A new book looks at the heyday of the Western International Hockey League and other Kootenay sporting history. Hockey Night in the Kootenays is a collaboration between Keith Powell and the late Anthony Dransfeld, a Kimberley Bulletin columnist.
Powell, a Cranbrook resident and author of several novels and photo books about the Kootenays, said he approached Dransfeld a couple of years ago about collecting his columns into a book. Powell then added some other stories to round the book out and broaden it to include other sports, including skiing and baseball.
(Full discloure: I contributed one of the stories, about Nelson’s Lillian Hickey, who played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.)
The heart of the book features the WIHL, a senior hockey loop that existed from 1946 to 1988 and enjoyed its greatest success in the 1950s when packed arenas witnessed epic battles between the Trail Smoke Eaters, Nelson Maple Leafs, Kimberley Dynamiters, and Spokane Jets.
Powell said he’s particularly happy to capture that era.
“It’s easy to forget about a couple of generations ago and how dynamic that league was, how competitive it was. Before expansion, the NHL only had six teams and a lot of very talented hockey players ended up playing in leagues like the Western International Hockey League.”
The book also features older teams like the Fernie Swastikas, a women’s team from the 1920s, and the Kimberley team that won the Coy Cup in 1926, plus more modern athletes like Rossland Olympian Nancy Greene Raine and Trail-born ball player Jason Bay.
Sadly, Dransfeld didn’t get to see the finished product. Before Powell left for a trip to New Zealand in February, he presented a proof to Dransfeld for approval.
“I said to Tony, the book’s ready to go. Take a look at it. I want print it when I get back. And unbeknownst to me, he decided to go to Nepal, which he often did, and unfortunately, he passed away. So that was really a tragedy. It made me sad. I was almost going to shelve the project. And then I thought, no, I should print it as a tribute to him.”
Powell thinks Dransfeld would have been happy with how the book turned out.
“I called him sort of the Forrest Gump of the Kootenays because it seemed like he was in the middle of a whole lot of things that were going on,” Powell said.
“One day he was sitting in a bar in Nelson and [longtime Nelson Maple Leafs goaltender] Gus Adams said, ‘Gordie Howe’s here. His ride to the Spokane airport didn’t work out, can you take him down to Spokane?’ So Tony takes Gordie Howe Spokane and visits with him for three hours. Those kind of things just kept popping up.”
Although he never joined the senior ranks, Dransfeld was a hockey player himself, Powell explained. After a junior career, he played for Spokane’s Gonzaga University for one season. He once attended a tournament in San Diego where former US president Ronald Reagan dropped the opening puck. Dransfeld took the face-off.
“He was always quick to tell me that story,” Powell said. “Tony was always full of stories. At the end of the book, I added one story. That was a reflection of him because whenever you talked to Tony, it was never a short conversation. He would always end the conversation with, ‘Oh, one more story.
“I don’t know how many proofs I had on this book and it was ready to go. And Tony would come up with another tweak or another suggestion or another story. It grew to almost 300 pages.”
Powell said the book should appeal to anyone interested in hockey, even if they are too young to have attended a WIHL game.
“I hope people enjoy the reflection back on the early days of hockey in the Kootenays,” he said. “It’s such an important thing, history and our legacy in sports.”
You can find the book at Crockett Books in Trail, Country Life Books in Creston, Huckleberry Books in Cranbrook, Arrow & Axe in Kimberley, Papervale Books in Kimberley, and Four Points Books in Invermere and Golden.
