Miners Forum memories
People of surrounding communities were welcome at Glace Bay rink
Back in November, the national telecast of Rogers Hometown Hockey from the Savoy Theatre shone a spotlight on the hockey culture of Glace Bay and the surrounding area.
Community volunteers, working with the Rogers team, did an exceptional job in highlighting the best that Glace Bay has to offer. Only one backdrop was missing. Unlike many of the places that the Rogers team has visited, there was no community rink to showcase.
The Glace Bay Miners Forum opened in 1939. Until the late 1960s, it had one of only three indoor ice surfaces in the local area; the others were the forums in North Sydney and Sydney.
The Miners Forum not only served Glace Bay. The people of the surrounding communities were always welcome and as youngsters in Port Morien, we often took advantage of the facility.
You can’t appreciate the thrill experienced by a youngster playing his first game in the storied Miners Forum unless you’ve been there.
The only available ice time was most often in the early morning. My father told me that they’d take the “Hobo” (the coal miners’ train) at 5 a.m. to attend hockey practice at the forum.
When Gowrie had a school hockey team, cars were not readily available for transportation. Very often, Hopper MacLeod’s half-ton truck would transport players to an early hockey practice, returning them in time to get to school. It must have helped, because the Morien Comets won the Glace Bay Common School Championship in 1960.
In later years, Donkin-Morien school team members would take their hockey equipment on the bus in the morning, leave it in class, and then get a ride to the game after school with a parent or teacher. I recall hitchhiking on Saturday afternoons with an army duffle bag full of gear in hand, heading to a weekly practice or a game.
Attendance at big games at the forum was an unforgettable experience. It was standing room only as cigarette smoke wafted to the rafters. Hecklers bellowing from the crowd added to the atmosphere. Even the hotdogs seemed to taste better. Between periods, the “rink rats” scraped the ice and flooded it by pulling barrels of hot water up and down the ice.
Every generation had its particular favourite team. Mine were the Glace Bay Miners of the 1960s and later the Metro Bees, who won the Atlantic Junior B championship in 1972.
The forum not only hosted hockey games. There were labour rallies, boxing matches, dances, bingo, concerts with big name entertainers like Johnny Cash, horse shows, and a military tattoo, just to mention a few.
After the 1979 explosion in No. 26 colliery, the old forum was jammed to capacity for the memorial service for the miners that were tragically killed.
Eventually, time took its toll on the old Miners Forum, and a replacement was needed.
Hopes were high in 1996 with the opening of the new building called the Bayplex, but for numerous reasons, its service was short lived. The facility was forced to shut down in 2017.
The rebuilding has been a slow process. Elected representatives from all government levels have secured funding to repair the Bayplex, and CBRM staff has worked diligently to get the reconstruction underway. Tenders have been awarded and construction is scheduled to be completed by July 2020.
Parents, players and fans are anxious to have the building reopened by the scheduled deadline, and await the long anticipated return of this much needed facility to Glace Bay.
The population of Glace Bay, including the surrounding communities, is about 20,000 people. It is unusual for a community of this size in Canada not to have a rink.
Let’s hope that in 2020, we can make a fresh start in a revamped arena. Maybe in the coming years, we can once again be a fitting host for a national television audience, this time from what will be the appropriately renamed the Glace Bay Miners Forum. Ken MacDonald is a retired school teacher and administrator, and a community volunteer. His family can be traced back seven generations in Port Morien, where he has lived almost all his life. He can be reached at morienbay@gmail.com.