Peewees....

We were all in Peewees....in 1968. Me, Morris, Lester, Kenny, Victor, Barry and George Alexander. One day Mr. Kenny came to us and asked us if we wanted to play for Fraser Lake that coming weekend. Mr. Kenny was our Intermediate dorm Supervisor. He explained that Mr. Simpson, the coach for the Fraser Lake Peewees, asked if we could play for them in an upcoming game. We weren’t exactly sure. Kenny, Barry and us. We never ever played for anybody else before except Lejac. But some of us said we’ll try it....maybe. So that weekend Mr. Simpson came and got us and we played for Fraser Lake against a team called Nadina. Or course we beat the pants off them.

It was an early morning game at their rink at Fraser Lake. After the game, we all went to Mr. Simpson’s house for lunch. And Mrs. Simpson fed us soup and sandwiches for lunch. Mrs. Simpson was really nice.

After that a whole bunch of us from Lejac started joining the Fraser Lake teams just so we could get away from the school. Especially when we had ‘away games’. That’s when we went on road trips, like to Burns Lake, Fort St. James or even Vanderhoof. That way we got to be away from the school the whole day. Even Burns Lake came and got some of us to play for them. But that was a long way away to travel for a game (Burns Lake is 40 miles away from Lejac). That was Immaculatta at Burns Lake.

By 1970-71, most of the older boys from Lejac only played for the Fraser Lake teams. Especially after they built their brand new arena and all their dressing rooms were all inside and nice and warm.

Lejac and Fraser Lake, like most northern communities, only had outdoor rinks in the 1960s which required they make their own ice.

At Lejac, once the snow fell in the late fall or early winter, all the boys and girls would go out to the rink and trample the snow. Everyone would line up side by side across the entire rink from the boards of one side of the rink to the other, and you would have one line of kids work their way down the length of the rink trampling all the snow. Followed by another line of kids until the entire rink area had been trampled. Then that would all be flooded.

Most years none of us could wait for our ice and so the whole school would go up to the pond next to the dump, across the highway from our school. The pond always had excellent ice. Some Saturdays all the boys and girls and their supervisors would be out there the whole day in the late fall.

In 1963 there was only one rink at Lejac. Later, maybe in 1964, they built another rink which we used to call ‘the big rink’. Whenever we had hockey games, we always played at the big rink while the smaller rink was more for public skating and sometimes broomball. We also had a fairly large skate shack at the new rink where we changed into our skates. During the winter months, the rinks were a very active place as many students and staff preferred the outdoors and skating especially in the evenings after supper. There were also families who lived at Lejac or just up the road, like the Leslies who used to come out skating. Or Trevor Bowen, Mrs. Bowen’s son.

Then they built a curling rink next to the big rink around 1965 and everyone at the school all took up curling. They even used to have bonspiels with teams from Fraser Lake. I used to hate having to clean off the curling rink because it was such a big long building. But if you did, once we were done us Intermediate boys used to take turns jumping off the roof into the deep snow below. That was our reward for shovelling all that snow off the roof. Photo courtesy of Jim Callanan, edited by Verne Solonas