The morning after the roof caved in on the only indoor ice surface in Prince George, 15-year-old Dave Bellamy and his younger brother Jack came around the corner and felt a whoosh of cold air hit their faces just as they caught sight of the remaining walls and roof beams of the Prince George Civic Arena crashing to the ground.
They’d left their house on Burden Street early that Saturday morning carrying hockey sticks, skates and shinpads, thinking they were about to skate on arena ice for the first time.
Instead, they narrowly escaped what could have been a colossal catastrophe.
Had the arena collapsed 24 hours later than it did on that fateful morning, Feb. 3, 1956, the Bellamy brothers would have been among a crowd of more than 200 kids taking their first strides on indoor ice.
“They called it a Jamboree Day and they were inviting all the kids that wanted to play hockey to come down on the Saturday, and as it happened the roof fell down on Friday,” said Dave Bellamy. “That would have been hell.”
Dave and Jack left their house totally unaware of the disaster. There was no internet or social media. The Citizen did not publish a Saturday edition, there was no TV station in Prince George and they missed hearing the news on radio.
“We left early from Burden Street and we got to Seventh Avenue in the block between Victoria Street and Brunswick Street and we heard a wicked noise and a real whoosh and the wind just gushed by us and we said, Holy moly, the rink fell down,’” said Dave. “What it was is they were there with machines, pushing the walls in so they didn’t fall on the street. We thought it happened then, but it happened earlier. That’s when we found out about it. There was no communication back in them days.”
Officials who inspected what was left of the building estimated only 10 per cent of a crowd in the building at the time it collapsed would have survived the crushing effects of hundreds of tons of snow and heavy timbers. Heavy snowfall in the days leading up to the collapse left metre-thick accumulations in some places on the roof. Two weeks prior to the cave-in, the Lumbermen had packed crowds of 900 into the doomed building for their weekend games against Quesnel.
While the cause was undetermined, nearby residents said there were graders working in the area that might have triggered a sudden slide of several feet of snow built up on the east side of the roof, which happened just before the roof fell that Friday morning at 10 a.m. City engineer George Harford told the Citizen the snow falling off the peaked roof either weakened the east grandstand shed roof enough to cause it to collapse or the uneven snow load forced out the columns supporting the main trusses enough to cause the main structure to collapse.
Fred Terrace, the rink attendant, lived at the arena and was in the building at the time of the collapse. He was uninjured but his narrow escape left him rattled. The rest of the roof and arena walls were unstable and had to be knocked down the day after to prevent another catastrophe. The ice surface was salvaged and the Prince George Lumbermen played outdoors for the rest of the season.
Owned by the city, the Civic Arena was built in 1939 at Seventh Avenue and Quebec Street for the princely sum of $18,000. The Lumbermen held the priority lease as a privately-owned team and they were at first reluctant to share their indoor rink. But by mid-winter the ice started to thaw on that relationship and the Lumbermen has agreed to let kids play there the day after the rink met its final fate.
Roots of Prince George minor hockey, Mohawks tapped Bellamy family
Dave Bellamy was six in 1947 when he moved with his family from Tisdale, Sask., to Willow River and he learned how to skate on frozen ponds his dad cleared for him. Three years later the family bought the house on Burden, close to Sixth Avenue and Alward Street, the site of a dormitory for out-of-town students which had a well-maintained hockey rink.
“We used to sneak in there, they didn’t want the local kids there, they wanted the rink for the out-of-town kids and they never used it very much, so when they went home for weekends we really made use of it,” said Bellamy. “Our home rink was a slough down by where Dairy Queen is and we’d look after that.”
When Dave, his brother Jack, and neighbourhood buddies Frankie Westle and Teddy Teichman wanted a treat, they went to the Ollinger rink on Central Street on an old army barracks site now occupied by Sandman Inn and Suites, which had the rare luxury of lights. Dave started organizing hockey games when he was 12 when his father Delbert, their coach, asked him to round up kids to play West End Rockets, one of four minor hockey teams in the city.
As a 15-year-old, Dave played for two teams, the West End Rockets juveniles and Prince George Polars high school team, and the following year he joined the Prince George Mohawks senior team for the inaugural 1957-58 season.
The Lumbermen had folded earlier that year, unable to cover their own expenses with room for only a few spectators around the outdoor rink, while construction of the Prince George Coliseum began. Ernie Rucks, a member of the Penticton Vees world championship team in 1955, moved to Prince George to become the city’s recreation director and he got minor hockey started. To replace the Lumbermen, Rucks formed the Mohawks in the fall of 1957 and after just two home games outdoors they played all road games until the Coliseum opened on March 20, 1958.
At that time, Prince George had the only indoor arena ice and the other North Central Interior Hockey Association teams – Quesnel Kangaroos, Williams Lake Stampeders and Vanderhoof Bears -- played their games outdoors. But warm weather wiped out their rinks that first season and the Mohawks offered to host all playoff games at the Coliseum. Quesnel and Williams Lake agreed to do that but Vanderhoof declined and the playoffs were cancelled. The Mohawks were declared champions based on their regular season record.
“The Mohawks at that time were player-owned and operated and we got a share of the gate receipts based on how many games you played,” said Dave. “We did not too bad, the split (for the team) was $450. I got a bit of money that spring and bought a new pair of Tacks.“
Dave and his wife Marian met when he was 17 and she was 14 and they got married a year later, with Marian expecting their first of five children. That was 63 years ago. She looks back fondly on their Mohawks days, watching the games from the stands.
“It was loud and the crowd was quite rowdy,” Marian said. “They team could be quite rough, especially when they played Vanderhoof. It was quite a rivalry.”
Nicknamed “Moptop,” because he had longish hair he slicked back with Brylcreem, Bellamy was a strong skater and despite his tender age he wasn’t afraid to go into the corners to dig out the puck as one of the team’s top penalty-killers. After eight seasons at forward he left the Mohawks in 1965 to devote his full-time efforts to start his own business, Dave Bellamy Trucking, which became Coyote Transport in 1970. He didn’t get back to playing until 1975, the year he signed up for the Mohawk Oldtimers as charter members of the Canadian Oldtimers Hockey Association. In 1997, Bellamy organized a trip to Australia, where the Mohawk Oldtimers won the Australian Masters Games tournament in Canberra. He continued to play regularly until he was 78.
Now at age 81, after 70 years of organizing hockey games, Bellamy is still putting his managerial skills to use, keeping the graybeards of hockey entertained as head honcho of the Prince George Rusty Nuts oldtimers. He, Frank Speed and Don and Lorne Delisle formed the Nuts in 1986 for a tournament in Saskatoon. The 45-player group still meets three mornings each week at Kin 3 for intrasquad games.
