Bill Dummer

Kids from the Shore Acres neighborhood in Scituate have been skating on the two ponds straddling each side of Seaside Road for years.  The smaller pond on the left-hand side of the road is only fifty feet from the high tide line where the Atlantic Ocean laps up against the shore.  The much larger pond on the right is mostly hidden by tall reeds, making it a great place for pickup hockey games.  In years past, when the pond froze, a dozen kids spilled onto that ice every weekend and weekday afternoon and put together a hockey game.  Among those kids was ten-year old Billy Dummer, who made himself into one of the best power forwards to come out of Scituate High School in the early 1970s.

 

Bill Dummer: “My older brother played hockey.  One day when I was about ten, I followed him down to that pond near Egypt Beach, hoping the older kids would let me play.  To a ten-year-old, these guys were like grown men and they seemed to play hockey, even pond hockey, at a very high level.  I was easily the youngest one there those first couple of years, but I stuck with it and eventually learned to skate and play hockey.  When I first got down there they would put me in net.  I didn’t mind.  At least I was out there.  Because of my size, I was the kid who had to retrieve the puck when it went off the edge of the pond.  One day I fell through the ice and had to walk all the way home in my skates because the laces were frozen solid.  But that pond got me into hockey and once I started to skate, I was hooked”

 

He continues: “I got into organized hockey within a year or two.  It was peewee hockey.  Ed Taylor was both the coach and main instructor in those days for kids playing youth hockey up at the Winter Garden.  This would have been right at the beginning of the Scituate Braves program.  I played with Billy Johndrow and his younger brother Dickie.  Both were good skaters.  Nicky Fairclough and Tommy Basso were peewees then.  Nicky’s older brother Biff was a very good hockey player.  I played with him a bit.  Bobby Dwyer was our goalie.  These are some of the guys that were already playing organized hockey when I joined.  I remember we practiced and traveled a lot.  We went to Framingham and a bunch of other places.  Bobby Dwyer’s dad used to drive us to those games in his Country Squire station wagon.  He was an aggressive driver and some of those trips were terrifying.

 

“Ed Taylor was my first coach and he had an impact on me.  He was tough but fair.  He had tremendous hockey knowledge.  He was a ‘tell it like it is’ type of guy - never sugarcoated anything.  But a good coach and a patient man.  I enjoyed playing for him and we got along great.  I was fortunate to have Mr. Taylor at that age.  I needed hockey instruction and he was the best guy for me and a lot of those other kids.  Jack O’Brien, John’s father, was an instructor for Mr. Taylor and he was excellent.  Terrific guy.  Not real vocal like Ed but an awesome guy. 

 

“I started out as a defenseman, probably because I was big as a kid.  Nicky Fairclough and I were paired on defense.  When I got into bantams and midgets, I moved up to wing.  I always had pretty good speed.  We started doing goal line drills in practice, which eventually led to better conditioning and leg strength.  When I got a little older, I began to develop a quicker, harder shot.  I was growing and getting stronger.  Like a lot of guys during that time, I went to Bud’s Gym in high school.  All that strength training helped me improve my shot.  As I built up strength from the weight training, I’d practice shooting pucks at the net in my driveway from as far away as I could.  At practice, Danny McLean and I used to take slap shots from one goal line to the other.  We’d try to hit the far net in the air.  All of that practice carried over to the ice pretty quickly.

 

“We played hockey pretty much year-round then.  Besides Cohasset, we played a lot of games at the old Weymouth Rink and Ridge Arena in Braintree.  We went to Toronto one year in bantams or midgets.  Somehow, Ed Taylor was able to get us invited to big tournaments despite the fact that Scituate youth hockey was relatively new.  I played with guys like Kyle Vietz and Jay George, both very good hockey players.  Kyle and Jay were a couple of really talented Scituate guys who ended up going to private school instead of Scituate High School.  They were just two of a handful of guys who, in the early 1970s, were at another level talent-wise.  My friends and I tried to emulate them. 

