Hockey buff finds holy grail: the Maclaren Cup
For the past decade, James Milks’s desultory search for his holy grail was in vain.
The object of the one-time Chelsea — now Aylmer — resident and amateur hockey historian’s quest was the Maclaren Cup, the trophy that for more than 50 years was presented annually to the winners of the Lower Ottawa Hockey Association, a senior league that predated professional hockey. Among the LOHA’s teams’ rosters were a dozen or more players who at some point in their careers skated in the NHL, including six Ottawa Senators, three of whom — Cy Denneny, Buck Boucher and Harry “Punch” Broadbent — are in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Yet for much of the time Milks was looking for the Cup, it sat on a showroom floor in an east-end industrial park — coincidentally not far from where Milks works as a software designer — waiting for years for its owner to return and claim it.
“A customer came in, maybe six or seven years ago,” explains Stéphane Giroux, vice-president of Régimbal Awards and Promotions, the Canotek Road business that currently has the Cup. “He wanted to know if we could restore it.”
After looking at the trophy, which is worn, bruised and battered, the hockey-player figure that once adorned the top now long gone, it was determined that they couldn’t bring it back to its former glory.
“So we called him to let him know, and to tell him he could come pick it up.”
A year passed, and Régimbal again called and left a message with the customer, again to no avail. Then, in 2014, Régimbal relocated from its Vanier address to the current one. Somehow in the move, the customer’s business card with his contact information, which they’d kept in the Cup, went missing. “So now we had no way to get ahold of him.”
The route from the Cup to Milks, meanwhile, was marked by luck and happenstance. A friend of Giroux’s contacted the Citizen, which in turn tapped staff at Library and Archives Canada for help. There, archivist Andrew Ross reached out to Milks, knowing of his interest in local hockey, but unaware that this had been his almost mythic quarry for the last 10 years.
“I told him, ‘Are you kidding?’ ” recalls Milks. “’This is my unicorn.’”
One of the greatest hurdles Milks faced in finding the Maclaren Cup was geography. During the league’s heyday in the early 20th century, three senior leagues in the area vied for hockey supremacy: the Lower Ottawa (also known as the Lower Ottawa Valley Hockey Association), the Ottawa City Hockey League and the Upper Ottawa League. Teams in the Ottawa City league were well covered by such Ottawa newspapers as the Citizen and Journal, while Upper Ottawa teams regularly appeared in papers in Arnprior and Pembroke.
“But most of the towns that competed for the Maclaren Cup were little places that may or may not have had a newspaper, and certainly don’t have digital archives. I suppose if I was ambitious enough to go sit in libraries, or if I didn’t have a job, maybe I would have done that, but otherwise I had to rely on what I could find online.”
The trophy was donated by Buckingham’s Albert Maclaren, son of lumber baron James Maclaren (often also spelled MacLaren), in December 1901.
“(Albert) was a sportsman and played on the first Buckingham team,” Milks says. “He funded it and paid to update the arena, putting in electrical lights. He paid for the uniforms. But when his father died, he became more involved in the family business and didn’t have time to play. But he founded this league.”
After about a decade, the league expanded. Teams over the years included those from Hawkesbury, Vankleek Hill, Lachute, Thurso, Buckingham, Cornwall, Rockland, Vars, Brownburg, Gatineau, Hull and Aylmer.
“Its biggest season was probably 1914-15, because the Ottawa Royal Canadiens, who had two future NHLers on the team, joined the league after a dispute with the Ottawa league.”
But judging by the names engraved on the trophy, the league appears to have disappeared sometime in the mid-1950s, a demise that Milks says began decades earlier with the emergence of professional hockey, most notably the National Hockey Association in 1909, which morphed into the NHL eight years later.
“In the small towns, these guys had day jobs, working in the mills and that sort of thing. But when the pro leagues arrived, people in these small towns would listen on the radio, and leagues like this became just senior hockey, and less the main entertainment.
“But before that, hundreds and hundreds of people would go, and they would board trains to go see their teams play in other towns.”
As for the Cup itself, it may find a new home — in the Hockey Hall of Fame. After learning of the trophy’s whereabouts, Milks contacted Hall curator Phil Pritchard — famously the keeper of the Stanley Cup — who said they would be happy to add the Maclaren Cup to the hall’s collection, with the understanding that it might one day be claimed by its owner.
I told him, ‘Are you kidding?’ ’This is my unicorn.’