Terrier Town: Summer of ’49

Frank Udvari

311 Frank Udvari I T WAS SUMMER WHEN I WALKED INTO FRANK UDVARI’S Kitchener office and he was on the phone. He motioned me to come in. We hadn’t seen each other in almost fifty years. Around the walls were hung various pictures and memorabilia showing vignettes of his long and successful career as an NHL referee. Not far from his desk was a picture of the late Toronto Maple Leafs coach Punch Imlach and a five dollar cheque Imlach paid him after losing a bet on a goal Udvari once called. Imlach told Udvari he’d pay him five dollars if the puck had crossed the goal line. Pictures proved it had. Soon Udvari, the businessman, was off the phone. We went outside into the heat and sun that was the summer of 1995, and we walked the short distance to his car. He turned on the air conditioning and we drove off to lunch outdoors under the shade of a cluster of tall trees at the Westmount Golf and Country Club. There was a pleasant breeze, and a number of people greeted Frank as we walked in. Udvari played a minor role with the Galt Terriers of 1949. One sportswriter wrote that “Husky Frank Udvari is no fancy Dan around the first base station, but if willingness to learn means anything, the former Kitchener player will prove his worth to the Terriers. You can’t laugh off a .417 batting average, even for twelve official trips, and Udvari hasn’t had any boots in twenty-seven fielding chances.” He was one of the young local players—the others were Lillie and myself—who seemed to get better because of the quality of people around him. Padden spent a good deal of time with us, and it paid off. For all the knocks against Lillie’s hitting, he had blossomed into a consistent .286 hitter in 1949, one of the best averages he’d ever had in his brief career, while Udvari was playing better than almost anybody had predicted. Words like eager, conscientious, and determined were used to describe him. The team was so talented that Udvari saw little action that summer, though he remembered it well. As we talked about those old days the conversation invariably turned to Lillie. Udvari leaned back in his chair and smiled. We had already ordered lunch. Then he said: “What you have to remember about Lillie is that he couldn’t hit.” Udvari always blamed Bobby “Shaky” Schnurr, the playing manager of the 1948 Kitchener Legionnaires, for selling him to Gus. “Shaky, you traded me to Galt in ’49 for a jockstrap and a bat.” In reality, Gus Murray persuaded him to come to Galt, and as many people know, Murray was nothing if not persuasive. So Udvari came, though he didn’t fraternize much with the other players that summer in Galt. He was a Kitchener boy. In fact, few players hung around together that season. The imports were on the road a lot, while there were only a few homebrews, including Lillie and myself, who were too young to even technically have a drink. The only thing the entire team did together happened between the white lines on the ball diamond, and occasionally we travelled together to an away game, though as often as not many drove in their own cars. Perhaps Udvari’s best friend on the Galts that season was catcher Johnny Clark. “He was a great guy,” Udvari recalled. It had been years since the two had seen each other. Clark, who remained active until a massive heart attack in the fall of 1995, is a few years older than Udvari. Both men have bad knees, and Udvari, like Kaiser, has had a knee replacement. A year after surgery, he had completely recovered so that on this day he walked briskly. “That was a good year,” he said of that summer of ’49, having had no cause to regret coming to Galt. He was interested to hear that Jeff Shelton was still alive and well and living in Buffalo. “He had good stuff,” he said. “And he could hit.” So too could Creedon, he said. “He could hit that ball like it was a bullet.” But as good as they were as hitters, Udvari believed London’s Evon was the best hitter in the league. “He was the best hitter I ever saw in the Intercounty.” 312 Terrier Town—Summer of ’49...