 

“We also played a ton of street hockey in those days.  I used to push a homemade hockey net from my house on Hatherly Road up to Cushing Hall on Tilden Road.  I built it out of two-by-fours and chicken wire.  We would set up games on the tennis courts and play for hours.  We also started to go to other neighborhoods to play street hockey with the other kids that were in bantams with me.  We’d go to Grasshopper Lane and play with the Coadys, the Donahues, David Silk, and a bunch of other kids that grew up in that neighborhood.  I’d go down there for street hockey games and we would play for hours.  These same kids all skated on Musquashicut pond in the winter and many of them turned into very good hockey players.

 

“When I got to high school, I knew I was going to play hockey.  Paul Johnson spoke to me about it a year prior when I was in the eighth grade.  He must have known that I was a decent hockey player and he approached me to gauge my interest in playing varsity hockey for him.  Initially, I entertained thoughts about going to Archbishop Williams High School but in the end I figured I was better off at Scituate.  I thought about playing high school football but, although he did allow me to work out with the football team during their double sessions, Coach Johnson made it clear that it was too much of a risk to miss the hockey season because of a football injury. 

 

“I made the team my freshman year.  It was 1970-1971.  There were some very talented kids that year and there were some kids with less talent who were forced to work a little harder to make the roster.  The first line that year was Danny Shakespeare, Mark Quigley, Gordon Flett, Tommy Moylan, and Jake Basso.  Gerry Hayden may have played on that line a bit.  They were very talented.  Very good hockey players.  So the varsity hockey team had a handful of very good, very experienced hockey players and everyone else.  But Coach Johnson made it work.  I got along with Coach Johnson very well.  I had him as a gym teacher and he encouraged me to push myself to be a better, more complete hockey player.  Tom Burnell was the assistant coach then.  He and Coach Johnson had a little good cop/bad cop thing going on.  Johnson would quietly tell us to focus on the fundamentals…the things we were good at.  Burnell, on the other hand, began to read us the riot act as soon as Johnson closed the locker room door.

 

“I think we went to the State Championships in that division both my freshman and sophomore years.  One of those games was at Ridge Arena and the other was the old Boston Arena.  But we would lose the talented seniors every year so it was up to the underclassmen to step up.  I played right wing in high school and I developed a good hard shot by the time I was a junior.  I skated my lane, kept my head down, and played hard. 

 

“In the Old Colony League, I remember Randolph and Marshfield as pretty good teams.  At the time, Randolph was our biggest rival and hockey games against this formidable opponent were always close, hard-fought battles.  Rod Langway of Randolph was my age and I played against him several times in high school.  As a high school team, we were fortunate to have a large fan base of parents, friends, alumni, and even teachers who came out to support us.  That included home games at the Cohasset Winter Garden and away games throughout the Old Colony League.  Hockey was very popular when I was in high school and our fans supported us the entire season.” 

 

During his senior year in high school, Bill considered the possibility of playing college hockey.  He explains: “Coach Johnson was instrumental in getting a couple of colleges interested in me.  My options then were Norwich, AIC, and Bridgewater State.  The Bridgewater coach contacted me through Coach Johnson.  It was Division II college hockey and they had a very good team in those days.  I ended up taking his offer and I played two years at Bridgewater.  It was during this period that I got recruited to play junior level hockey, which took me in a new direction.” 

 

Bill explains: “Michael O’Brien and I were recruited to play for a junior hockey team playing out of Beverly, MA called the Beverly Flyers.  An agent by the name of Red Fleming was responsible for signing us.  Fleming was compensated by professional hockey teams for recruiting local talent.  Brendan Watson was the coach.  In addition to working games as an official, Watson was in charge of all the hockey referees in Eastern MA.  His reputation as a hockey official preceded him.  We played two games a week all over the state.  Watson drove us to many of those games.  As far as I know, other than Michael Breen, Mike O’Brien and I were the only Scituate guys playing at that level then. 

