Hi everyone! Whew, has this been one busy week! Work is crazy right now. The baby’s room has finally been painted. I interviewed the Washington Capitals’ Mike Lampman for my new book, which means lots of transcribing to do. I do love this part of the research process of a book though. So many great stories I’ve never heard before, which I assume means readers are going to enjoy immensely as well. Thankfully, we’ve also got a weekend trip to the Eastern Townships planned for Saturday morning. It’ll probably do us all some good to rest with friends and family a few days.

Another thing I’ve got to get started on before the baby arrives is a review of my book since University of Nebraska Press has just informed me it will going to a paperback edition in the fall of 2020, which is great news! They say it means they have confidence the book will continue to sell well, which feels great to hear, although I get the impression the e-mail I received is really just a canned message that has been sent to lots and lots of authors as well. But I’ll finally get the chance to correct those stats that were compiled before the NHL released all of its game summaries, not to mention a few little typos here and there in the rest of the book, so I’m not complaining.

Just a small update this week due to my lack of time to write anything new, funny, creative or interesting. In the articles section, there is a brand new piece on underrated defenseman Len Frig, who played four seasons with the Seals-Barons. Thanks once again to Pete Manzolillo for sending me yet another great article from one of his old game programs from the 1970s. Check it out here in the articles section.

Until next time, stay gold!

Hi everyone! Yup, some things never change, and thank God for that. I’m not sure about you, but I absolutely loved it when my beloved Habs came back from a 4-1 deficit to defeat the Leafs in OT. What is it with the Leafs and blowing 3-goal leads all the bloody time? It’s like they’ve cornered the market on horrible third periods or something. If you think that’s bad though, trust me, it has nothing on what the Seals did February 23, 1972 when they blew a 5-goal lead to the eventual Stanley Cup champions from Boston. I invite you all to go read the article which describes exactly what happened on that miserable night. No new article, however, just one that already exists in the articles section. I just thought it was fitting considering the turn of events this last week.

During that Boston debacle, a few Seals players may have felt like walking out on the team and hockey in general, but luckily, cooler heads prevailed unlike on January 22, 1968 when Billy Harris had enough of his prickly relationship with coach Bert Olmstead and walked out on the team. You can read all about the incident in the articles section.

You should also check out our brand new addition to the Overexposed wing of the Hockey Hall of Shame. This week, we feature junior goaltender Patrick Desrochers in his classic 1996-97 Upper Deck rookie card! Just be warned, looking into his eyes will probably feel like Joe Pesci asking you what’s so funny à la Goodfellas. Enjoy!

Until next time, stay gold!

Hi everyone! That’s right, it’s that time of year again. Your favorite team, my favorite team, everyone’s favorite team is back in action to start yet another NHL season, and that makes me very happy! I’m especially excited that since my son has started school, he is absolutely exhausted by 7 o’clock and falls asleep by 7:30, which means I can actually watch almost an entire game now! I know I’m a teacher, and this sounds a little obvious and self-serving, but damn, school is freakin’ great!

Speaking of great, you guys are going to love this brand new article that was sent to me from Pete Manzolillo. I am so sad I didn’t have the information contained in this article while I was doing research for my book. Have you guys ever wondered what happened to all those Cleveland Barons jerseys after the team went belly up? I have to admit I’ve never once thought about that, or for that matter, whatever happened to all those old Kansas City Scouts, Calgary Cowboys, and Hartford Whalers jerseys, but seriously, they must end up somewhere, right? Did they give those things away? Did they incinerate them? Who knows about those three teams, but I can now tell you what happened to the Barons’ old unis, and you can find out too in the articles section. If you prefer to read the article on the website where it is found, you can click here and check out the Uni-Watch.com.

I was wondering what else to post to the site this week. I was thinking about a new Overexposed disaster, but no kidding, as I was writing this entry, I received an e-mail from site subscriber Mark Harris (by the way, a two-time reader of my book! Nice work, Mark, and my compliments too!). Just a few days ago, Mark caught up with former Seals captain Bobby Baun and Seals scoring leader for 1972-73, Walt McKechnie, at a Dave & Busters in Toronto as they were doing a signing with a bunch of other former Maple Leaf greats. Check out Mark’s photos here.

Hope you enjoy the new additions to the site! Until next time, stay gold!

