Bedlam. Bobby Orr had just scored the acrobatic goal ending the Bruins 29-year championship drought and Boston Garden was shaking to its foundations. South Boston teen Kenny Callow was against the glass, giving his brother Keith a boost up, just as he was getting smacked down by a Garden security guard. Although Kenny never made it, Keith scooted over, joining a dozen other Southie kids frolicking in the midst of Bruins delirium: clapping backs, cutting in on hugs, and looting. Priceless mementos, mostly sticks and gloves shed by the celebrating players, ended up in the clutches of these adolescent raiders.
"I've got three gloves from that game," said Franny Flaherty, still living on South Boston, "Hodge, Bucyk and Sanderson. They're down in my basement." He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder, pointing toward a closed door.
Shuttle the YouTube clip to the1:44 mark you will see a white shirted teenager with two Bruins gloves. He puts them on to consolidate his spoils. At the 2:10 mark, a lad in a yellow shirt caresses a pilfered stick, greeting his buddy in an auburn windbreaker (back to the camera) who's claimed his own. They are all from Southie. The Garden was their turf. How they claimed it, and how they managed to get into every contest they chose, is a Dickensian backstory to hockey's greatest moment.
Flaherty's cousin Larry Norton lived around the corner on Telegraph Street. A charming and dapper middle aged gentleman, Norton was the lynchpin of this neighborhood gang of sports maniacs who claimed Boston Garden as their turf. Their method of entry was as simple as it was ingenious. "I would put on my Sunday School clothes," said Norton, who was 13 at the time and known for his baby face. "I'd find a well-dressed family and slide in front of the dad. When the usher asked for my ticket, I'd just point behind me."
In the ensuing moment of confusion, Norton would bolt into the masses, and head for a designated location. "Door 14 off the East Lobby," said Norton, or another favorite spot called the "Cheese Doors." He would push them open, and let his pals in. Those doors led to five or six different areas of the Garden, so the staff couldn't cover all the options. "There would be 25 of us," said Norton. "The ushers would only get three or four of us. Those that got caught usually tried again and got in. We had eight or nine sure ins, and one would always work."
At the 3:01 mark of the video, a Southie kid comes up to Orr as he embraces an ecstatic old man atop the glass, the youth nearly separating Orr from his gloves. The legend rebuffs the attempt, and at 3:14 Orr hands his gloves to his roommate and team trainer, John "Frosty" Forristall. Orr was one of the few who escaped the swarm.
Prior to that season, the Garden belonged to kids from the North End and Charlestown. "We controlled Fenway, and Charlestown ran the Garden," said Flaherty, nearly two generations later. "There were a lot of turf battles. You were taking your life into your own hands, you [Southie kids] couldn't go over there. But we started to outnumber them, like locusts, the sheer numbers. Finally in 1969 I could go over there on my own."
Future firefighter Sean Ingram was also on the ice. He is in other unedited clips of the post-game madness, long red hair flowing as he danced across center ice.
By pure happenstance, Ingram was on a job in 2010, and began reminiscing about Orr's goal with John Gilligan, a pipe-fitter from Reading. Like so many others in Boston, Gilligan fell in love with the Bruins, and as soon as they swept the Blackhawks in the semifinals, he bolted to the Garden to spend the night waiting for tickets. There is a picture of him in the Record American, patiently queued up in the pre-dawn hours.
That morning he paid face-value for a pair of ducats worth their weight in gold. Gilligan's next stop was a Xerox copy shop, the first step in forging a reasonable facsimile of a workable ticket.
On May 10, Gilligan scalped his legit tickets for a sensational markup, and then used his forged version to slip in to the packed Garden, At game's end, he too, made it onto the ice, but he waited for the bedlam to subside. As the ice was being cleared he saw the cages and nets, cleared off inside the Zamboni entrance. With the building off its high alert, Ingram strolled over to cage and cut the netting, slipping it inside his jacket. The historic twine resides in his Reading den, next to the framed picture from The Record.
The Southie gang's lock on Garden access provided high-end entertainment beyond hockey. "We went to prize fights, Celtics, college hockey, AHL, concerts," said Flaherty. "We'd see big name bands on the board and we'd be there. It wasn't like we knew their music. Wednesday night, we're going to The Stones."
Garden security started wising up, and the Southie kids had to make adjustments. "For big games, we'd get there two hours early, before regular fans were allowed in," said Flaherty. "Sometimes the owners of the Bruins, Westy Adams senior and junior, would be down at ice level before the game, grab a security guard and point us out in the Heavens [the old Garden's Upper Balcony]. Their feeling was No one gets in for free. We'd have to climb up the ventilation shafts and hide in the ceiling until they let the fans in. We'd pop back down and go wash up in the bathrooms. It looked like we'd been playing in coal."
The good times rolled on for the Southie hockey maniacs into the 1970's. After games at the Garden they would come home and play street hockey for another two hours. When the Bruins made it to the 1972 Finals against the Rangers, they got set for what they thought would be another rollicking Cup party, the Bruins leading three games to one, ready to clinch the championship on home ice once again.
"We were too cool to take the "T" any more," said Norton. "So instead of sharing a cab, I saw a car with the keys in it." The boys were now riding in style to the Garden, albeit in a hot car. With the Cup in the house, the Rangers upset the Bruins, forcing a Game Six in New York. This provided yet another opportunity.
"I still had the car," said Norton, "Let's go to New York!" Larry found lots of well-dressed New Yorkers to ply his craft, and Southie's answer to the Bowery Boys found themselves in a much glitzier Garden party. The end result, however, was much the same, with Johnny Bucyk and Lord Stanley taking a victory lap.
At the final buzzer, old film clips show renegade fans sprinting onto the ice, reminiscent of Mother's Day two years prior. But this Cup celebration was not nearly as accommodating to the gate crashers.
At the 22:35 mark you see an excited fan in a blue windbreaker sprinting towards Gerry Cheevers and the Boston net, gleefully ready to join the black and gold conga line. That is, until he runs into the elbow of Johnny "Pie" McKenzie, and gets flattened to the ice for his trouble.
In the remaining footage, the renegades are now out of the picture, apparently deflated by McKenzie's last check of the season.
The Bruins didn't win another Cup until 2011, and by that time the Norton, Flaherty, Ingram and Callow were all watching from their couches as middle aged men. But like their heroes in black and gold, this Southie gang had a hell of a run.
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