Former NHLer Ken Dryden scores once again with riveting new book
‘The Class’ is a sensitive reaching back in terms of generational experience
I knew Ken Dryden as an athletic youngster in west-end Toronto and even scored an Ivy League goal against him in my senior year at Princeton. But, rest assured, it was a lucky rebound and we lost 7-1.
We were never in serious Ivy League contention when Ken was in the net for Cornell. Ken and my younger brother Terry were teammates at various levels in the Humber Valley hockey program back in the late 1950s. Not surprisingly, Ken’s hockey doings and his writings have held my interest over the years.
“The Class” is a study of the world Ken left behind when, after graduating from Etobicoke Collegiate (ECI), he took his goalie pads to Cornell University and began the climb to stardom that climaxed in his outstanding career, including four Stanley Cup wins, with the Montreal Canadiens.
He had entered ECI as a member of “the Brain class” in September 1960, having written a special examination to qualify. This too had interest for me because ECI was where I would have been my high school if I hadn’t left the Kingsway in 1954 for Grade 7 at the University of Toronto Schools (UTS) in downtown Toronto.
“The Class” is a sensitive reaching back in terms of generational experience. It is an engaging exercise in reconnecting with one’s high school classmates some 50 years after graduation and looking into what they have become. Of the original 35 in the class, Dryden managed to reconnect with 26. That constituted a rigorous, time-consuming challenge, all undertaken by telephone during the pandemic, as he tracked them down individually and engaged in many calls to draw out their stories. Much of the book is taken up in Dryden’s retelling of their stories, several of which he clearly delighted in singling out.
But the book also provides a context in which to present his own autobiography. In sync with the life stories of his classmates, he recounts his own rather extraordinary success story as a student, hockey star, politician, and writer. As such, he positions himself within Ontario’s — and Canada’s — ‘lucky’ generation, one that was born well after the war and lived through the country’s coming of age in the 1950s, albeit with a Toronto focus.
It is a heartening book that spreads its attention widely but not unwisely, even while running the risk of blurring his desired goals. Bereft of sociological clichés and academic generalizations, it happily celebrates the generation of which Ken was a part and shows the differing paths to success or personal development his classmates pursued.
He sets his own story in the context of the lives of his classmates, displaying it like a gemstone in a colourful class ring. An immensely talented goaltender in his 20s, Ken Dryden had by age 31 completed both his hockey career and his law school degree, though he had no intention of pursuing a legal career. Nevertheless, as the 1980s began, he had to do something new and different with his time; he had to be “better” and continue to be an allround individual. So, as he puts it, he became a reader. A writing career soon followed with books like “The Game” (1983), and studies of hockey people like Steve Montador (2017), who died of complications from brain injuries, and Scotty Bowman (2019) who was his coach during his years with the Canadiens.
“The Class” is a sort of make-work project toward the end of what might now be called a lengthy writing career — it is Dryden’s ninth published book and one that embraces his generation’s promise and hopes. The generation that began high school in the 1960s was itself special and privileged, though it did not see itself that way. His classmates were pre-baby boomers though they ought to be considered as such. Theirs were mostly allwhite days in places like the Kingsway where the biggest social issues had to do with long-established conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. Jewish kids were rare and there were few blacks west of the Humber River. Multiculturalism and globalization lay far ahead. In these mostly quiet growth years, gender roles remained solidly in place and the outside noise came mostly from American bigness to the south and the beginnings of rock n’ roll.
Using “Macleans” magazine as his voice of authority, Dryden offers an agreeable picture of teenage life in the north Kingsway during the 1950s and ’60s. Like Murray and Margaret Dryden, most of the parents of the Brain Class had escaped the war and had emerged from working-class origins; they were making their upward way in the attractive suburb of the Kingsway (more generally called Etobicoke then), west of the Humber River. With kids now at school, it was expected that the father would work productively, and the mother would run the home-front. University education, which had eluded the parents, was the general goal they set for their children. And for the most part it all worked out as planned.
Ken and his cohorts entered ECI in September 1960 and, with few changes, stayed together for five years, including their Grade 13 final year. Little interested in girls at the time, Ken committed himself to sports, but he observed the wider school life (drama, debating, and the arts) that engaged many of his classmates. Whether he knew this then or gained a wider view as a result of his pursuit of information about their lives, is difficult to determine.
Likely, the wider, more sensitive view of his mature years had its roots in his past and his own attentive skills. For he was a keen observer. He found that, like himself, his classmates kept strong memories of their teachers (their influence, their eccentricities, their passions), the tyranny of the Grade 13 exams, and the lure of university and of adventure for themselves. In gathering the personal recollections of his classmates, he was able to amass a set of observations and experiences that make his narrative rich and compelling. “This was a good time for teachers to be teachers,” he writes. But it was also a very good time to be a promising student or a student-athlete like himself.
“The Class” is also a portrait of “the Canada we grew up in.” It covers the ground from pre-1960 events to the present, emphasizing what people did with their time and the nature of their hopes and aspirations. Ken relies on cultural observations of the period by figures like Pierre Berton and Lister Sinclair. He writes, “As Canadians, we now had more than we ever had before.”
But not all was rosy. He includes the experience of one classmate whose father worked on the Avro Arrow project at De Havilland and whose family felt the deep sting of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s cancellation of that promising project. So too were the cautions emanating from distant winds during the Cold War period.
I found myself drawn to several of the stories Dryden tells here. He hearkens to the successes of various classmates in hospital administration, the financial sector, teaching, outdoor education, and theatre. But he does not allow the book to wallow in the past. He moves it into sections entitled “The New Millennium” and “Getting to Here,” and shows his classmates striving to achieve “better” things even as retirement looms.
At times I found Dryden’s stylistic quirks a little bothersome (he is, for instance, never happy with a single phrase when he can inject list of three or more supplements) but I agree with Roy MacGregor who worked with him in the 1980s. MacGregor was impressed by not only his insights but his ability to write dramatically and well. That skill made “The Game” the best hockey book ever written. He scores here as well.