George Stanley

SHS Class of 1974

Fittingly for a player of his stature, George Stanley was reared in Charlestown, Massachusetts, a hotbed of hockey during the Bobby Orr era.  He grew up on Concord Street in the shadow of the Bunker Hill Monument.  Like every kid in the neighborhood, George played baseball, football, and street hockey.  As the Charlestown Rink was not yet built, his skating experience was limited.  He remembers his church having sponsored outings at a rink in Revere, but organized hockey did not yet exist in George’s neighborhood. 

It wasn’t long before Mr. and Mrs. Stanley decided it was best to raise George and his sister Marie outside the city.  When he was ten, George’s parents moved to the Shore Acres neighborhood between Hatherly Road and Oceanside Drive.  George wasn’t happy about leaving his friends behind, but he was young enough to make new ones at Wampatuck School.  Soon he was playing street hockey, baseball, and basketball in his new hometown like every other neighborhood kid his age. 

Organized hockey started a few years later when George was in the eighth or ninth grade.  The Cohasset Winter Garden offered public skating on Friday nights, then the Friday Night hockey league took over.  The Scituate Braves were the major youth hockey organization in town at the time, managed by Ed Taylor and assisted by several other coaches and instructors.  George joined the secondary team in action then - the Scituate Bucks.  Interest in hockey was high during the late 1960s and early 1970s in Scituate and, since he was just developing his hockey skills, the Bucks were a better option for him.

George’s first Bucks coach was Mr. Bill Marhoffer, father of Andy.  George remembers playing with guys like Rich Phinnie, Bobby Welch, Freddie Ames, Bill Looney, John Brennan, Bill Brennan, Larry Takki, Jim Sweeney, Glenn and Greg Karlberg, Scott Nichols, and Joe MacDonald.  The Braves B team was coached by Ed Brennan, a fiery Irishman from Brook Street.  What he lacked in hockey knowledge he made up for in enthusiasm and hilarious instructions hollered from the bench.  Some of Coach Brennan’s favorites were “skate ya’ big monkey” and “change ‘em up.”  The Braves A team was coached by Ed Taylor.  The Braves A team had the most experienced roster.  Guys like Sean Coady, David Silk, Hobie Taylor, and Billy Dummer played for the top Braves team.

Here’s how George remembers it: “This Scituate Bucks team played Friday nights at the Cohasset Winter Garden.  There were four or five teams in this league including Norwell, Marshfield, and Canton.  I played in this hockey league through my first three years of high school.  Most of my teammates were guys who didn’t make the varsity high school team but wanted to play as much hockey as they could.  The league was competitive and a lot of fun.  It would have been the equivalent of a Midget team. 

“I think this league started in September and went to May.  We weren’t the best hockey team in Scituate at the time, but we had a blast.  Most of us were guys who got cut from varsity but we still had a desire to play competitive hockey.  This league gave kids like me an opportunity to play every week.  After Mr. Marhoffer left, my father stepped in and coached the Bucks.  As I recall, we always had three lines and five defensemen.  So there were always kids interested in playing Friday night hockey at the Cohasset Winter Garden. 

“Going into my senior year of high school, I was confident that I was going to make the varsity team.  Coach Johnson let it be known that he wanted me on the team that year.  Scituate had a summer team, sort of a high school team that played in the offseason that year.  I got asked to play on that team.  We went to Tyngsborough and a few other far off places to play in tournaments.  Coach Johnson may have gone to these tournaments to scout us, but he wasn’t our coach in the offseason.  However, he clearly was there to assess talent for the upcoming season.

“We had some real talent my senior year of high school.  We had three good lines.  Billy Dummer was very good, an excellent skater, tough to knock off his feet.  Michael Breen was the best player on the ice every time he was out there and he was only a sophomore that year.  He was as good as (Rod) Langway.  Langway was just bigger.  Michael had better skating skills than him though.  We also had guys like Danny McLean, Mark Ellis, Peter Sabean, Rob Griffin, and Matty Brennan.  These were very good hockey players.  Kenny Mattern was our third line center.  He was a junior that year.  Had real talent.  Ricky Kelly was a fantastic skater.  A sniper-type forward.  A little undersized but good.  We had a few tough guys too like Richie Phinnie and Gary Mahoney.  We were really a well-rounded team with some real talent and toughness.

