McKillop met some characters during career

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This article was published 13/09/2020 (2093 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Larry McKillop remembers Don Cherry walking into the Rochester Americans dressing room in a three-piece suit and a rage. 

The American Hockey League team, which would finish third in their division in the 1973-74 season, was wildly exceeding expectations.

But that night they weren’t playing well against the Boston Braves, with an extra home game in the playoffs potentially on the line. Down a couple of goals after the first period, Cherry was ready to deliver a message to his players.

“He was ranting and raving and saying ‘Geez, what did I do?’ and ‘(expletive) this’ and ‘(expletive) that,’” McKillop said. “‘Didn’t I do good for you at Christmas?’ He gave us these small tape decks that were probably worth about $200 and everybody got one. ‘Now look what you’re doing.’

“We always had a big garbage pail in the middle of the room and he grabbed a stick and he was trying to break it. He was a big strong man but the stick wouldn’t break. Finally he broke it and the splinters came off it into the vest of his suit and all over the arms.

“He said ‘Oh, what the hell, we’re not even supposed to be in the playoffs anyway and just turned around and walked down the hall to his office. He was great.”

McKillop, 74, played with the Brandon Wheat Kings for three seasons between 1963 and 1966 before embarking on a nine-year professional career.

He was born in Deloraine but grew up on a farm beside the small community of Goodlands.

McKillop didn’t have any brothers to play with — his sister Donna is the mother of Westman player and coach Marlin Murray — but he did grow up with a cohort of fine athletes from area farms who played hockey in the winter and baseball in the summer.

His parents Bert and Eva didn’t have to give him a ride to the nearby rink but helped in other ways.

“They were supportive,” McKillop said. “In fact my dad coached when I was younger like eight and 10. My dad coached for a couple of years.”

The natural-ice rink in Goodlands was looked after by his uncle Lloyd (who went by the nickname Shorty), so McKillop and his friends had all the ice time they could handle.

“We had pretty good access to the rink after the girls were done their figure skating,” McKillop said. “In fact sometimes when they were figure skating we were out in the other end with the sticks already.”

Prior to the ice going in at the rink, usually in November, the boys would meet at a dugout near his farm. There was also a nearby lake that was shallow and froze quickly, allowing the youngsters to skate for nearly a mile.

It certainly showed in games. Goodlands piled up provincial championships as McKillop and his friends grew up.

Later in his minor career, he joined a midget team in nearby Deloraine, and also won a title there before returning to Woodlands to play with a juvenile squad formed with Melita. He also played with the senior team, the Comets.

Naturally, both those teams won championships too.

McKillop grew up a Wheat Kings fan, and his family would head to Brandon eight or 10 times a year for Thursday night games in the Wheat City Arena.

“That was a lot back then,” McKillop said. “A trip to Brandon was like a trip to Montreal.”

He remembers it being a cold rink, and that his family would head up into corner seats. But the team was certainly well known in Westman.

“Everybody was always talking about the Wheat Kings,” McKillop said.

Dr. Gordon Bonar, the namesake of the Deloraine arena, alerted Brandon general manager Jake Milford about McKillop and got him a tryout. He found out by letter in early June, although he cracked his ankle playing baseball that summer and had a cast on.

Doc Bonar took care of him, and he was ready when the Wheat Kings finally hit the ice. 

Five players out of his Goodlands group attended the camp, but ultimately, McKillop was the only one who stuck. Just months earlier, he bought a ticket to see the team in the Memorial Cup semifinal series against the Edmonton Oil Kings.

“It was awesome to make the team, watching them in April of 1963 and then being lucky enough to make the darn Wheat Kings and in April of 1964 to be playing against the Oil Kings,” McKillop said. 

The young forward, who played at six-foot-one and around 185-190 pounds, said it was a lot of transition for a farm kid, even if there were familiar faces from home at every game.

“The good part of it was there were at least three or four of us on the team who were going to the same school (Brandon Collegiate Institute) so that helped a little bit,” McKillop said. “My billets were distant relatives of my grandmother, which helped out. My mother sniffed that out before I even went to Brandon in case things worked out.”

They lived a block south of the Wheat City Arena, which allowed McKillop to just walk over.

He would get home from school and grab a bite to eat because the team practised around 5:30 p.m., and they would be done by 7 or 7:30. 

He said the three seasons he spent with the senior Comets proved helpful because he had already played against men. But the move to the MJHL still required his game to adapt.

