1943, Nov 6th: "Early Lead Wins For Celts"

St. Patrick's College won the Senior Interscholastic championship in 1943 behind the guidance of former Ottawa Rough Rider Bunny Wadsworth. The article below, from the Ottawa Citizen, summarized the victory against Ottawa Tech that put the team in the finals against Glebe.   

Nov 8th, 1947, Ottawa Citizen: "Carleton College Crew Stops Queen's Team, 11-6"

Nov 23rd: Ottawa Rough Riders 08 @ Toronto Argonauts 01

The summary of the first contest in this two-game series for the 1940 IRFU (Big Four) title was posted earlier today.

Nov 16th, 1940: Toronto Argonauts 01 @ Ottawa Rough Riders 12

Continuing to gather the various teams' playoff successes, here we have the 1940 Rough Riders' first such victory in a two-game series against Toronto. The second game will be added shortly. 

The 1941 games were a better fit for the Rough Riders 1907 - 1942 page so I added them there directly rather than create a post for them. You can check that out at your leisure using the link bearing that exact name under the banner image.    

Nov. 20th, 1948: Hamilton Tigers 00 @ Ottawa Rough Riders 19

This is the game which put the Rough Riders in the Grey Cup for the first time since 1940. They would lose the championship to Calgary, however, in a game now known in part for a horse being ridden into a Toronto hotel lobby by Calgary fans.

Dec. 14th, 1944: Joe Asquini is Awarded the Gerry Boucher Trophy

Many years ago, I was contacted through the previous version of this website by a relative of Joe Asquini. The lady in question was looking for more information about Joe's playing days. I tried to help and was ultimately given a gift that exceeded my contributions to the cause.

Since acquiring much better access to old newspapers articles, I've occasionally attempted to get in touch with this lady again to find out if she'd achieved her goal or if there was anything more she was looking for. So far, no luck. 

I was reminded of all this again last night when an article about Mr. Asquini caught my eye. It's taken some time to find it simply because it is from mid-December of 1944. By then most of the football-related activity is over so searches don't extend that late into the year.  

Mr. Asquini was honoured as a high school player at Ottawa Tech prior to joining the Ottawa Rough Riders. The articles about that award are copied below and if his relative is still looking for material, hopefully she stumbles across this post one day and this is something new to add to the collection. 

We Should Know More About: Ace Powell (Both of them)

I posted the image below on Twitter the other day. I did not save the full caption attached to it in the paper at the time but it read, in part: "Ace Powell tees up the ball and George Fraser, high-scoring Ottawa Rough Rider and 1945 winner of the Jeff Russel Memorial Trophy, displays his placement-kicking artistry for the benefit of The Citizen cameraman". It appeared in the November 3rd edition of that newspaper. 

It might require further clarification. The Ottawa Sooners and Carleton Ravens were coached by a gentleman named Ace Powell in the 70s and 80s. His birth name is Wayne. I believe the image above is of Clayton Powell, his father. The article below is essentially an obituary for Clayton following his passing in 2004 and it refers to his time as a Rough Rider. 

What gives me cause to doubt all this is that Carleton's page about its past football coaches refer to Wayne Powell as a "Jr" which normally suggests the same first name as the father. That's obviously not the case here though they could simply be referring to the "Ace" part. 

It seems the younger Ace Powell got into coaching almost immediately after leaving university. He played at uOttawa in the late 60s and was mentioned as a replacement on the coaching staff for the 1973 team while also coaching at Sir Robert Borden high school. That led to coaching the Sooners to a national championships in 1979 and eventually the Carleton Ravens gig. The Ravens experienced their only playoff success during his time as coach. Both father and son have carved out impressive careers for themselves. 

1945: Arnie McWatters is Awarded the Imperial Oil MVP Award

I'd gradually been putting together a list of the men who have played for the Ottawa Combines/Trojans of the ORFU from 1943 to 1947 prior to that team amalgamating with the Rough Riders.

The list usually only grew in small spurts. Today, I decided to dedicate some time to that task specifically.

I took a longer look at some mid-week articles from September through November of 1945 and 1946 instead of only game summaries from that time range. The mid-week articles often listed injured players being removed from the roster and their potential replacement as teams resumed training. They used the players' full name in doing so. Far too often, game summaries only refer to players by family name. 

Reaching the end of 1945, I landed on the union's MVP award announcement. It was given to Trojans  veteran player/coach Arnie McWatters and that seemed like a notable achievement to record here. I believe McWatters is the only Ottawa recipient of the award but that's hardly shocking since Ottawa was in the ORFU only a short period of time while that award was being handed out. 