Hi everyone! This update comes a bit later than usual because I wanted it to be worded just perfectly, and I didn’t have all that much time this week to put it all together. Also, I won’t be around much from Wednesday to Sunday this week due to family spending a few days with us, so I won’t have any time to post anything knew until the first week of October. We should have ourselves a great time though because we will be heading to Carp Fair this weekend, and the little one will sleep a baby for about two days straight, which is aces in my book! For those of you who don’t live near Ottawa, which is probably ALL of you, Carp is a small town outside the Nation’s Capital and so Carp Fair is not some sort of fish fest. Nothing wrong with fish fests, mind you, but we just aren’t going to be going to any.

This week, folks, we’re going to the fights! We’ve got all sorts of people chucking knuckles and making life miserable for another person on skates. In the articles section, a great feature about the great Carol Vadnais from the Oakland Tribune‘s Ed Levitt. Some of his editorials were among my favorites when I was doing research for my book, so you should go check this one out over in the articles section.

I’m also very excited to present, for the first time in a year, a brand new induction into the Hockey Hall of Shame! If there are any fight fans out there, you will definitely want to take a stroll down the hallowed hall to learn about one of the most memorable round of fisticuffs in NHL history. I am here to give you the play-by-play, or in this case, the blow-by-blow in this latest video induction!

Until next time, stay gold!

Hi everyone! Hope everyone is doing well and that the fall blahs haven’t got you down. Don’t fret though; it just means another hockey season is around the corner. I’ve already received, count ’em, TWO different season preview issues from the Hockey News. How much their prognosis could have changed from issue number one in late July to issue number two in late August, a time in which almost nothing happens in the NHL, is a mystery to me, but I’ll eventually get to reading both issues all the way through and find out.

This week, head on over to the articles section for a brand new piece on the famous January 12, 1973 3-3 tie against the vaunted Montreal Canadiens. Yes, the Seals actually picked up a point against this edition of the Habs that lost a total of ten games throughout the regular season and won the Stanley Cup.

On a completely unrelated note, I turned my computer on yesterday morning and the first thing I, like many of you saw was this guy:

Oh yeah, that’s some good old fashioned nightmare fuel right there. You’re welcome!

Like everyone else on the Internet, I thought, WOW, Bryan Cranston has really let himself go. I mean, he actually went FULL Walter White and started cooking and selling meth. And then I looked closer and realized it was some other dude who cooks and sells meth, but seriously, look at the resemblance.

Subconsciously, the image must have stayed with me all day, and as I was writing up a new induction for the Overexposed wing of the Hockey Hall of Shame, I couldn’t help notice how much former Edmonton Oiler Dean McAmmond was a dead ringer for yet another sinister Breaking Bad character. To find out which one, you’ll have to head on over to this week’s induction!

And that’s about it for this week. Hope everyone has a great weekend and takes advantage of the last few days of warm sunshine. Until next time, stay gold!

Hi everyone! School has officially started for every child here in Ottawa, meaning that things are getting busy here at the homestead. I’m hoping it doesn’t slow down my updates, but if it does you’ll know why. In the meantime, lots of new stuff to share with you this week.

This week, I stumbled upon a fascinating article about the San Francisco Seals’ (and later Oakland/California Golden Seals’) legendary broadcaster Roy Storey. I had no idea how many health scares he went through in his life, especially before and during the Seals’ championship runs in 1963 and 1964. I invite you all to read up on a sometimes forgotten member of the Seals family.

In the Overexposed wing of the Hockey Hall of Shame, check out this brand new card of the Hartford Whalers’ Dave Barr. It’s time to break out the Crayolas, folks, so you know what that means… bad 80s airbrushing!

If anyone is interested in reading a new review of my book, please check out Sal Barry’s site Puck Junk. You can check it out at the following link: http:// http://puckjunk.com/2019/07/22/book-review-the-california-golden-seals/. Sal’s site has all kinds of interesting articles about hockey books, hockey cards, and other hockey-related topics, and it is updated quite frequently so there’s always lots of new stuff. With hockey season around the corner, there’s sure to be a surge of new material.

Until next time, stay gold!

Hi everyone! It’s great to be back and yet still officially on holidays for at least another four days. I’ll be heading back to work, which happens to be a school, this coming Tuesday after Labour Day weekend, and my little boy Emmett, along with a whole bunch of other four-year-olds will be starting kindergarten the very same day. In order to commemorate what has often been termed “The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year” I present to you a brand new induction into the Hockey Hall of Shame’s Overexposed wing. If you grew up in the 1990s like I did, you will surely get the warm-and-fuzzies looking at this classic cardboard and thinking of your high school days. I’m talking about the wonderfully awesome Craig Wolanin card from the 1992-93 Topps set.