 

He continues: “After a summer with the Flyers, both Michael O’Brien and I ended up going to Lac-Megantic, Quebec to play Canadian junior hockey.  I was nineteen.  Michael was eighteen.  Lac-Megantic is a little lake town with a population of about five thousand located several miles northeast of Sherbrooke.  Michael and I were two of only four Americans to play for the Lac-Megantic Royals.  The team owner provided us with clothes and even an apartment.  We were given per diems so that we had enough money to pay for meals.

 

“At Lac-Megantic, we practiced about two hours a day with great emphasis on speed and technique.  That’s what the Canadians really worked on and it made all of us better skaters.  As I recall, their training methods were different than what we were used to.  For example, Americans, for the most part, are taught to skate counterclockwise.  In Canada, they made us go the other way, clockwise.  So you were constantly crossing your left leg over your right.  It was laps and laps and laps in the other direction.  As an American, I wasn’t used to this, but I became a better skater because of it. 

 

“The talent at the Canadian Junior hockey level was a step up from Division II college hockey in the states.  I was a very good hockey player at Bridgewater State, but it seemed everyone in Canadian Juniors was good.  There were plenty of talented young hockey players up there.  Most of the players were, of course, native Canadians.  They were smooth, fast skaters and they would handle the puck with precision.  The fans in Canada really love their hockey and made their presence known by throwing an occasional chair onto the ice when there was a bad call from the officials.”

 

Billy came back to Scituate after that season.  He continues: “After a year and a half playing two levels of junior hockey, I refereed a little bit and continued playing in hockey leagues while I decided what to do next.  I was still young.  I was probably twenty-two or so.  I played in two really good hockey leagues at the time.  One was at Cohasset on Sunday nights and the one was Thursday nights in Hingham.  I played with guys like Jimmy Grip and his older brother Donnie, Ralphie Cox, Jackie O’Donoghue, Robbie Griffin, and Kevin O’Donoghue.  All of these guys were either from Scituate or had a connection to Scituate and they were all very good hockey players.

 

“Even though I was several years out of high school, it got to the point where I just kept playing.  I played primarily with the same guys that I had played with for years, but newer guys kept coming in.  Guys like Michael Hoar and Peter and Michael Cooney.  These younger guys were just like me, five or six years before.  They were just looking for an opportunity to continue playing competitive hockey.  It was just this thing where, if you grew up in Scituate playing hockey, you continued to play, year after year.  And having the younger guys come in is what keeps it going.  It was really a good thing to see these guys come into our league and play.  It felt like we were passing it on to the younger generation.  Richard Spence and Billy Spence came in and played.  There were many more.  It was special that so many of the guys that I grew up with in the game of hockey continued playing.  We were tight and it just felt natural.  There was never any animosity between the older and younger guys.  We just loved playing and wanted to continue as long as we could.  I’m sure it still goes on like that today.

 

“I went a long way in hockey, and I loved it.  Things weren’t exactly easy to come by, especially at that higher level.  But hockey was never any effort for me.  If there was a game somewhere, I just got up and played.  I didn’t have to be coaxed into it.  Hockey took a strong hold on me as a kid and I just pursued it.  Playing the game felt completely natural to me.  That’s what hockey meant to me.”

 

Billy Dummer is something of a quiet, under-the-radar man of sixty-two, but could pass for someone ten years younger.  He’s tall and trim and he looks like he could lace them up tomorrow and blow by an eighteen-year-old defenseman and put the fear of God into an opposing goalie.  He has spent some forty years playing hockey at every level.  Guys who played with and against him still remember him as an uncommonly gifted athlete.  He’s most proud of the camaraderie and friendships that he developed with guys who shared the same love of the game of hockey that he did.  He’s a product of Scituate, quick to give credit to those who drove him to practices and games and helped him develop his talent.  And he has great memories of the time he’s spent on ice rinks all over the state too numerous to mention.

 

Bill Dummer and his wife Robin live in Scituate.  They have a daughter Kristen who lives out of state and checks in with them frequently.  This may be the most he’s revealed about himself, and his hockey career, in his sixty-two years.  If you bump into him around town, introduce yourself to one of the greatest local talents ever to step on the ice.

 

Edited August 21, 2019