McWatters was the most valuable player but was not named to the union's all-star team. Only George Sprague represented Ottawa in that regard. That would suggest that McWatters' coaching ability and sportsmanship were substantial decision influencers in determining his "value".

McWatters' career started in Sarnia but he joined the Rough Riders in 1939, won the Grey Cup with them in 1940, and stayed with the club until it was disbanded after the 1942 season because of WW2. He then joined the Ottawa Combines/Trojans in 1943 and stayed with that club until the aforementioned merger with the Rough Riders prior to the 1948 season. He has coached at both Ottawa universities. 

Oct 11th, 1947: Ottawa Trojans 21 @ Sarnia Imperials 06

I'm in the middle of adding some game summaries from either the Ottawa Citizen or the Ottawa Journal to the Trojans page, being the ORFU club that played from 1943 to 1947 inclusively. I've added one from 1943 and another from 1947, their most successful (yet final) season.

I'd like to shine a little more of a light on the game below from October 11th, 1947. Why is that, you ask? Was it a particularly impressive team or individual performance? Is there something about it that makes it iconic? Was it a turn-around performance after a winless 1946?

Not really, I just laughed out loud at the chaotic nature of the game and it was made all the funnier to me by the casual way in it which it was reported. Read on.

Very few games include brawls, fan swarms, and a manager having a bucket of water dumped on him after "just retaliation" from having an opposing player get in his face. We go from a mention of that incident right into the description of the success of the off-tackle play.

This may be my favourite game summary in nearly 150 years of Ottawa football history. 😁

Oct 29th, 1949: Carleton 06 @ uOttawa 24

While appreciatively watching the OUA semi-final game between uOttawa and Queen's on OUA.tv, I also took some time to split some of the information about the garnet and grey between a few more pages specific to certain eras.

1949 to 1970 was selected as one period of time. The team joined the Ottawa-St. Lawrence Football Conference in 1949 so it felt like a good starting point. That time range includes the Matt Anthony-coached years and right through to an appearance in the National Championship game with Bob O'Billovich at the helm.

The smaller segments will make it easier to record the program's long history. I plan to include more game summaries on each dedicated page as well as individual and team honours and so on to the results that are already displayed. Having one page for a program that dates back to 1881 was becoming cumbersome.

The game below against Carleton, pre-Panda, is from that 1949 season. I thought it made a fine addition. A few more have been added as well here and there on this new page, with many more to come.

Sure, Eight Interceptions Is Impressive, But...

Prior to the REDBLACKS' game against BC this past weekend, I located and posted what I believe to be the first regular season contest between the two teams. It turned out to be one of the first-ever regular East vs. West contests following the formation of the CFL, so a bit more historic than I thought.

I wanted to find a similarly historic event between Ottawa and Montreal in light of the game between the two teams this coming Friday night. I was reminded that Ottawa once picked off eight pass attempts by Montreal in a single game so I tracked that down. 

I was initially confused. I had read that the game took place on October 12th, 1947, and that Ottawa won (as you'd expect, when intercepting eight passes) 22-03. Yet when I pulled up the October 13th, 1947, Ottawa Citizen, it made reference to a loss by Ottawa to Montreal, 07-01. What the hell?

There were actually two game summaries in that paper because there were two games played that weekend. Ottawa hosted Montreal on October 11th, a Saturday, then the two teams played again the next day in Montreal. There were no Sunday papers then so both game summaries were in the Monday paper and I just happened to land on the wrong one. Hence the mention of "yesterday's performance" in the partial article below. 

That would be Howie Turner referred to in the first paragraph. With the score 6-3 in Ottawa's favour, Turner picked off Montreal passer Tommy Cates and ran "nearly forty yards" for the TD to make the game 12-03 at halftime. Then....

There you go. Now about those frayed tempers...

A couple of notable Jakes there. Dunlap played with the Ottawa Trojans for one year and seven seasons with the Rough Riders (and time with the Argos and TiCats as well). He has been general manager of the team and also a part owner.

Gaudar doesn't have much history within the Ottawa region as such, though he was on the 1943 Ottawa Combines team, but he was league commissions from 1968 to 1984.

Those two teams had quite a few people that would go on to be very influential, but that day they were just getting their noses bloodied.

The 1942 RCAF Flyers

The 1929 shutdown of the Rideau Aquatic Club's football program, a self-inflicted punishment for a postgame brawl at the conclusion of a national semi-final game against a team from St. Thomas, appeared to be a killing blow for junior football in the city.

That turned out to not be the case. In fact, junior football only disappeared for one year.

In 1931, a new junior league sprang up featuring six teams. I initially thought that it had lasted only a season or two but while tracking down its results, I came to find that it ran until 1941. A rough page has now been built for it though at the moment it's little more than a skeleton.

