Memorial Beginning

In Montreal last week, a combined team of Montreal Maroons & Canadiens and a team composed of star players from the other six teams in the National Hockey League flashed across the ice and began to belabor the puck. Quickly the All-Star team began to pile up a 6-to-2 lead. Then suddenly in the last four minutes of play, the Maroons-Canadiens clicked. Three swift goals followed, then the closing bell. Winners by a breathless margin, the All-Stars skated off the ice with a 6-to-5 victory. Thus was raised enough money, added to private subscriptions, to make a fund of $23,000 for the widow and three children of Howarth ("Howie") Morenz. speediest forward in hockey history, who died last winter after breaking a leg in a Canadien game. Thus also was opened the 1937-38 hockey season.

Notable was the fact that the National Hockey League has the same set-up this year as last: American Division teams in Detroit, New York, Chicago, Boston; International Division teams in Toronto, Montreal (two), New York.

Biggest news of the beginning of the new season was the appointment of veteran Player Frank ("King") Clancy to manage the Montreal Maroons, and the accession of William J. ("Bill") Stewart, 42, National League baseball umpire and National League hockey referee, to managership of Major Frederic Mclaughlin's Chicago Blackhawks. Bill Stewart, square-set, affable and bald, preens himself on being one of the least vilified umpires in baseball. He has, however, been mixed up in some fair-to-middling hockey brawls, one of which nearly cost him his arm. While coaching hockey at Milton Academy a decade ago, he trained Barry Wood who later became All-America quarterback at Harvard. As Boston University's baseball coach, he immortalized himself by switching Mickey Cochrane from third baseman to catcher. Since the Blackhawks, who won the world's championship Stanley Cup in 1934, were last year the lowest scoring team in the league, Bill Stewart should have started work on them early in October, but he was busy umpiring the World Series.

This was promptly demonstrated when. in their opening game last week, Bill Stewart's Blackhawks took a 3-to-0 licking from the revived New York Americans. On the same night the Detroit Red Wings, out to defend the Stanley Cup they have held for two years, played an inauspicious 2-to-2 tie with the Toronto Maple Leafs. Meanwhile, as the other teams in the circuit started their 48-game schedules, Howie Morenz Jr., 11, hung on his wall a hockey stick covered with autographs of his late father's friends, who had taken care of one of their own.

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