they entered Kenmore Square, where Beacon Street crosses Commonwealth Avenue, Parker’s wit and wisdom delivered in harmony once again. He shouldered himself halfway down the middle of the bus and raised his nasally voice. “Here’s the deal. This bus is going to make two stops tonight. The first stop will be at Marsh Chapel [across the street from the Dugout], if anybody wants to get off and say a prayer or anything. The second stop will be at West Campus, at the rink. You can decide which stop you want to get off.”
Dave Silk’s rendition of his ensuing conversation with freshman Billy Cotter is captured on both YouTube and the official History of the Beanpot commemorative video. “As we were getting off the bus, Billy Cotter, who was a real good guy and a Charlestown guy, turned to me and said, ‘Hey Silky, I’m a good Catholic, but we just won the Beanpot. I’m not going to go to church now.’ Someone had to explain to him that that was Jack’s way of letting us out somewhere near the Dugout.”
The bus then stopped at Marsh Chapel, and its unloading resembled that of a clown car. “The bus is mobbed,” said Parker. “It’s standing room and you can’t move. And then they start piling off: all the students, all the hockey players, the AD. The only people left are me, one student manager, and the trainer.”
And thus began one of the greatest chapters in the history of the Dugout, a saloon that was already credited for entertaining young Ted Williams and the plotting of the Brinks job. Shortly after the players arrived, packing the place beyond capacity, the power went out in the city of Boston. The Dugout’s resourceful proprietors Jimmy O’Keefe and Billy Crowley produced some candles, and the party took on a new dimension.
The Dugout was shadowy to begin with—seven steps underground, with booths wedged deep into corners. There was plenty of snow to keep the beers cold, and someone produced a key to Christo’s sub shop upstairs. “It was freezing outside but there were so many people inside, it was warm,” said Ruvolo. “We had food, we had beer, we had candlelight.”
This was a transcendent moment of college life in Boston at the pinnacle of the 1970s. There was no music, but the happy crowd generated lyrical sounds of joyous humanity, shouts and murmurs of an undefeated team and the occasional chorus of “BC Sucks.” Each booth was packed with smiles and laughter. Clearly there would be no school and no practice for the foreseeable future. A Beanpot blowout, a storm of the century and partying with candlepower created a surreal spectacle in the most comfortable headquarters in college hockey. The human warmth was contagious. “There were a lot of girls,” said Ruvolo. “And you got to remember, the apartments upstairs were BU apartments.”
Around 4 a.m., John Melanson and an unnamed wingman were lucky enough to find local accommodations, enjoying the company of some coeds and saving themselves a hellish walk. Melanson sauntered back to the Dugout five hours later and found that very little had changed. “We go back in and we run into Lamby and Silky, still there from the night before,” said Melanson, who remembers the night well. “Who comes in to buy a pack of cigarettes but coach Parker. We’re drinking beer at nine in the morning. He looks at us, shakes his head, gets his cigarettes, and walks out. I’m sure he was just coming in to do a check. No harm, no foul.”
The boys kept going, and why stop? They were unchained after having their noses up against Parker’s grindstone for months now. They were undefeated, had pumped eighteen goals into BC’s net in two games, and had all but clinched top seeding in the ECAC. And it wasn’t just the Boston boys whooping it up at the Dugout. Quebec’s John Bethel knew all about a good winter blast. “That’s just a Canadian weekend party,” said Bethel. “You wake up in the morning and you find leftover pizza and a few unopened beers, and you start again. That night was pretty hysterical. We knew we were snowed in. We’re from Canada and we don’t care when it’s thirty or forty below in a snowstorm. We’re used to that.”
Crowley kept reloading his candles and dragging in cases of Schlitz from the snow out back, and the band played on. Only emergency vehicles were allowed on the Boston streets, and according to legend, seventy-four-year-old former bootlegger Jimmy O’Keefe called in a favor and had beer deliveries made by a Boston Edison utility truck. No one suffered from thirst.
Two of Boston’s premier sportswriters, Joe Concannon of the Globe and Peter Gammons of Sports Illustrated, wandered in Tuesday afternoon, as the Dugout had become a center of local activity in snow-crippled Boston. Around 5 p.m., with the power still out throughout Boston, Concannon started teasing senior bartender Brian Durocher about the faint lighting in the bar, as Durocher prepped for his evening shift. “Hey, you’re the captain of a 20 and 0 team. Can’t you do something about this?” asked Concannon, looking around at the dimming candles.
“I can’t do anything, Joe,” said Durocher, who then gave an exaggerated shrug and turned his palms upward. With comedic timing that his Uncle Leo would have applauded, all the lights in the city suddenly sprang to life, as if miraculously on cue. To the delight of everyone who witnessed it live, that story appeared in both the Globe and Sports Illustrated and earned young Durocher fame that rivaled Leo’s.