Not surprisingly, the league did not run in 1942 during World War II, much like the professional football unions. Ottawa did have a three-team senior league, however, involving the Rough Riders, members from the Air Force and a team of civil servants.

This league only lasted one season. Each team played the other two twice each so there's little to report.

It wasn't without its highlights though. The Rough Riders defeated the RCAF team 18-00 in the first weekend's action. RCAF would then play the Civil Servants a week later with a special guest star hanging around.

There's the two-time All-Star (at the time), the previous year's recipient of the Jeff Russell Memorial Trophy and the Lionel Conacher Award and 1940 Grey Cup champion Tony Golab, home on leave, just casually chilling with the RCAF lads. Could he bring a little star power to the proceedings?

And he did that very thing for the November 7th game against the Civil Service. 

Both the Rough Riders and Flyers ended the regular season with 3-1 records (and the poor Civil Service team was winless with eight points for and 89 scored against) so they met in a playoff, won by RCAF.

Unfortunately, our RCAF club would lose to Toronto's (the Hurricanes) the following weekend in Toronto by a score of 18-13 and therefore fail to qualify to play for the Grey Cup. 

That was it for the Flyers. The following year, a team named the Combines joined the Ontario Rugby Football Union. They became the Trojans in 1944 and eventually merged with the Ottawa Rough Riders. All that is recorded in the "Ottawa Trojans (1943-1947)" page above. 

Returning To The Field, Part 1: 1945

2020 marked the first time since 1944 that the collection of teams of what is now the league's Eastern Division did not compete.

With an expected return to the field in August by the CFL, let's go back and see what happened the last time the league, and Ottawa specifically, came back from an interruption in play due to global circumstances.

The IRFU's simmering plans to return were communicated in an odd fashion by the Ottawa Citizen in March of 1945.

The announcement confirming that the league would indeed compete in 1945 was delivered slightly more professionally.

The Rough Riders brought back former coach Ross Trimble who had previously guided the team from 1937 to the IRFU's suspension of operations in 1941, including a Grey Cup victory in 1940. He had to request a leave of absence from the firm with which he worked in Hamilton but it was not expected to be a roadblock.

Perhaps a partial reason for his success was the football "school" he ran, referred to below. 

Tony Golab and George Fraser (more on him later) only warranted last name inclusion in the above paragraph because they had been mentioned earlier in the article. 

The 1945 IRFU (Big Four) season began on September 22nd with Ottawa hosting the Argos, a game won by the visitors 11-09.

That tertiary will need to tighten up! 😠

Okay, so...that sucked. Let's move ahead a week. 

The two teams would post 5-1 records on the season, leaving Montreal and Hamilton with one win each), and therefore meet in the two-game IRFU final as well. Ottawa and Toronto split those two games as well with Toronto winning the overall scoring by a 33-18 total. 

"Rough Rider Dad"

Partial credits for this article are included at the bottom of the second image but as the article will quickly make clear, it was written by George Fraser's son, Andy. Rough Rider Dad was the article's title, which I've cropped off.

I bought the October/November 2012 issue of Canada's History Magazine when it hit shelves at the time but had no memory of this article being included. I came across it this past weekend while cleaning out a drawer at my cottage and thought you fine folks might enjoy it. Sorry I didn't do a better scanning job of it. 

The article makes no mention of it but George Fraser was also involved with the 1943 and 1944 Ottawa Combines/Trojans. 

Just Added: 1945 Old Boys Cup, Game 1, Ashbury 05, Bishop's 02

The summary of the second game in the home-and-away, total points series between Ashbury College and Bishop's (then) College had been located some time ago, but that of the first game revealed itself today. I also landed a picture of that 1945 team with line-up included.

At the other end of the page, any record of the Old Boy's Cup contest between these two teams I had found only reached 1969 but I managed to find mentions of it again in 1972 and 1976. Evidently it ran a little longer than originally thought so I'll be adding details as I come across them.

1940 Ottawa Rough Riders Sketches

I've added a few brief snippets of game summaries from the two match-ups between the Ottawa Rough Riders and the Balmy Beach for the 1940 Grey Cup as well as the team pictures below from the December 9th Ottawa Citizen.

Based on the citizen's coverage, the city was quite proud of its first championship team since 1926. The newspaper provided brief (and sometimes maybe a little padded) "sketches" of the team's roster. That would take up quite a bit of space on the Grey Cup page so I've added them below instead for, hopefully, your reading pleasure. 

Man, there were some quality people on that team. Several have been named to several halls of fame and/or later excelled as coaches and/or builders.

I might spend more time on this specific team, their combined successes are impressive.