Marquette Iron Rangers: Oakie Brumm

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Leonard "Oakie" Brumm. January 2001.

Can you say anything about the fans in the Palestra at that time?
Well the fans were very involved. There was no screen or anything, no Plexiglas, between the fans and the players. A lot of times you'd go into the boards, the opposing players would, and the fans would grab their sticks. I mean it was right...the people were sitting right in the game. They heard all the talking, they heard all the emotion, they heard the hitting. They were right in there. I think til this day there are some people that wouldn't go back to a hockey game in the Lakeview Arena because it would seem to far away.

I agree. I know some of them.
The Palestra was unique. The thing that got me about the Palestra, when you look back, there were no screens or Plexiglas, and the pucks were flying into the crowd all the time. A lot of people got hit, but nobody ever sued. A lot of people got hurt or hit in the face, but nobody ever sued anybody over it.

Wow. Are there any stories that you can recall that exemplify how hockey was different back then as compared to now?
Well, it was a…the Iron Rangers was a senior team. Even though we had some kids under twenty on it. It was older mostly mature players who, for the most part, were very good players. Now when I go to a hockey game, whether its in the International League or the National Hockey League, or say if I see the Electricians play, or even the University team…they're just going through things, I think. They don't have the good passing, and they don't receive passes as well. It was just more of a mature league. Actually, now I think there are thirty teams in the National Hockey League. Back then there were only six, and by the time you got down the line between the Western League, the Eastern League, the International League, and the United States Hockey League, the Iron Rangers were probably twentieth or twenty-fifth on the list of teams in the country. And at that rate they could be classified as National Hockey League.

What is the story as to how you got on the team? Now I imagine you would answer this differently than others.
Well, Dewey St. Cyr and I promoted it really. Leonard St. Cyr and I were neighbors. I had been playing in Waterloo and Des Moines, and there wasn't any senior hockey in Marquette. I was renting my house out, and the second year I rented my house the people who rented my house, college kids, pretty near ruined it. So I decided I wasn't going to go away to play hockey anymore, and the people in Marquette wanted a senior team. So we got Dewey St. Cyr, myself, and Jack McCracken, and Bill Todd…there were other people. We put the organization together, and there's a story in the program of who finally backed the team. We had to guarantee so many tickets for the league…when you read the story in the program as to how it got to start…Bishop Noah and my Dad put the final guarantee on it so it would be a success. And that's the way it started.

Can you say anything about the road trip to different cities?
I t was normally cold all the time. Sometimes we went by bus, sometimes we went by air. The big problem was flying over Lake Superior to Thunder Bay in three or four little single-engine planes that had to get all their altitude before they got over the lake so if they had an engine failure they had a glide path down. And of course Thunder Bay was, it might be 10 above in Marquette, and you get to Thunder Bay and it would be 10 to 15 below zero. Those were all what we called white-knuckle flights. And the bus trips were long and hard...

And the fumes?
Well, yeah the bus wasn't the best. My favorite story about the road trips is the fact that one year I got paid for coaching the Iron Rangers...I got the motor and the tires off the bus. It had a nice diesel engine in it and pretty good tires, so I, we, junked the bus and I kept the motor and the tires.

[Laughter].