Mosdell moved by Stanley Cup visit in 2005

The Stanley Cup arrived in Ken Mosdell's tidy retirement-home apartment 12 years ago today, and a man whose name was engraved four times on the priceless trophy as a member of the Montreal Canadiens said more with his moist eyes and broad smile than words ever could.
For the past two decades, in one of the great Stanley Cup traditions, each player and coach from the champions spends a summer day with the trophy, as do select others from the team. This month and next, the Cup is scheduled to visit at least six countries with members of the Pittsburgh Penguins, no doubt making a few return trips to venues from last summer, when the Penguins celebrated their 2016 championship.

The 2005 visit to Mosdell's home in Pointe-Claire, Quebec, came four days after his 83rd birthday, the day the NHL and its players announced an agreement in principle to end a labor dispute that had resulted in the cancellation of the 2004-05 season.
But without a champion to squire the Stanley Cup around during the summer of 2005, the NHL decided to give many of the League's past stars a day with the game's ultimate prize. Hockey Hall of Fame curator Phil Pritchard and his team of Cup caretakers hit the road to get the trophy into the hands of as many of those veteran players as they could; included in that group was Mosdell, who was on the list of elder statesmen as a champion from the 1940s and 1950s.
The stories of the Stanley Cup's travels and its adventures have been remarkable, even outrageous. But sometimes, as was the case for Mosdell on July 17, 2005, the quiet, poignant moments demonstrate the love and respect commanded by the 34½-pound, 35¼-inch trophy.
Big Mo, as he was known throughout his career, would die Jan. 5, 2006, in a hospital one block from his home, shortly after having taken ill. But for the final six months of his life, he positively glowed about the Stanley Cup's visit.

Mosdell quietly celebrated two anniversaries on July 13, 2005: It was his birthday, and 67 years to the day that he had met Lorraine Lortie, the woman forever at his side, and who for 62 years was his wife and soulmate.
Four days later, the Mosdells welcomed a priceless sterling guest to their apartment 20 miles west of Montreal. Following a private, emotional visit, the Stanley Cup was carried into the ground-floor recreation room where residents, their children and grandchildren, friends and facility staff fawned over it like the superstar that it is.
Mosdell was one of the great unsung centers of his day, breaking into the NHL with the Brooklyn Americans in 1941 at age 19, then leaving hockey for war service with the Royal Canadian Air Force before his rights were transferred to the Montreal Canadiens in 1943, upon the folding of the Americans.
Mosdell went on to win the Stanley Cup four times with the Canadiens between 1946-59. Traded to the Chicago Black Hawks (then two words) in 1956, he returned to Montreal for the 1959 postseason, winning his fourth title when he filled in for the ailing Jean Beliveau, who was sidelined from the Stanley Cup Final with two cracked vertebrae.
Mosdell knew a thing or two about injury; the center (6-foot-1) played a game so rugged that during his 693-game NHL career that he had his nose broken 10 times, a leg fractured, a wrist shattered, an ankle cracked and an arm fractured so badly that its reassembly required three steel bolts.
Mosdell was one of the best checking forwards of his time, his 141 NHL goals a footnote to his career. The second-line center's hallmarks were his defensive skills and a formidable strength built during the offseason by swinging a sledgehammer and shouldering sacks of cement in Montreal's rail yards.

"(Former Boston Bruins great) Milt Schmidt once said to me: 'Ken is around me so much, I think I'm married to him,' " Lorraine said with a laugh.
With Mosdell every step of the way was Lorraine; they met July 13, 1938, his 16th birthday. She would spend a dime to watch her beau play at the Montreal Forum for the junior Montreal Royals, often against the Verdun Maple Leafs and their teenage star, Maurice Richard.
Soon to become a Canadiens great known as The Rocket, Richard would cherish Mosdell as his best friend, road-trip roommate, confidant and sometime bodyguard in hostile NHL cities. Richard and his first wife, Lucille, were close away from the rink with Mosdell and Lorraine, and after Richard died May 27, 2000, Mosdell was one of his pallbearers.
I sat with Mosdell six weeks before his death for a premiere of the 2005 Maurice Richard biopic "The Rocket," and he was unable to see much of it through his tears. On the big screen, watching the grainy, sepia-toned scenes of Montreal in the 1940s and '50s, Mosdell saw the days of his own prime when he and Richard were like brothers, on some of the greatest teams in hockey history.
Mosdell barely said a word that night, a near-fatal stroke in the late 1990s having ultimately left him in a wheelchair with almost no faculty of speech. But his eyes lit up the room on July 17, 2005, when a white-gloved Walter Neubrand, arriving with the Stanley Cup on behalf of the Hall of Fame, lifted the trophy from its case in the living room and placed it in Mosdell's lap.

Mosdell hadn't been this close to hockey's holy grail in nearly five decades. He ran his fingers over the four differently spelled impressions of his name: Kenneth Mosdell, Ken Mosdell, K. Mosdell and Kenn Mosdell. The first two were soon to be removed with the retirement to the Hall of Fame vault of the band bearing the names of champions from 1940-41 to 1952-53, making room for an empty band; the second two will be gone next summer, when the band containing the champions from 1953-54 to 1964-65 will be retired.
After his private time with the Cup, about 100 eager people awaited Mosdell when he steered his motorized wheelchair into the recreation room, accompanied by Lorraine; their daughter, Bonnie; and Bonnie's son, Jason Bermingham, who wore Mosdell's No. 18 the previous season with Tulsa of the Central Hockey League, as he had for most of his hockey career.
Neubrand placed the Stanley Cup on a table next to Mosdell, and for the next few hours, family, friends and total strangers streamed up to hold and hug both the trophy and the proud gentleman it had come to visit.
While grandchildren studied the bottom band on the Cup, listing its most recent winners, the majority that afternoon began at the top. Why bother with the 2002-03 New Jersey Devils when you could marvel at Mosdell's 1945-46 champion Canadiens, a team you might well have taken a streetcar to see play at the Montreal Forum?
Wearing a vintage Canadiens sweater that entire day, Mosdell mischievously did tricks for kids, pushing his nose this way and that, like you'd see in a cartoon. Neither the Cup nor Lorraine ever left his side, the gleaming silver trophy and his beaming wife reflecting not just his happiness, but his entire life.
"I tossed and turned last night," Mosdell slowly confided in a whisper that afternoon, overjoyed by the occasion. "But I'll sleep well tonight."
I telephoned him at noon the next day. He was still asleep.