On the cover: "Can Derek Sanderson Find Happiness On Ice?"

I’m not a big fan of ice hockey but getting to leaf through a 1973 issue of Hockey Digest is a fun retro thing to do. The April issue I got my bony fingers on features a slew of narrative-driven stories, most of which oddly concerned players trying to attain happiness in life and career. But, then, aren’t we all?

One of the interesting articles, written by Toronto sportswriter Dick Beddoes, a colorful character who enjoyed dressing sorta pimpy, focused on the imprisonment of Maple Leafs owner Harold Ballard, a jackass who’d been sentenced to a nine years in the federal penalty box for an assortment of financial chicanery. Incarceration in a supermax penitentiary didn’t prevent him from continuing to be an operator. An excerpt from “The Unhappy Saga of Harold Ballard”:

“Millhaven has rarely had a more celebrated inmate, apart from the odd big-time stock thief or kidnapper. The other cons naturally want to know what’s wrong with the Maple Leafs, a dilapidated team on a headlong plunge down an open elevator shaft.

Ballard is an expansive host as he shows his friends his tidy Millhaven quarters, somewhat more Spartan than to palatial suite in the Gardens. which resembles an ostentatious remnant from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

‘This,’ he’ll say, ‘is the library. And next door, here, is the television room. We get the hockey games on color TV.’

He points out the swimming pool and says, a little wistfully, ‘And out there just outside the window we’re going to get busy building a hockey rink.'”

More Miscellaneous Media:

• Official guide of the 1964 World’s Fair.
• Official guide of the 1939 World’s Fair.
• New York Nets 1976-77 Yearbook
• “Tom Dooley” Sheet Music.
• Buffalo Braves 1972-73 Yearbook.