Harvey Gates
SHS Class of 1961
Harvey Gates is a third-generation of the Gates family to live in Scituate. He's the son of a Scituate selectman and state representative. He graduated from Scituate High School in 1961 at the age of seventeen. He was the youngest member of his graduating class and an outstanding student in high school. He played varsity high school hockey, college club hockey, and another thirty years or so in Cohasset and Hingham leagues while married and raising a family. Like his good friend Skip Fryling, Harvey grew up on Booth Hill Road and starting skating as a young boy on North Scituate ponds.
“I started skating like everybody else as a kid, probably eight or nine years old. I could walk up to the corner of Clapp Road and Booth Hill Road where the Weeks’ lived. Phil Weeks put a small pond in behind his house. It was big enough for kids to skate on and not very deep. I could walk up there from my house and skate or I could go up to Hunter’s pond in North Scituate or the Dishpan a bit further up on Clapp Road. Dishpan and Hunter’s were bigger and we were able to play hockey there because the ice surfaces were larger.
“The store that my family owned – Gates Store - sold skates. It wasn’t a sporting goods store but for some reason they sold ice skates. So I got my first pair of skates from the store and starting skating on these ponds. There was no instructional hockey in Scituate in those days, so my friends and I really just learned to skate on frozen ponds wherever we could find them.
“Varsity hockey started at the high school in 1957-1958. I was a freshman. I decided to play basketball that year, not hockey. I was tiny…the smallest kid in my class. Why I chose basketball was beyond me. I had no basketball skills. I was the twelfth man on a twelve-man squad.
“The next year I decided to play hockey. This was the second year of varsity high school hockey. Our opponents were Weymouth, Hingham, Archbishop Williams, King Phillip, and Canton. Paul Finnegan was the coach that year. He was the first coach in the program and continued to coach for a number of years into the 1960s.
“It was my first year in the program (1958-1959) that we actually got real hockey jerseys. Fifteen of them. No more hand-me-down junior high football jerseys. These were real hockey jerseys and they looked great. We would dress three lines, two sets of defensemen, and two goalies. We had a number of practices leading up to the start of that season. Games were played on Saturday nights and I remember we had a meeting that Friday afternoon in which Coach Finnegan was going to hand out the jerseys. Coach seemed to be holding out to see who the last couple of guys would be to impress him enough to dress for the opening game. If you got handed a jersey, you dressed for the game. I was maybe a third- or fourth-line player, at least in my mind. It seemed to me that the first two lines were set in Coach’s mind. I didn’t expect to dress for that first game, but then something happened.
“A kid by the name of Tommy Kelly was ahead of me in terms of age and ability but he got caught smoking that day in school. Coach Finnegan temporarily kicked him off the team and gave me his jersey. Now that didn’t necessarily mean I was going to play, but I would travel with the team and dress for the first game of the season. As the season went along, Tommy Kelly came back but other kids got hurt or couldn’t play for some reason and I stayed on the team. I held onto that shirt for three years.
“I really liked and respected Coach Finnegan. He played at Boston College. He was a very good hockey player. When I was a sophomore, he took about six of us into Boston to buy real hockey skates. He took us to the old Bucky Warren’s Sporting Goods store on Winter Street to get us properly fitted for skates. Bucky Warren’s was a hangout for BC hockey players and coaches, including Snooks Kelly. I remember that everyone got a pair of Tacks – these were real good skates and not inexpensive. He made us get them properly fitted – no more of this ‘buy them bigger and grow into them.’ He thought hockey skates should be worn tight, maybe with one thin sock or even no sock. He also recommended that we put the skates on when we got home and dangle our legs over the edge of the bathtub to soak them. That way they would eventually form right to our feet.
“Coach Finnegan was very stern. I was scared to death of him until I was forty years old. To me, keeping that varsity hockey shirt was the most important thing. I wanted to get better so I went to public skating to improve my skating skills. Coach said, ‘skating is skating.’ It didn’t matter where you skated, just that you kept skating and improving.
“We played out of Salt’s Rink in Weymouth those three years. It was originally built without a roof but they added one sometime in the late fifties or early sixties. We were a very mediocre team those three years. We probably won no more than eight games over three seasons. The teams we played against – Hingham, Archbishop Williams, and Weymouth especially – were very good, very established teams. We had trouble keeping up with them. But strangely, we never felt we were on a losing team even when we had a losing record. We felt that everyone we played against had a head start on us and it would take some time to get a team together that could really compete.