There is also another new article courtesy of Pete Manzolillo. It contains some great photos of Pete Laframboise from during and after his famous four-goal game against Vancouver January 3, 1973. You could say that Laframboise and the Seals really took the Canucks to school on this night! You can read all about it in the articles section.

Until next time, stay gold!

Hi everyone! Well, it’s that time of year again when network television slowly starts bringing back its hit shows for yet another season. Actually, it’s more Netflix than anything else. Orange Is The New Black is back and so is Glow, not to mention a whole slew of stand-up specials and straight-to-Netflix Adam Sandler movies. Then again, that sounds like what Netflix does year-round. Anyway, I needed some sort of segue into this week’s Overexposed card, featuring the NHL’s all-time greatest stuntman, David Oliver! Yes, you read that correctly. You won’t believe this cardboard classic until you see it, so I strongly urge you all to head on over to the Hockey Hall of Shame for your weekly dose of weirdness.

In keeping with the entertainment theme of the week, you can go read a new Oakland Tribune article from the summer of ’70, a time when the Seals were up for sale, and no one knew exactly who owned the team in the first place. Trans-National Communications claimed they owned the Seals, and wanted to sell them to roller derby king Jerry Seltzer, while Barry Van Gerbig also claimed ownership, and wanted to sell the team to Charles O. Finley. You all know how things ended up, and the rest is history.

If you’ve checked out the David Oliver card, you can see where I got the “broken neck” part of this week’s title. As for the rest, well, it’s holiday time, and I’m taking a break. Don’t fret though, I’ll just be away for a week, so no new update until the last week of August. So until next time, stay gold!

Hi everyone! Welcome back to Golden Seals Hockey for another trip in the Way-Back Machine. This week, I’ve added a new article detailing Bert Olmstead’s frustrations as he thought about resigning as head coach. Olmstead’s one and only season behind the bench (1967-68), did not at all go as planned. The Seals were expected to contend for the division crown. Instead, they were pretty much out of the playoff picture before Christmas, and by February, they were already busy polishing up their golf clubs. Olmstead made one last-ditch effort to better understand what was wrong with his players, but all that resulted from his observations way up in the stands was that he became even more disillusioned. You can read all about Olmstead’s last stand in the articles section.

There is also a new addition to the Overexposed wing of the Hockey Hall of Shame, and like most of the previous additions, it tries really, really hard to be cool, but in the end it achieves everything but coolness. It looks like poor Brent Sapergia of the San Diego Gulls got himself some really bad advice from some hack photog. Bad advice that likely continues to give the dude nightmares to this day. Take a trip down memory lane to a simpler time when men tried to look like rats, and women tried to look like Brillo pads that were struck by lightning. Check out this horrific slab of cardboard over in the Hall of Shame!

Until next time, stay gold!

Hi everyone! Happy Civic Holiday long weekend! At least, for those of you living in Canada. I don’t know what goes on in the U.S. the first Monday in August but here in Canada it is time to celebrate! What it is we celebrate, I really have no freakin’ clue. Civic Holiday is one of the weirdest holidays in Canada in that it serves really no purpose other than to give the populace a paid day off between Canada Day and Labour Day. All I know is that I don’t have to work, so I’m happy whatever the reason I’m allowed to sleep in on a Monday. (Who am I kidding, considering my son Emmett is only 3, I’ll be lucky if I’m still in bed past 6:30am.).

The point I’m trying to make is that rituals don’t always make a lot of sense, but in the end, they often make us happy, comforted and/or comfortable. Hockey players’ superstitions make about as much sense as Civic Holiday, as you will read in this week’s new article (thanks again to Pete Manzolillo). This piece comes from 1973-74 (I’m not sure exactly when), so it features little snippets from the lives and careers of Gilles Meloche, Bob Stewart, Gary Croteau, Morris Mott, and Hilliard Graves among others. Some of their superstitions produced (at least that what is believed) some interesting results, while others did absolutely nothing but provide some peace of mind. In either case, the article is an interesting insight into the minds of professional hockey players from a long-ago era.

While you’re here, be sure to check out the latest addition to the Overexposed wing of the Hockey Hall of Shame. This week, we feature one-time San Francisco Seal Doug Favell in what seems to be a very trying moment in his NHL career. You have to see his face to believe me.

Until next time, stay gold!