Jack Mullen
SHS Class of 1961
Jack Mullen was born in Dorchester and moved to Scituate at the age of seven. The Mullens summered in Minot and decided to make Scituate their home so that young Jack could develop in school and play sports with kids his own age. His parents had a house built on James Way, a new development off of Beaver Dam Road. This neighborhood was a breeding ground for more than a few outstanding hockey players. After a few years developing his skating skills on ponds, Jack broke in with the very first Scituate High School hockey team as a freshman. He’s one of a very select group of young men to play all four years of varsity hockey at Scituate High School, starting with the very first team.
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Jack remembers skating on a pond located in the woods between Beaver Dam Road and First Parish, across the street and down the hill a bit from his house. On any given day, kids from the neighborhood would gather there to skate and play pond hockey. As he got older, he skated at Hunter’s pond in North Scituate, Greenbush pond, the cranberry bogs, and even Musquashicut pond on Hatherly Road.
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Here’s how he remembers pond hockey in the late 1940s and early 50s: “There were a lot of guys playing pond hockey in Scituate in those days. Many fathers of kids liked to play pond hockey too. A couple of these fathers were really good. Paul Brown’s father, for instance, played for Boston University. He was a great player. The guys that really stood out to me as especially skilled in those days were guys like Paul Johnson, Bruce Sunnerberg, Donny Grip, Jon Story, and Ron Rencurrel. These guys, of course, turned out to be the core of that first Scituate team. They were always skating on the ponds and they were good.
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“I was a freshman in 1957-1958. Up until then, there was no sanctioned varsity hockey team at Scituate High School. This ’57-’58 team was the first. I can remember a call going out that hockey was finally being considered for a varsity team sport. I took this as really good news. I tried playing basketball and I just couldn’t get the hang of it. In one junior varsity basketball game I played in, I ended up with the ball under the net and managed to get it up and in. This was the only two points I ever scored in a basketball game. The only problem with those points was it was for Hingham and not Scituate. I put the ball in the wrong basket.
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“I really loved hockey from an early age. When I was very young, growing up in Dorchester, the older kids played street hockey on the packed snow and ice right in front of our house. I used to show up with my stick waiting to get asked to play. But these were older kids and they didn’t bother to ask me. They wanted to borrow my stick, but they didn’t want me to play. I think I received my first pair of skates as a Christmas present. They weren’t anything great, but they were special to me. We had moved to Scituate by then, and I wore them on the ponds.
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“When the hockey program was started at the high school, I was absolutely thrilled. Finally, here was something I could play and enjoy and get better at. Just being out on the ice with the older kids and some of the other kids I knew from school was really exciting. It really meant the world to me that Scituate was starting a real hockey program.
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“We only had one practice a week at the rink but we still found ways to get additional skating in on the ponds. I remember my freshman year, Mr. (Paul) Finnegan saying, ‘Alright, I want everyone up at the bog at 2:30 today’ and we’d go up there and put our skates on and work on basic hockey skills and then we'd eventually have a scrimmage. I played varsity hockey all four years of high school. My freshman year we were pretty good. But my sophomore year and junior year were a little tough. We lost some talented seniors. I don’t remember our record my sophomore year, but we only won two games my junior year. My senior year was better – we won a few more games that year. I initially played right wing in high school. Later, Coach Finnegan moved me back to defense. I had a real good hard shot. I scored a few goals with a low hard shot from the point.
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“Going from pond hockey to skating on a real rink was really something. I remember one time we were practicing or scrimmaging at the rink and I took off up the ice with the puck and went right at the net with it. But I heard whistles blowing and kids yelling ‘get back here, get back here.’ I come back with the puck and say ‘what’s the matter?’ ‘The matter is you’re offside. You’re over the blue line before the puck.’ I looked at them and asked, ‘offside, what’s that mean?’ I had never played on ice with blue lines and I didn’t even know what offside meant until that day.
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“We played our games on Saturday nights. We’d meet at the high school a couple of hours before game time and have a meeting before getting on the bus to the rink. It was really exciting. My father would go to my games, but I don’t think my mother ever went to a game of mine. I only played a couple of shifts my freshman year and it was only if we were up big or down big. Coach Finnegan always put Paul Johnson or Jon Story on the ice with us just to make sure we didn’t totally blow it. But I loved it. It was a real thrill to get out there and skate around in warmups. I got to dress for every game that year. We wore football jerseys my freshman year. I need to point out how good guys like Paul Johnson and Jon Story were. This was their first year playing varsity high school hockey and they were really good. I was in awe of them.
