I grew up playing hockey on ponds, out in the country. We played on the Pits—big holes left after they dug the clay out for bricks. And the main Pit, just across the railway tracks, made a huge ice surface, 800 by 600 feet.
Winter day, kids would come in by the car-load from villages all over the Valley, and you’d play 10, 15, 20, hell I remember games 22 aside, all on the ice at once. It was a gigantic, hard-as-nails, free-for-all and you played-til-you-crashed.
People had played like that forever. Black and whites, farmers’ sons and brickyard workers and local soldiers all together on the Pits.