Chapleau Intermediate 'A' Huskies dominated regular season in 1977-78 but failed in playoffs

Bill Scheer with Ron Larcher on his right

When the Northland Intermediate Hockey League released its 1977-78 season statistics, it showed that the Chapleau Intermediate Huskies dominated several categories, according to the Chapleau Sentinel.

But, for the third successive year, the Huskies failed to defeat their arch rival Timmins North Stars in the semi-finals losing in six games. The North Stars went on to win the league championship.

In regular season play, the Huskies won 24 games, lost four and tied two for 50 points, a first place finish 18 points ahead of the Calvert GMs.

The North Stars were in third place with 14 wins, 13 losses and three ties. The Kapuskasing As had 30 points, based on 14 wins, 14 losses and two ties for fourth place.

The expansion Cochrane Commandos and Heasrt lumberkings did not make the playoffs.

Bill Scheer of the Huskies won the league scoring title with 41 goals and 43 assists for 84 points, while Ivan Fournier of Calvert was second with 43 goals and 39 assists.

Pat Swanson was in fourth spot in league scoring with 30 goals and 45 assists.

Paul Scheer, who was named league Rookie of the Year was in fifth spot with 22 goals and 46 assists. Paul also set a league record for assists.

David McAdam and Glen Cappellani of the Huskies had the best goaltending average in the league with a combined average of 3,70 goals against.

Paul, Bill, Pat and Jamie Doyle with 25 goals and 26 assists, were the only players on the Huskies to score more than 20 goals in regular season play. But David McMillan was close with 19 goals and 30 assists.

Jamie and Dave finished in 11th and 12th spots respectively in league scoring.

Tom Laframboise of the Huskies led the team penalty parade with 65 minutes followed by Pat with 63 placing both of them in the league top ten. 

However, the Huskies coached by Doug Prusky, were the second least penalized team in the league with 485 minutes while the North Stars led with 802 minutes. Kapuskasing was least penalized with 428 minutes.

According to league statistics Ted Swanson was the only member of the Huskies to play in every game of the schedule. In fact, Ted was the only player to participate in every game over the team's four years in the Northland League.

And, with the end of the 1977-78 season, the Chapleau Memorial Community Arena closed its doors after serving the community for 27 years. It was opened in February 1951 and the A.W. Moore Arena, named after "Mrs. Hockey" Moore, part of the Chapleau Recreation Centre was officially opened 37 years ago on June 29, 1978.

And please, after all these years, don't ask me "how come" the Huskies failed in the playoffs after such a  successful regular season. Even though I was the manager, I couldn't figure it out then, and all these years later, sure can't now. 

But I can tell you, they remain the best of the best to me 37 years later. My email is mj.morris@live.ca

Photos by John Theriault

Harper prepares for his next glorious war

Perceptions by Gerry Warner
Stephen Harper is a war monger and he loves guns too! No wonder he’s preparing to send troops into Syria and telling rural Canadians to arm themselves because the Canadian countryside is unsafe.
What else can you conclude after Harper’s bizarre comments last week on the need for a rural arms race and his musing about sending our jets into Syria after what started out as a “non-combat” mission in Iraq. And he even brought his own wife into his dark discussion!
“My wife’s from a rural area and obviously gun ownership wasn’t just for the farm, but was for a certain level of security when you’re a ways away from immediate police assistance.” Harper told the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister didn’t say if Laureen kept a gun under the pillow while he’s away fighting the Taliban in Ottawa. But Harper’s remarks were troubling and ignorant on several levels not to say belligerent coming from the chief law maker of the land.
For starters, Canadian law does not give homeowners in urban or rural areas unfettered rights to blow away someone who unintentionally or intentionally happens to stumble onto your property in the dead of the night. “The suggestion that rural people have firearms in case the police cannot reach them in time is not really consistent with Canadian law on lawful use of force but smacks of American arming for self-protection.” said Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, in an email to the Ottawa Citizen.
It also smacks of taking the law into your own hands and vigilante “justice,” but this doesn’t seem to bother Harper and his core supporters, whom he was clearly playing to when he made his gun toting remarks. And with an election coming soon, there’s money to be raised for Conservative coffers as was made plain by Jenni Byrne, the party’s hard-bitten campaign manager and former deputy chief of staff in Harper’s office
“As someone who grew up in a rural part of our country, I was proud to hear what the Prime Minister had to say yesterday,” said Byrne in an email sent to Conservative supporters “Our Conservative party recognizes that guns play an important role in the livelihoods, recreation and safety of many Canadians. And we’re standing up for responsible gun-owning Canadians.”
The National Rifle Association in the US couldn’t have said it better.
And for those who bristle at Harper being called a war monger, have you ever considered how much of your tax money the Prime Minister spent on glorification of the almost forgotten War of 1812, which was actually fought on our behalf by
the British? Our spendthrift Prime Minister spent $28 million on the bicentennial celebrating the forgotten war, including such necessary adornments as a special silver coin, which cost $60-a-piece, a new national monument, funding for historical re-enactments, upgrades to historic sites and even a new mobile phone app! If you don’t think our Prime Minister enjoys a “good” war, you must think the Toronto Maple Leafs will win the Stanley Cup this year.
And then there’s Syria, a place Harper is obviously itching to go with an announcement expected in Parliament next week. The fact that Syria is not at war with us doesn’t seem to deter the Prime Minister nor the fact that the war would be illegal under International Law. But the US and its Middle East allies have been bombing ISIS in Syria since last summer and we know that legal niceties won’t
stop our Prime Minister from sucking up to Uncle Sam.
How sad! We’ve already lost one of our soldiers to “friendly fire” in Iraq and we lost 158 soldiers in 12 years of fighting in Afghanistan – and did not defeat the Taliban – while suicide took 178 Canadian Forces members over the same period.
Surely there’s a message here, but it seems to be lost on our war mongering Prime Minister.