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“One game at Salt’s Rink I forgot my shin guards. In the dressing room I told Billy Barron, my best friend on the team, ‘Billy, I forgot my shin guards.’ I went out in warmups and skated around anyway with my socks flapping in the breeze. I didn’t care. I was just happy to be there. I didn’t have a ton of hockey talent as a freshman, but I got progressively better each year. My sophomore year I played right wing on the first line with Donny Grip at center. Donny was very good. He went on to play at Norwich.
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“I was good friends with many of my teammates – David Desler, Walter Stone, Billy Barron, Jon Gunn, Harvey Gates – we were all good friends for years. Billy grew up in my neighborhood. We had early ice one morning before school. For some reason my parents didn’t want me going to early practices. So I tied a string around my leg and let the other end out my bedroom window. Billy Barron lived down the street. Billy drove his parents’ car to my house, ran over to the window, pulled the string and woke me up. I threw my hockey bag out the window, jumped out after it, and hopped in the car. We went to practice and got back without my parents even knowing I was gone. Our junior year, Billy Barron took a stick right in the forehead. Right between the eyes. It formed a perfect ‘Y’ right on his forehead. For the rest of his life he walked around with a scar on his head from a hockey game our junior year.
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“I have a number of other recollections about high school hockey. My sophomore year we were in a tough game and I remember our goalie Billy McKeever taking a shot right to the face. I think it hit him square on the chin. Not a redirect. A shot straight to the face. It didn’t even phase him. Shook it off like nothing happened. Walter Stone was a very good hockey player, good enough to make the league All-Star team our senior year. But in the last game of the year against Archbishop Williams, Walter took offense to a cheap shot from someone on their team and cracked this kid over the head with his stick. Walter was suspended for the infraction but there was a funny twist to the story. Walter ended up marrying the girl who earlier had dated the kid from Archie’s who’s head he cracked that day.
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“Coach Finnegan was a terrific coach but he had his quirks. He wouldn’t let us wear shoulder pads. If you look closely at the team pictures, you’ll see we don’t have shoulder pads. Coach said ‘no shoulder pads. You guys are slow enough as it is.’ Coach used to bum cigarettes off Peter Moore, our team manager. Peter was my age and smoked, but Coach never seemed to bring his own so he was always bumming them from Peter.
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“I graduated from Scituate High School in 1961 ended up going to Boston College. BC hockey was big in those days. I had a great experience playing high school hockey. I still loved the game of hockey but I didn’t go to BC expecting to play Division 1 hockey. I finished college in four years and went into the service. I was in the ROTC program at BC. I did two years of active duty after my four years of college. I was a second lieutenant. Airborne. Infantry. I got out in 1967. Then six years of reserves.
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“After my service commitment, I worked for Genuine Parts for two years in Connecticut and then I switched careers and took a job at the Gillette Company in Boston. I applied for and was accepted to the management training program at Gillette and worked in overseas technical operations. I got an MBA at Suffolk University in 1973 and ended up with a 31-year career at Gillette. While I was working at Gillette, I played in a hockey league comprised of employees of the company. We played Monday nights at the Quincy Youth Arena. Every year they picked an all-star team of Boston Gillette employees to go up to Montreal and play the factory hockey team in our plant up there. I played on that team and it really kept my interest in hockey going for a number of years.
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“Some of the other Scituate guys I skated with after high school and college are Garrett Reagan, Jimmy Grip, Bobby Ferriter, Harvey Gates, Charlie Hoar, Skip Fryling, Peter Breen and many others – all great guys who I’ve stayed friends with for years. I played in men’s leagues in Hingham and Cohasset. I should mention that a number of good hockey players came out of my James Way neighborhood – Jeff Baldwin, Billy Spence, Michael Gately and my younger brother Donald (a.k.a. ‘Mouse’) are a few. All very good hockey players who played at Archbishop Williams. I also coached youth hockey in those years. Before we moved to Cohasset, I coached Plymouth youth hockey when my son Chris was young.
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Jack passed his love of hockey on to his son and daughter. Chris played at Archbishop Williams and Suffolk University. He has three children playing youth hockey for the South Shore Seahawks. Jack’s daughter Leisa has two hockey-playing sons – both outstanding players at Cohasset High School. One is at UMass Amherst and the other is at Merrimack, both playing intramural ice hockey. Jack Mullen is retired and lives in Cohasset. He enjoys playing golf in the spring and summer and spends many of his fall and winter weekends in hockey rinks watching his younger grandchildren continue his passion for the game.
Edited February 12, 2019