“One thing I remember is that we always had good goalies. Bill McKeever was the goalie my sophomore year. He was a very good goalie. He was just a great athlete. Fantastic baseball player. He kept us in a lot of games. The next two years we had Rich Clifford. He was a big kid and also very good.
“A number of my high school teammates went off to college with hopes of playing hockey at that level. Jon Gunn went to Harvard, Jack Mullen went to BC, and Billy Barron went to Northeastern. I went to Lehigh University. Hockey was not a varsity sport at Lehigh then, it was club. I was playing with kids who had Division 3 junior varsity-type talent. I went out for the team my freshman year and it was great. We had a great group of guys.
“We played Lafayette, Villanova, Franklin and Marshall, Bucknell and a couple others. And we were one of the better teams in the college club league. It wasn’t Division 1 or even Division 3 hockey, but I didn’t mind. I just wanted to play. There was no real budget for club hockey. The coach wasn’t paid, he volunteered. I was a center and left wing, played all four years I was there, and really got progressively better at the sport. I captained the team my senior year. I should mention that I went to Lehigh intending to major in engineering, but I switched to finance after a short period of time. I graduated in 1965. Overall, it was a very enjoyable experience.”
After college, Harvey got married and took a job teaching high school economics in Bedford MA. When someone saw he had hockey experience, he was made the assistant varsity hockey coach for the three years he was there. However, it was during his third year teaching when his dad died and Harvey decided to come back to Scituate to help run the family business. He thought it might only be for a few years but he ended up staying for twenty-five. All this time he continued to play hockey. While teaching in Bedford, Harvey and his wife lived in Watertown. He played at the Harvard Rink, only a couple miles away, while he was teaching and then played at the Cohasset Winter Gardens in a Sunday morning league that was as entertaining as it was competitive.
“I played with older guys including Peter Cooney Sr., ‘Boonie’ Dillon, and Jim Graham as well as guys my own age like Dave Desler, Bill Barron, Jack Mullen, Jon Gunn, Skip Fryling and even got an occasional visit with younger players like David Silk. Preston Gray organized it – he was an auto mechanic who loved hockey. I’ll tell you a great story about one of those guys. One Sunday morning, Peter Cooney went out to his car to drive to the rink. Peter played at Middlebury and absolutely loved the game of hockey. He had six or seven kids and his wife would plead with him to spend Sundays at home. Peter would say ‘I’m just going to the dump.’ He’d throw garbage bags in his car to cover up his hockey bag. He then took off to Cohasset to play in our league then race home and tell his wife that his trip to the dump took a little longer than usual. He told her that someone spotted him and wanted to chat. I think Peter played for several years with us on Sunday mornings and his wife never knew. She thought he was just his time taking the trash out.
“Two father-son combos played. A guy by the name of David Desler played with his father, George. Jay Graham played with his dad, Jim. So these fathers are like sixty years old. One Sunday, the two sons got into it and the fathers ended up going after each other soon after. It was wild. Hockey in those days was just a great time. These were great Scituate guys who loved the game of hockey. I was only in my twenties then, but I continued to play hockey until my fifties.
When he hit age 35, Harvey joined the CEHL (Cohasset Executive Hockey League) at the Winter Gardens where six teams competed in a different time slot each Monday night. Loads of Scituate guys played in that league, including Hingham hockey coach Garret Reagan and Cohasset coach Dennis Lynch. Other Scituate guys who played in that league included Ken Chisholm, Jim Grip, George Delaney, and Skip Fryling. When the Winter Gardens later closed, the league moved to Pilgrim Arena in Hingham where it was expanded to eight and then ten teams.
Harvey and his wife Susan live in Scituate. They have two sons and four grandchildren. His son Peter, a former Scituate High School hockey player, continues to play pickup hockey and Harvey’s granddaughter Lyla, a fifth-generation Scituate Gates, is a nine-year-old goalie and forward for the Scituate Seahawks. He works in the financial services industry, plays golf, and cherishes his Scituate hockey memories. Harvey has friendships through hockey going back to the 1950s that he still maintains today.
Edited February 11, 2019