Gerry Warner is a retired journalist, who believes politicians should serve in the wars they support.

Killing the World for the Sake of Convenience

By Rev. Yme Woensdregt

Did you catch the tidbit on the news the other day that the inventor of the Keurig coffee system regrets ever doing so? When he invented the system, John Sylvan thought there might be a limited appeal to people who would normally go Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts or other coffee chains in the morning, because now they could get a cup of coffee at work that was cheaper, faster, and no fuss. “That would make it environmentally neutral, because you wouldn’t have those Starbucks cups everywhere,” he said in an interview.
He is mystified that the system has become as popular as it has. In fact, because he never thought it would amount to much, he sold the rights to the system for a paltry $50,000 in 1997.
Since then, however, Keurig Green Mountain (the parent company) has taken off. It’s not just being used in offices, but in homes and other places as well. People seemingly can’t get enough of the stuff. Sales figures show that 1 in 3 homes in the US have a Keurig machine. In 2014, Keurig sold over 9 billion K–cups—the 1–serving coffee pods you pop in the machine to make a single cup of coffee. Since 2008, sales have increased 6–fold.
People have fallen in love with this system for two main reasons. One of the reasons, as someone said to me last week when I asked is, “It just tastes so good.” I wouldn’t know about that. I’ve never used the system, but I also find that the coffee I’m able to buy at local retailers also tastes pretty good.
But I suspect that the biggest single reason is the convenience of it. You pick up a single–serving K–cup, pop it into the machine, add water, and presto changeo you have a cup of coffee in almost any flavour you desire.
In a recent interview with The Atlantic, Sylvan says, “I feel bad sometimes I ever did it.” Why? He says it’s not because he’s not sharing in the massive profits of his invention. He regrets it because the K–cups have become an environmental hazard. They are not recyclable or biodegradable, and almost all of them end up in landfills. Sylvan indicates that he never anticipated this scale of waste.
Sylvan is aware of the appeal of the system. “It's like a cigarette for coffee, a single-serve delivery mechanism for an addictive substance.” Each K–cup contains 11 grams of ground coffee, vacuum–sealed in nitrogen to prevent oxidation. At that rate, what you’re buying is standard coffee grounds for around $40 per pound. Pretty expensive coffee!
There are billions of them around. They are everywhere, over 400 varieties of hot drinks made by multiple manufacturers. In 2014, there were enough discarded K–cups to circle the globe 10½ times.
Keurig Green Mountain says it can make a recyclable cup by 2020, but Sylvan disputes this claim. Even if it is possible, that’s still 5 years away, which means we can circle the globe another 53 times with K–cups.
It amazes me how willingly we continue to damage the environment. It would be such a simple thing to stop using these pods. We’d also save some money, since the excellent coffee I buy at a local retailer is less than half the price of these convenient pods.
Sylvan thinks that Keurig users should think hard about the choices they’re making when it comes to a cup of coffee. “From a personal standpoint, it saves 20 seconds of your day,” he told As It Happens. “What's that worth?”
On a related note, do you know about what is being called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Billions of pounds of plastic garbage are trapped in a great holding pattern twice the size of
Texas in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, held there by currents that draw the garbage in and won’t let it escape. The plastic doesn’t get there on its own … it gets there because we throw it into streams and rivers which make their way to the ocean. On some beaches in Hawaii, the plastic is up to 10 feet thick!
If you want to know more about how our hunger for convenience is killing the planet, there’s a wonderful “mockumentary” on youtube called “The Majestic Plastic Bag”.
We can stop killing the world. There are so many simple little things we can do.
What's it worth to you?

Rev Dr Yme Woensdregt is Incumbent at Christ Church Anglican Cranbrook BC