Billy Johndrow

One of the best young hockey players to emerge in Scituate in the late 1960s and early 1970s is familiar face to many town residents.  He’s well known around town due to the time he’s put in at Hatherly and Scituate Country Clubs as well as the Scituate water department.  What many don’t know is that he was a very talented hockey player as a teenager.  His name is Billy Johndrow.

 

Billy Johndrow grew up on Egypt Beach Road playing multiple sports like every other kid in the neighborhood.  Billy remembers: “I grew up playing football and baseball until I was eleven or twelve.  Then I got into hockey.  Like a lot of kids in those days, I skated and played hockey on ponds around town in the winter.  I skated on the pond near Egypt beach, the Kent Street pond, and Greenbush pond.  Musquashicut pond when it froze was always a good place to skate and get a game going.  But I started relatively late.  Some of the other kids I skated on the ponds with were guys like Sean Coady, George Stanley, Billy Dummer, David Silk, and my younger brother Richard.  Richard turned out to be a very good hockey player.

 

“As I got to the age of twelve or so, I started to enjoy the game of hockey more than football.  Hockey was a sport I felt I could excel at, so I pursued it.  Especially when Ed Taylor started the Scituate Braves program.  I went right up there to sign up.  It eventually drew me away from football.  Football was my favorite sport growing up, but I really enjoyed the speed and contact of hockey.  Football had plenty of contact obviously, but I liked the movement of hockey.  It was fast.  For a while I was playing both sports, sometimes on the same day.  There were a few Saturdays when I was playing a hockey game at the Cohasset Winter Garden in the morning and then I had to race back to Scituate for a youth center football game in the early afternoon.  I usually missed the start of the football games because I couldn’t get from Cohasset to Scituate quick enough.

 

“I mostly remember playing bantam hockey.  There weren’t too many kids playing at the juvenile or midget levels in those days.  There were a ton of kids playing peewee hockey because of the Bobby Orr effect, but it was much different in bantams and midgets.  Sometimes I had to go up to midgets or even juveniles and play with them in some games if they didn’t have enough guys.  Usually, playing with kids who are older than you helps you improve your skills.  On those bantam teams I played with guys like Paul Keough, Billy Dummer, Richard and Billy Spence, Nicky Fairclough, and Garry and Peter Cooney.  Bobby Dwyer, who ended up going to Archie’s, was our goalie.  We had pretty good talent on those teams and we didn’t back down from anyone. 

 

“We traveled a lot.  We would drive as far as Natick to play bantam games.  Hockey was very enjoyable in those days.  I didn’t mind traveling.  This was Scituate Braves hockey, a real organized youth hockey program.  It was a lot of fun and I looked forward to those games and practices - even the early morning practices.  My dad used to drive me to those practices before school at the Winter Garden.  He had nothing else to do so he would always stay and watch.  Then he would drop me off at school.

 

“I need to say a few things about Ed Taylor.  As you know, he basically created the Braves from scratch and he ran the program his way.  He was a good instructor.  I had a few battles with him, but he was always fair.  He was a man of character.  I’ll explain what I mean.  I was burned out for a while by hockey and I decided to take some time off.  I was about eighteen.  After about a year away from the game, I went back to the Winter Garden to start skating again.  A short while later, Mr. Taylor got on me about something – my effort maybe.  I lost my cool and turned towards him and threw my stick in his direction.  I immediately regretted it.  My father told me to go right up to him and apologize.  Which I did.  Mr. Taylor looked right at me while I was getting the words out.  When I was done, he says ‘I’ll see you next week.’  That’s the kind of guy he was.”

 

“He never held a grudge against me for that incident, even when he had good reason to.  He even picked me as a member of a team that he was putting together to play in a tournament in Toronto despite that run-in we had the year before.  That’s what I mean when I say he didn’t hold a grudge.  He was fair and level-headed.  He wanted to put the best players out there to give the team the best opportunity to win.  I respected that.  Believe it or not, we drove back to Scituate from Canada together in his car after that tournament.  He had completely moved on from it.  He didn’t dwell on it.”

 

Billy Johndrow’s father encouraged his son to play all sports, but Billy was drawn to hockey.  Mr. Johndrow sold golf equipment for a living.  It was a seasonal sales job, leaving plenty of time in the winter months to drive Billy back and forth to rinks.  But he also emphasized the importance of getting an education.  Here’s where the two didn’t see eye to eye.  Billy remembers it like this: “My father wanted me to go to Archbishop Williams as a high school freshman.  I resisted.  Apparently, he had already talked to Frank Quinn, the hockey coach there, about me playing at Archie’s.  Coach Quinn was well known in Scituate.  I used to see him up at the Winter Garden all the time.  He was an excellent hockey coach, but I had no intention of going to that school and I told my father that.  He wasn’t happy with me.

