Hi everyone! It’s great to be back after a wonderful two-week vacation.  I feel rejuvenated and looking forward to taking on new challenges.  I even got motivated enough to start work on a new book.  Originally, I was hoping my next book would be a biography of famed NHL and WHA goaltender Gilles “Gratoony the Loony” Gratton.  I was getting ready to write to him to see if the idea interested him when I noticed on Amazon that his autobiography would be coming out in October.  I was both saddened to lose out on what I thought would be a great research topic and book, and excited to see that his life would finally get the book treatment it deserves.

Undaunted, I moved on to another idea I had been toying with for a while: the 1974 expansion which welcomed the Washington Capitals and Kansas City Scouts into the NHL fold.  A few years ago, I wrote an article for the Society for International Hockey Research about the Caps and Scouts’ four-game exhibition set in Japan, which gave me the opportunity to speak to players such as Ron Lalonde, Mike Lampman, Bernie Wolfe, and Robin Burns.  I was always hoping to expand on that article and explore the first two years those teams competed in the NHL.  It had been so long since I started writing my book on the Seals, that I really had no idea how to even start a book now, so I just started writing random thoughts, analyzing a few statistics, drafting an outline, and before I knew it, I had written twenty pages or so.  With the lessons I’ve learned writing my first book, this one hopefully won’t take me two decades to write.

I also got the opportunity to scour the Internet for awful-looking pictures of hockey players just for your amusement.  Rest assured, I found some real doozies, including some pretty atrocious cards featuring this week’s subject, Manon Rheaume.  I couldn’t pick just one of these putrid pieces of cardboard, so this week, you get The Very Worst of Manon Rheaume in the Overexposed wing of the Hockey Hall of Shame.

There are also two new articles from the San Mateo Times about the San Francisco Seals’ home opener, which took place in November (huh?) of 1961, along with a print out of the roster which was expected to suit up that night.  The second article describes the game itself, which the Seals lost 8-3 to the Edmonton Flyers.  In a way, it was a chilling omen of things to come.

Until next time, stay gold!