January 1st, 1937: "Fr. Wm. J. Stanton Dies In Crash Near Chatham"

Father William Stanton, long-time coach of several sports at the University of Ottawa in the early 1900s, died in a car accident on new year's day of 1937.

The snippets below are from the evening edition of the January 2nd, 1937, Ottawa Citizen. The Citizen combined reports from the Associated Press, Canadian Press and other sources, which caused the article to be a little disjointed and repetitive. I've chopped out the parts that are more relevant to his football contributions. 

Not mentioned above is that Father Stanton coached the Ottawa Combines team of 1913, a fusion of Ottawa city team (the Rough Riders) and the university of Ottawa club.

The 1964 Laurentian High School Senior Team

Over the past few days, I've worked on adding far more detail to the high school page. Most seasons included little more than the championship game's score and a brief summary, but I'm now working from 1927 up to the present to add regular season results for the eventual champion, as well as playoff scores for the league. 

1964 got the bulk of the attention this morning. Photography in the local newspapers began to improve around this time so the images displayed with the articles tend to be easier to copy. We have a couple of examples below involving the eventual champion Laurentian. 

Joe Upton is back coaching the Laurentian senior football team. Upton, a former Rough Rider star lineman, took ill a few years back and had to take things easy. But he feels fine now and is anxiously awaiting the start of the senior league schedule. In the picture with Upton are, back row, left to right, Jim Foley and Doug Smith. Kneeling in front is Mark Ciavaglia. 

The above is from the September 22nd Ottawa Journal. The picture below is from two days later, but appeared in the Ottawa Citizen.

Upton was a former Rough Rider but Foley was a future one. The team drafted him in the first round, ninth overall, in 1969. He played for Montreal for a couple of years but finally joined the Rough Riders in 1973 and played through to the 1977 season inclusively, winning two Grey Cups along the way. He is a member of the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame.

In the image below, sporting a different number, Foley is getting some instruction from Upton during the Western semi-final game in November against Rideau.

The mention of Upton's illness in the first picture casts a bit of a shadow on that otherwise happy occasion. Upton had suffered a heart attack during a game in 1961 and while the caption states that he was feeling great, he would succumb to a heart seizure at only 42 years of age in 1967. His obituary appeared in the March 2nd Citizen that year.

One of several articles about his passing included the November 1964 image above as an illustration of Upton "in happier times". No doubt that's true, as they won the championship that year. They would win it under Upton's guidance as well in 1965 and, as if to honour his impact on the program, in 1967 following his passing.

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. 

We Should Know More About...Matt Anthony

The mention of Matt Anthony in the earlier post about the 1947 all-star team added a little emphasis to the breadth of his contributions to the game for me.

In adding game results for the Gee-Gees over the past few months, his name appeared constantly. And so it would, since he was head coach there for 15 years. I continued to come across it when doing the similar research for the Sooners.

His playing career is less celebrated (in my view, anyway), as is his coaching stint for the St Patrick's team, but when those are taken into account, he has impacted the game positively at the high school, junior, university and pro levels as either a coach or player. Very few people can make that claim.

Let's let the also seemingly ever-present Martin Cleary break it all down for us. The article below is in effect Anthony's sports obituary from the Ottawa Citizen following his passing in 2000.  

The article accurately states that Anthony was the Sooners head coach in 1971 but he was also an assistant on the 1970 team.

I've been trying to determine when he coached at St. Patrick but I can't seem to land on that. I'm not questioning whether or not he did, but I would like to see if he had his standard level of success there. This post will be updated if I finally manage to find those results.

"Former Rough Riders coach George Brancato dead at 88"

Former Ottawa Rough Riders head coach George Brancato passed away on October 22nd. I let a few days pass so that I could select the most detailed account of his career and selected the one below from the CBC (Canadian Press).

George Brancato, who won Grey Cups with the Ottawa Rough Riders as a player, assistant coach and head coach, has died (on October 22nd, 2019). He was 88.
Brancato, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., was a halfback/defensive back with Ottawa from 1957-62. 

The five-foot-seven, 177-pound former LSU star earned his first Grey Cup as a player with the Riders in 1960 before claiming a second in '73 as an assistant coach with the club. 

He took over as Ottawa's head coach in 1974 when Jack Gotta left the CFL team for Birmingham of the now-defunct World Football League. 

After capturing the Annis Stukus Trophy as the CFL's top coach in 1975, Brancato guided the Riders to a 23-20 Grey Cup win over Saskatchewan in 1976 in Toronto.
Tight end Tony Gabriel cemented the victory for Ottawa with a 24-yard TD grab late in the fourth quarter from quarterback Tom Clements, a play affectionately dubbed "The Catch." 

Brancato and the Riders narrowly missed registering the biggest upset in Grey Cup history five years later. After finishing the regular season with a 5-11 record, Ottawa surged to a 20-1 halftime lead over the heavily favoured Edmonton Eskimos (14-4-1). But the Eskimos, with Hall of Fame quarterback Warren Moon, rallied for the 26-23 victory at Montreal's Olympic Stadium. Kicker Dave Cutler's 27-yard field goal late in the fourth quarter provided Edmonton with the fourth of its five straight CFL titles (1978-82). 

Brancato was fired following the '84 season after the Riders posted a 4-12 record. He compiled an 82-90-4 regular-season record with the Riders, finishing behind only the legendary Frank Clair (116) in victories. Brancato's teams were 8-10 in the playoffs.
It was during his CFL coaching tenure that Brancato earned the nickname "The Ice Man," because he routinely chewed ice on the sidelines.  

Brancato returned to coaching in 1989 with the Arena Football League's Chicago Bruisers. After the franchise folded, he served as an assistant with the Dallas Texans. 

He rejoined the Riders in 1993 as a special-teams and secondary coach on Ron Smeltzer's staff. The following year he was an offensive co-ordinator with the expansion Shreveport Pirates. 

Brancato was also an assistant coach with Saskatchewan (1985-86). He finished his coaching career in the AFL with Anaheim and Florida, retiring after the '99 campaign. 

Brancato played both offence and defence, spending time in the NFL with the Chicago Cardinals (1954-55). He made his CFL debut as a running back with the Montreal Alouettes in 1956 and played mostly on defence with Ottawa but still made appearances on the offensive side of the ball. 

Brancato was a CFL all-star in 1961 and was inducted into the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame in 2002.

The Ottawa Sun made a nice tribute to the man, seen below. The photo halfway down the article is not from the CBC page but rather was on TSN's story about Brancato's passing. It was credited to Getty Images but not to a specific photographer.