“When I was younger I scored a few goals and when I got into Brandon, the game advanced a little bit,” McKillop said. “I could still score some goals but I became a better two-way hockey player.”

Happily for McKillop, he was joining a Wheat Kings squad that would go 27-1-2 and win the Manitoba Junior Hockey League title for the fourth time in five years. 

The squad was led by its defensive corps, which included Jim Murray, team captain Bob Ash, Lloyd Leslie and George Hayes in front of the league’s best goalie, Ken Kachulak. On the front end, MJHL scoring champion John Vopni, Leon Garinger and Ron (Spike) Huston led the attack.

McKillop skated with Rick Hextall and Cam Allison.

“We were pretty potent,” McKillop said with a chuckle. 

The team also welcomed 16-year-old Bill Fairbairn for a handful of games when they had injuries.

“He was quite a hockey player,” McKillop said. “He would go in the corner and there was no way he wasn’t coming out with the puck. If you went to hit him, you were down. He never budged.”

Ron Maxwell, who played for the Wheat Kings in the late 1940s and early 1950s, coached the club. McKillop liked the father of future National Hockey League player Brad Maxwell.

“He was a good coach,” McKillop said. “I got along good with him. He treated me well. Being younger, he would stay on the ice with me after practice.”

One of the things they worked on was McKillop’s shot, which suffered after he separated his shoulder.

After defeating the Fort Frances Royals 10-2 in the nine-point final series to win the MJHL, Brandon took the Western Memorial Cup Inter-Provincial Playoff with a 4-2 victory in the best-of-seven series over the Fort William Canadiens of the Thunder Bay Junior A Hockey League.

That earned them the dubious honour of meeting the powerhouse Oil Kings, who defeated them 4-1.

“They had a team out there,” McKillop said, noting future NHLer Glen Sather was on the first line.

McKillop enjoyed the Wheat City Arena, which sat at the site of the current police station and was demolished in 1969. He even worked there a bit the summer after his rookie season.

“Bobby Ash worked there in the summer time, and Frank Clisby, who ran the concession stand — his nickname was Hotdog — Bobby got me to help (Clisby) in the back end of the south side of the rink where they would have bull sales occasionally,” McKillop said. “If I wasn’t doing anything, Bobby would get me to help him and I would run around selling popcorn and Cokes.”

When he returned to the ice at the Wheat City Arena that fall, the Wheat Kings faced some massive changes for the 1964-65 season. Not only did they graduate first-team all-stars Ash, Murray and Vopni, along with several other top players — making room for Fairbairn and Juha Widing — they moved into the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League for the first of two seasons.

Since the Wheat Kings had only played 30 regular season games in 1963-64, Milford got them a bunch of exhibition games against SJHL clubs.

“We knew a little bit about it,” McKillop said. 

Widing, who missed a few weeks after taking a skate to the mouth in practice that caused a terrible cut that later became infected, was a welcome addition.

“He was just a good kid,” McKillop said. “He was happy to be over here and he wanted to play the game. Of course we were all trying to help him with his English, and he was very appreciative of everything.”

Oddly, the two years Brandon spent in the SJHL were identical. It finished third both times, beat the Saskatoon Blades 4-1 in the first round of the playoffs and then fell 4-2 to the second-place Weyburn Red Wings in the semifinals. 

In McKillop’s third year, he became a very popular and highly sought after teammate when he acquired a car. While virtually all the Wheat Kings have vehicles now, back then there was only one other player with a car.

“Every time somebody wanted to go somewhere, I was the taxi driver,” McKillop said with a chuckle. 

After practice ended in the evening, they would head to a small cafe near the arena for a hamburger, and then would carry on down 10th Street to a pool hall. Sometimes they hung out at somebody’s billet house and played cards.

In his third season, McKillop worked in the summer at a cement plant in Deloraine with his uncle, and actually held a job with the city in his third season with the Wheat Kings because he wasn’t in school anymore.

When Brandon fell to Weyburn again in the 1965-66 playoffs, junior hockey came to an end for McKillop.

“It was tough,” said McKillop, who remembered talking about it with teammate Erv Ziemer. “He had a good year and he knew that he was going to a training camp. I didn’t really have any invitation at that time. I didn’t what was going to be in the cards for me.”

He returned to the cement plant — where he worked every spring for 20 years — and early that summer received a letter from former Brandonite Fred Creighton of the Eastern Hockey League’s Charlotte Checkers. Creighton, the son of former Brandon mayor Jimmy Creighton, had talked to Wheat Kings coach Ed Dorohoy, who recommended McKillop.