 

“After eighth grade, I was really looking forward to playing hockey at the high school level.  I was a decent player in bantams, so I thought I could hold my own.  My freshman year at Scituate High, I played varsity on the first line with Tommy Moylan at center and Gerry Hayden on left wing.  The high school had a junior varsity team, but I tried out for the big team and made it.  We were pretty good that year playing against some excellent teams – Hingham, Randolph, Quincy, Marshfield – they were all talented.  We got to the MA State High School Hockey tournament that year.  Some of the other guys I played with on that team were Jake Basso, Dick Gerry, Steve Parker, and Steve Gluck.  Dave Bresnahan was the goalie. 

 

“Sophomore year I remember playing with Dana Smith, Chris’s brother, Gordon Flett, and Bobby Shakespeare.  Gerry Hailer was our goalie.  We were just as good that year.  Made the State tournament again.  That year, the standout teams were Hingham, Randolph, Weymouth, Weymouth South, Quincy, and Marshfield.  We had played Randolph in some kind of non-sanctioned game before the season officially started.  Beat them 1-0.  Mike Adessa was the coach of Randolph then.  He went on to become a very successful coach at RPI.  All these towns I mentioned had very good Old Colony League hockey teams.  It was Division I then. 

 

“I kept playing after the high school season ended.  It seemed like I had at least one game a week, maybe more.  I think it was my second year of bantam hockey that I jumped from the Scituate Braves to the Gulls.  The Gulls were a new upstart that broke away from the Braves sometime in the early 1970s.  I don’t recall too much about the particulars of that, but I didn’t care.  I just wanted to keep playing against good competition.  My teammates on the Gulls were guys like Nicky Fairclough, Paul Keough, Paul Hoban, Ray Gaffey, Kyle Vietz, Jay George, Robbie Griffin and a bunch of others.  I knew all these guys really well and liked playing with them.  Nicky Fairclough, in particular, was a good friend of mine and a good hockey player.  He had an older brother Biff, who could also play.  I was named captain of that team.  We traveled a lot for games – as far away as Lawrence and Framingham – and it was good hockey.  So I played pretty much year-round.  Before and after the high school season, I also played a lot of hockey in the house league at the Cohasset Winter Garden.  At that age, I just wanted to play.

 

“My senior year, I played third line on the right wing with Bobby Dillon and Paul Devlin.  Bobby was a center and Paul played the left wing.  Coach Johnson would use me to kill penalties.  In one game against Hingham that year, we racked up at least a dozen penalties so we were shorthanded for almost half the game.  I had an excellent game against them.  One of my best that whole year.  We made it back to the State Tournament in 1975 but lost in the first round again.”

 

During and after high school Billy Johndrow refereed hockey.  Here’s how he remembers that time: “A lot of people know me from refereeing hockey games.  I started young.  I was about sixteen.  There was a referee school in Walpole run by Bruce Hood.  He refereed in the NHL.  My father introduced me to Bruce and I started studying to become a ref during my junior year in high school.  I would bring the rule book with me to high school and study it.  It was about the only book I studied that year.  I started refereeing youth hockey games first, followed by house league hockey, and then NCAA and AHA games.  There was pretty good money to be made refereeing games in those days, especially for a sixteen or seventeen-year-old kid. 

 

“My first game ever, I was doing a house league game in Hingham and the other ref – we used a two-man system for those games – fell and split his head open.  I had to ref my first game without him.  But the more I refereed, the less I played.  It was a way to keep going to rinks, but I began to play less and less.  I developed a problem with my back during my late teens.  It was some type of hereditary degenerative bone disease.  It didn’t prevent me from refereeing, but I could feel my playing days getting further away.

 

“After high school, I got a job at Hatherly Country Club working for Ralph Roberts, the superintendent.  I did that for a few years, then moved on to Cohasset Country Club, Green Harbor Golf Club, Blue Hills, and South Shore Country Club.  I ended up getting a certificate from Stockbridge Agricultural School for turf management.  I went back to Hatherly for a few more years then Plymouth Country Club for a year and then finally Scituate Country Club.  Jack Devine hired me at Scituate in the 1980s to be his right-hand man.  I was there until the new owners bought it.

 

“I continued playing hockey at the Cohasset Winter Garden for several years after high school.  I didn’t really stop playing hockey - I actually enjoyed it more as I got older.  There was an excellent Sunday morning skate at Cohasset in those days.  I played with a bunch of Scituate guys - Mike O’Connell, Dave Silk, Sean Coady, the Cooneys, Jimmy Walsh and Chucky Harrington from Cohasset, and David and Richard Olin.  A lot of those Sundays, I had to be to work early at the golf course, get up to Cohasset to play in the 9am skate, and then I refereed a game that afternoon.  I continued to referee until I was about thirty-five.  I had surgery on my knee and decided that was enough.  I couldn’t risk hurting my knee again.”

 

Billy Johndrow has great memories and many life-long friendships as a result of playing hockey in Scituate.  He is quick to give credit to his father, who encouraged and supported him in every sport he participated in, especially hockey.  Billy is also very loyal to his bantam and Scituate High School teammates.  He can’t say enough good things about Ed Taylor, a major influence on him as a young man.  Sometimes, when you have the right people in your life, you can’t help but succeed.  And the more you get to know Billy Johndrow, you’ll realize that’s exactly what he did.

 

Edited June 14, 2019