“We rotated four goalies on this team – Phil Young was the starter.  The others were Greg Karlberg, Brian Powell, and Joe MacDonald.  They each took turns backing up Phil.  Tom Burnell was Coach Johnson’s assistant – he coached the goalies.  Coach Johnson, who was a very good athlete, was also a very demanding coach.  He could be tough but he knew what he was doing.   He knew hockey really well.  It was a lot of hockey X’s and O’s – more than I had ever been exposed to.  Coach Johnson knew what he wanted and tried to get what he could out of guys who weren’t naturally talented.  And he generally succeeded.  We also had a lot of ice time that season.  We had two games and three practices a week.  So we got in a lot of skating which helped us a lot.

“We played all the same Old Colony League teams that you remember: Hingham, Marshfield, Randolph, Rockland, Plymouth-Carver, Bridgewater-Raynham.  Silver Lake was just getting started then.  You could tell they were going to be a talented team.  We may have lost 4 or 5 games that year and had 13 or 14 wins.  We were pretty good.  We were actually very good.  We just couldn’t beat Hingham.  They were so good, they should have been in a more competitive league than the OCL.  We just couldn’t beat them.  They beat us something like 12-2 the first time we played them.  The second time they beat us, it was more like 3-0 or 4-1.  But we beat everybody else in the league, especially the weaker teams like Rockland, Plymouth-Carver, Abington, and Bridgewater-Raynham.

It was inevitable that the conversation steered to an incident known in Scituate High School hockey history as the greatest goal ever scored.  For those who have only heard rumors about it, here’s how George describes it: “We were playing Randolph at the Cohasset Winter Garden.  Not an empty seat in the building.  Little did the fans there that night know that they were going to see something truly special.  Besides Hingham, Randolph was our biggest rival.  We hated them.  Absolutely hated them.  We really got up for games against Randolph.

“The game’s tied, 1-1.  Third period.  I’m playing right wing.  I think Brian Rockwell was my center.  We had the puck down in their end.  But we turned the puck over and I’m in the right corner, down on the ice - the last one to leave the offensive end.  I got up – someone, I think it was Langway, had pushed me down.  So I’m trailing the puck out of the zone on the backcheck.  I get to the sideboards near the bottom of the circle and someone on the point – either Robbie (Griffin) or Michael (Breen) keeps the puck in the offensive end.  The puck gets sent back down to me in the right corner.  I pick it up and I can see that if I skate hard, I’m going to beat both defensemen to the net.  I have the puck on my stick and there’s no one between me and the goaltender.  I skate hard to the corner of the net with the puck, fake the forehand to the short side to freeze the goalie, then pull the puck back and around the sprawling goalie and backhand it into the far side of the net. 

“I skate into the left corner of the ice and throw my arms in the air.  The crowd’s going wild.  I’m on the very tips of my skates doing the dance we used to do.  My teammates mob me in the corner.  It’s like we just won the Stanley Cup!  I’m ecstatic.  I just put us up by a goal against our hated rival.  I’ll never forget it.  That goal won the game.  It was absolutely the highlight of my season.  People still want to talk about it.  And it was over forty years ago.”

George went to UMass Boston for a year and then North Adams State.  He had designs on playing college hockey, but here were some good skaters at North Adams and that was a tough lineup to crack.  For a couple of years, he played in leagues similar to the Friday Night league he played in as a teenager.  But it was time to get serious and think about a career. 

To this day, George Stanley has carefully maintained the friendships he forged with his Scituate teammates decades ago.  The guys he played hockey with back in the 1960s and 1970s are still among his best friends.  There’s a brotherhood, an unbreakable bond in this group of ex-hockey players which has endured for almost fifty years.  This bond is a testament to the game of hockey and the respect that these men have for one another.  George is certain that the game of hockey provided him with the best opportunity possible to make friends in a new town when he was just ten years old.  And he has undoubtedly made the best of that opportunity.

George is a financial advisor in Boston.  He and his wife Terri have two grown children.  The Stanleys live in Boston and enjoy spending their time at their second home in Southern California.

Edited February 17, 2019