McKillop made the young team, which set the players up in several apartments. He said a big part of that transition was meals.

“I adapted pretty good,” McKillop said. “I became actually not a bad cook. From there on in, every time I played, I did most of the cooking.”

After posting 49 points in 72 games in the 1966-67 season with the Checkers, the NHL expanded from six teams to 12 for the 1967-68 season. McKillop was added to the Philadelphia Flyers negotiation list and headed to their American Hockey League team, the Quebec Aces, after training camp despite putting up five points in five exhibition games. 

The Flyers called him up when Jean-Guy Gendron pulled his groin, but when the older player saw his younger substitute in the dressing room, the veteran refused to come out of the lineup.

“I went out for the warmups and I was 21 and Guy Gendron was 37,” McKillop said. “He wasn’t going to say he couldn’t play when there was a young guy. I went out for the warmups (against the host Pittsburgh Penguins) and up to the press box. We played in Philly the next night, and it was the same thing, warmups and the press box. That was my stint in the NHL. I never got another callup.”

A night later, McKillop was back in Quebec and what proved to be his best chance to play in the NHL was gone.

He spent three seasons with the Aces before being traded to the Hershey Bears, where he played the 1970-71 campaign.

He moved on to the Central Hockey League’s Omaha Knights when the New York Rangers claimed him in a minor league draft, spending the 1971-72 season with legendary brawler Steve Durbano.

The free-spirited Durbano earned a career high 402 penalty minutes in 70 games that season, but that’s not what McKillop remembers most about him.

McKillop’s uncle passed away that season, and former Wheat Kings GM Jake Milford was in that role with the Knights. Milford flew McKillop home for the service, and the team sent a huge bouquet of flowers.

When he returned to Omaha, McKillop told his teammates about what had happened.

A few weeks later, Durbano was in Milford’s office telling him his uncle had also died.

“Home he goes,” McKillop said. “Same thing. The story came from the trainer that Jake got a letter from (Durbano’s) mother. ‘Thank you very much for the condolences and the flowers but we didn’t have a death in the family.’ He was a character.”

McKillop’s journey took to him to Rochester the next season, where he would play for Cherry for two years.

“It was probably the best thing in my life,” McKillop said. “He liked me. I went to the rink for my two, two-and-a-half hours. We’d get into talks. We’d get on the bus and he and I would get together. He called them a ‘pop,’ and everybody had to have a pop. He would come back and talk to us for a while. He would let us do out thing. He would go back to his front seat at the front of the bus. He was a great players’ coach.”

The two talked occasionally as the years went on, and when the Cherry biopic “Keep Your Head Up, Kid: The Don Cherry Story” was partially filmed in Brandon’s Keystone Centre in 2010, Cherry recruited McKillop to play the trainer. McKillop spent three days on the production.

“It was great,” McKillop said. 

During the 1973-74 playoffs, Cherry told McKillop he wasn’t shooting the puck very well. McKillop mentioned he had a sore right wrist, which continued to get worse.

“When I went back the next year, they sent me to a specialist and he said ‘You’ve got arthritis,’” McKillop said. “I played that year, and then the next year they said ‘We’re scared to invite you back. If you get an injury, it will take you twice as long to heal.’ That’s how it ended.”

He still managed 52 points in 66 games in his last pro season, 1974-75.

McKillop joined the powerhouse Deloraine Royals after retiring. The squad won the province’s intermediate championship in 1975-76 and was inducted into the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame in 2015.

After two decades at the cement plant, he joined his former brother-in-law at Hasselfield Drugs in Deloraine — where he lives with his wife Carol — and has spent the last 35 years there. He works two days a week doing the accounting.

McKillop’s daughter Christa and granddaughter reside in Vancouver.

He still comes out to the occasional Brandon game, but doesn’t see as many as he once did.

More than five decades after he played his final game with the Wheat Kings, McKillop remembers the thrill he got from suiting up for the team he travelled to watch as a boy.

“It was a big deal,” McKillop said. “When you got your jacket, I couldn’t wait to get home to wear it around in Deloraine. I would wear it in the middle of the summer and it was a winter jacket. It was special to be able to play in Brandon and be recognized by a lot of people.

“I enjoyed it, it was very rewarding. I’m proud to be a Brandon Wheat King.”

 

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