Lifetime of service
Lou Pelino played instrumental role in growing hockey in Welland and in Nunavut
I just think it’s his personality that he’s that kind and so communityminded.” Fina Pelino
Lou Pelino is being self-deprecating, not immodest, when he describes himself as a “natural forward” growing up playing hockey in Welland.
“Yeah, that was me alright, a ‘natural forward,’ because I couldn’t skate backwards,” Pelino, 85, says with a laugh.
Still, Pelino, who went on to operate businesses and a successful career in sales after a 10year stint with the then Crowland Township Police Department, was good enough skating forward to be invited to play out the 1951 season with the legendary Inkerman Rockets.
Upwards of 11,000 people watched the team from the small Ottawa Valley town compete in the playoffs leading up to the Memorial Cup that year.
“But they didn’t pay to see me, it was that other guy,” Pelino says with a mischievious gleam in his eye, waiting a couple of seconds before delivering the punch line. “Jean Beliveau was 10 times as fast, and 400 times better than me.”
Soccer, not hockey, was in Pelino’s blood when he emigrated to Canada from Pacentro, Italy, as a six-year-old. The family settled in Welland South, in a home his father, a worker at Union Carbide, had built at the corner of Broadway and St. George.
At the time of the family’s move overseas long-simmering tensions in Europe were already nearing the boiling point. War would soon ensue and, with Italy siding with the Axis, the doors to immigrants, such as the Pelinos, were slamming shut.
In fact, the family was among the last accepted into Canada, and Pelino’s father would forever be grateful for that. He would never take Canada and the opportunities Canada offered to his family for granted.
“When we came from Italy, we were afraid as Italians, coming to a new land before the war, because Italy was already in the war,” Pelino said on the eve of his induction into the Welland Sports Wall of Fame. “When we got here my father made it clear ‘We don’t hurt anybody and we don’t do anything wrong or we might be sent back to Italy.’”
To say Lou Pelino took his father’s words to heart would require a greatly expanded definition of understatement.
At Sunday’s induction ceremony, Pelino will be enshrined as a builder, primarily for growing minor baseball and hockey in his adopted community, but it would be far easier to list what he didn’t do to benefit youth in Welland and, for much of the past 20 years, in Nunavut.
“I guess, maybe, what I appreciated in life I gave it back,” Pelino says.
Fina Pelino thinks the reason for her husband’s lifetime of service is much simpler than that.
“I just think it’s his personality that he’s that kind and so community-minded.”
Lou and Fina Pelino celebrated their 60th anniversary on Thursday.
Pelino’s involvement in minor hockey extended far beyond Welland city limits. He was a contingent that visited Sweden, the first-ever trip overseas by a team from Welland, and in 2000 went to Nunavut every summer with the Can Am Hockey development program.
First Air provided free roundtrip transportation from Ottawa and Iqaluit, formerly Frosbisher Bay, to all the coaches and to all the players within the vast territory.
“It didn’t cost any child anything to come to Iqaluit to play there,” says Pelino, who was often accompanied on the trips north by sons Mike, an assistant coach in the KHL, and Joe, a chiropractor practising in Mississauga.
NHLers as well as some of the top players from women’s hockey donated their time for the weeklong camps.
Pelino says players from Nunavut benefitted, on and off the ice.
“In four or five years those kids were as good as any of the kids from southern Ontario, because they learned a new thing, they learned to play hockey.”
The trips stopped after First Air dropped its sponsorship, but Pelino says the initiative left a lasting legacy. Groups at the community level now run camps and there are now several arenas in Nunavut, including two in Iqaluit, the capital.
Pelino recalls seeing youth walking down the street at 3 a.m., yet in the broad daylight, drinking. He says hockey and the opportunity to play in organized leagues is important to youth in the Far North.
“Nobody even knows who they are and where they are, because they are just left alone,” Pelino says. “They are from small little homes with room for three and there are nine people living there.”
The game’s impact isn’t limited to what happens on the ice.
“I don’t know if we should say this, but the increase came like this of the hockey players who took in sports,” he says, raising his left arm. “There might have been 20 people the first time, and the time we were leaving there was maybe 200 people for the whole week.”
“And they say this is how the suicide rate went,” he adds, lowering his arm.
Expect for the two hours he spends every Thursday morning singing to residents at the extended-care and Woolcott units at Welland hospital, Lou Pelino is largely retired.
He no longer is as active in the Welland Sports and Benevolent Society that he helped found more than 45 years ago, but can still be counted on for selling most of the tickets for the annual elimination draw.
Upwards of $300,000 has been raised over the years for charities in the community, as well as for Can Am Hockey camp registration.
Camps are now held at Ridley College in St. Catharines and the society has donated week-long camp opportunities to hockey associations in Pelham, Welland, as well as Iqaluit.
The associations in turn raise funds by raffling off the camp registrations.