INKERMAN ROCKETS – SECOND CHAPTER

People must have laughed when LaPorte, the high school teacher from the small town of Inkerman, population approximately 100,  applied for a junior A  franchise.

“There’s not a single junior A calibre player in your area,” he was told.

Inkerman Rockets Team Photo 1948-49

Still, to everyone’s surprise, he was awarded a franchise.  When nay-sayers protested that “No team is going to play on your rinky-dink rink”,  he retorted that he’d find a rink and he’d have no trouble bringing in players.

And by golly, he did find a rink and he found those players.   He recruited farm boys who played on backyard ponds all winter.   Two of them, the Duncan twins, became outstanding juniors. He found a 15 year old in Prescott, Ontario—as lad named Leo Boivin—who went on to a Hall of Fame career in the NHL.

I was about 15 years old when I first saw the Rockets play. I lived in Ottawa then and my dad took me to a junior playoff game at the old egg-shaped Auditorium where I played my high school games.  “You watch these kids from Inkerman ,” my dad told me. “This fellow LaPorte has some boys who can skate like the wind. They don’t have a league to play in so they play exhibition games all season. They’ll do well against St. Pats.”

When I saw them skate out for the warm-up I felt sort of sorry for them. They were little fellows, most of them. And their hockey pants were too small. Surely they’d be no match for St. Pats, the Ottawa City league champs.

Then the game began and the Rockets went to work. They whipped the Ottawa boys easily that day with non-stop skating and an energy that was truly impressive. Twins Erwin and Edwin Duncan, supplied most of the offense and that stocky sparkplug  named Leo Boivin was awesome. I’d never seen anyone skate backwards like he did.

I was so impressed I told me dad, “That’s the team I’m going to play for some day.”

More about the Inkerman Rockets another day.

Inkerman Rockets – THE FIRST CHAPTER

Every so often, when I was a member of  the Hockey Night in Canada telecast team, someone high in  the crowd at the Montreal Forum or Maple Leaf Gardens would shout down to me, “Hey Brian, remember the Inkerman Rockets?” I would look up and wave and shout back, “You bet. How could I ever forget them?”

I was pleased and proud  whenever anyone recalled that I played for the Inkerman Rockets, a scrappy junior A team that was the talk of the Ottawa Valley in the 40′s and 50′s.

No village so small ever produced a team so good. Inkerman was so  tiny – possibly a hundred residents – that it didn’t even have a hockey rink. And there was no league for an Inkerman team to play in.   Inkerman did have a school though and a schoolteacher named Lloyd Laporte, who loved the game and he enjoyed nothing more than giving kids an opportunity to play it.  He built a small rink in the school yard and began organizing  teams and games.

He even coached a team in the Winchester Town league. Winchester was a slightly bigger town, five miles down the road.  But he had a dream of bringing a team to Inkerman.

At the end of his first season with Winchester, Laporte found himself with a $48 surplus in the kitty. He figured this might be almost enough to purchase new jerseys for a new teamin Inkerman.  So he drove 30 miles to Ottawa one day and there he found a real bargain in a sporting goods store. On sale were more than a dozen red and white sweaters (Nobody called them jerseys back then) with a huge letter R on the front.

The clerk said, “Some team ordered these but never picked them up. They’re a great buy for $48 dollars if your team nickname begins with R.”

Laporte said, “I’ll take them. And I’ll name my team the Rockets.”

I’ll share more about the Inkerman Rocket’s story on another day.