Free Mr. Hockey My Story by Gordie Howe Page B

full shot, even if I didn’t know enough at the time to do so myself. Eventually, my education ended up coming through hockey. I learned a lot from the people I met and the places I saw, but it still wasn’t a substitute for school. If I could change one thing from that time, I’d make it past the big tree in front of Galt Collegiate Institute and into the office to register.
    The Galt Red Wings had a good team that year and I like to think I could have helped them win the league if I’d played. As it was, I got in about a hundred practices with the team, which was more organized hockey than I would have played back in Saskatoon. Missing out on games was tough to handle, but in terms of hockey, my time in Galt was well spent. Outside of the rink, though, I still missed home. When I wasn’t playing hockey or working I had little to do, so sometimes I’d find myself at the train station when I knew that Jack Adams and the Red Wings were scheduled to pass through town. I’d walk over there by myself and hope the trainwould stop. If it did, I figured I could board and ask Mr. Adams about my jacket. I wanted it badly that whole year, but Mr. Adams didn’t deliver. I came through on my part of the deal by going to Galt, so I thought it was only right that he hold up his end. The train always just rolled through town, though, leaving me with little else to do but walk home.
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    W hen I went back to Windsor for training camp in 1945, I was feeling better than ever about my chances of making the NHL. I was still a lanky kid, fifteen or twenty pounds under my eventual playing weight, but I was seventeen and starting to fill out. After I scored a couple of goals in an exhibition game, Mr. Adams called me to his hotel room to talk about taking the next step in my career. The Galt Red Wings were an amateur club and he felt it was time for me to turn professional. His contract offer for the season was $2200 plus a $500 signing bonus. It was a pretty standard offer for a first contract at the time. I wasn’t much of a negotiator and $2700 was a lot of money to me, but I did have one outstanding issue I needed to clear up. I told Mr. Adams that I wasn’t sure I wanted to sign, since he had broken his word about the jacket. He laughed and assured me that I’d get a jacket. I signed the deal and Mr. Adams sent me to Omaha, Nebraska, to play on the Red Wings’ farm team in the old United States Hockey League (USHL).
    In Omaha we played in the Ak-Sar-Ben Coliseum, which is Nebraska spelled backward. We were the Omaha Ak-Sar-Ben Knights, often shortened to just the Ak-Sar-Ben. The USHL was a bus league, and we rode around the country playing teams as far away as Dallas to the south and Minneapolis to the north. The road trips could be long, but I didn’t mind. I was playingprofessional hockey, which is all I ever wanted to do. Just as it did in Galt, my life in Omaha revolved around the sport. I remember that I went on only one date while I was there. A teammate was taking out a girl who looked like Elizabeth Taylor with a friend who would only go out on double dates. I was roped into it as a favor to my buddy, but it didn’t go anywhere. I was just a shy kid and too consumed with hockey to worry about much else. I wanted to learn everything I could about the game and didn’t see the point of cultivating a social life. Out of the $2700 I signed for when I was seventeen, I saved $1700. For a kid who used to sell fish for ten cents a pop at the back door of a Chinese restaurant, I figured I was doing okay.
    The start of the season was slow going for me. Tommy Ivan, who would later coach me in Detroit, figured that young players were best served by sitting on the bench and watching. I didn’t get many shifts to start out, and I was chafing at the lack of ice time. I was still learning about the game, though, and a few pieces of advice I picked up during those days have served me well since then. One day Carson