The Silk Hat Toppers

Those who have already purchased Tesseracts 22 will have noticed that my story, "If There's a Goal," is dedicated to the memory of the Silk Hat Toppers hockey team of the early 1950s. Here they are:

Photo from a family collection; photographer unknown. For that matter, the date is unknown as well: early 1950s?

There are a couple of things to note about this outfit, one pretty obvious and the other perhaps less so. First, though they wear consistent jerseys, the rest of their uniforms are, well, hardly uniform. The pants and stockings come from the various local athletic organizations the members previously played for. (See below.)

The second is that everyone in the photo is a Skeet. This team consisted entirely of my father and his seven brothers; the team sponsor (at the far left) was their father, my grandfather. Those were the days, when a family of ten children (my dad had two sisters in addition to all those brothers) wasn't unusual.

They were also the days when it was easy and affordable for any Fine Upstanding Canadian Boy to play hockey. My grandparents were far from well off, but somehow their sons all managed to play hockey, in both ad hoc and organized fashion. Contrast with today, when families are literally taking out loans in order to put their kids into some form of organized hockey (ad hoc being pretty much nonexistent any longer).

The Silk Hat was a restaurant my grandfather operated just south of downtown Calgary. Dates aren't known for certain anymore: Grandpa Sid was a sort of serial restaurateur in the years between 1946 (when he was discharged from the Canadian Army) and 1960; the Silk Hat was in the middle of the period, so likely ca. 1949-1953. Below is an earlier photo of my father and his brothers. They are standing on the frozen Elbow River, on the bank of which the family house was built.

More Skeet family hockey: again, photographer is unknown but could be Sidney Skeet.

This photo, the existence of which came as a surprise to me about a week ago, was probably taken in the winter of 1946-47 (or possibly 1947-48). The "winter" part is obvious: they're standing on a frozen river, duh. The year is a bit more of a guess: my father thinks he was about 14 years old at the time (he's fourth from the left, above), and he turned 14 in the summer of 1947. But his eldest brother is absent, which argues the winter of '46-47, when Lionel was still in the army. Four of the brothers are wearing the jerseys of the Calgary Buffaloes Hockey Association, which operated boys' teams at a number of levels (former Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed was an alumnus, as were a number of NHL players).

Seeing these photos makes me regret not having made a greater effort to gather the memories of my father's generation while they were still fresh. Of the young gentlemen in the photos above, only three are still alive.