"Mr. Hockey" By General Acclaim

When the final buzzer sounds in Davis Rink on March 4 Eddie Jeremiah '30 ends a 30-year regime as head coach

EARLY next month, on Saturday evening, March 4, the Dartmouth varsity hockey team winds up its season against Brown in Davis Rink. The game will mark the farewell appearance as Dartmouth hockey coach of Edward John Jeremiah '30, who closes out a career spanning some thirty years.

On the previous night, Friday, March 3, the traditional alumni vs. varsity game is scheduled, and you can bet that a host of former Big Green hockey players will make the sentimental journey to Hanover to play one more game for Jerry and to share in the postgame festivities with him.

Actually, Jeremiah will coach freshman baseball this spring, and then retire officially on June 30. It's an early retirement for the 61-year-old Jeremiah, necessitated by a serious illness which has plagued him with increasing intensity over the past ten years.

"I have mixed emotions about retirement," Jerry says. "I hate to give up coaching, the contact with the players, and the excitement of the games, but I just don't have the physical strength to continue effectively. The College wants me to remain available as a sort of consultant in hockey, so I'll be sticking around Hanover and maybe I can be of some help to Ab Oakes."

Few hockey coaches, if any, in the nation have contributed so much to the growth and development of intercollegiate hockey as has Eddie Jeremiah. None has compiled such an outstanding record, produced as many Olympic hockey stars, helped train so many school and college hockey coaches, or reached such a peak of eminence in a sport which by all odds is one of the toughest and most competitive in the sports world.

Next month, as many of the former Dartmouth hockey players return for the annual alumni game, they'll probably look with fresh appreciation on the array of team and individual hockey trophies on display at Davis Varsity House. They'll see other, more personal trophies on the fireplace mantel in Jerry's living room when they assemble there for the postgame party.

This tough, rugged but genial son of Armenian immigrant parents has a record of accomplishments which fills three full pages in his dossier in the Alumni Records Office.

In his first nine years as Dartmouth hockey coach the Big Green won seven Pentagonal League Championships. During the 1942-1946 seasons his teams set an intercollegiate record of playing 46 games without defeat. Jeremiah's overall varsity record at Dartmouth through 1966 shows a total of 300 wins, 227 losses, and twelve tie games.

While it is in hockey that Jerry is best known, it should be noted that he has coached equally well at Dartmouth in football and baseball. From 1937 through 1943 he was the freshman football and baseball coach. After World War II, in which he served as a lieutenant commander in the Navy on harbor entrance control, Jerry returned to Hanover to become varsity baseball coach and won the Ivy League baseball championship in 1948. In 1951 he resumed his present role as freshman baseball mentor.

Indeed it was only four years ago, in 1963, that the DCAC saw fit to employ a freshman hockey coach to give Jeremiah some needed assistance during the winter. Prior to the selection of Ab Oakes '56, Jerry had coached both freshman and varsity hockey for over two decades.

"It should be pointed out that Ab Oakes is a hand-picked successor," Jerry emphasizes. "I hoped when I brought him in as freshman coach that he'd be ready to take over the varsity when I retired. He's already proven himself, and you will recall that he coached the varsity team to an Ivy League title in 1964 when I was in Austria coaching the U. S. Olympic team. Ab was a fine captain for me in 1956, and I'm confident he'll bring Dartmouth's hockey teams right back on top."

During most of his years at Dartmouth Jeremiah has also served as an official in sports - baseball, hockey and football. He is particularly noted as an outstanding college football official and has refereed many eastern college games.

It is understandable that many honors should come to the popular Dartmouth coach during such a career. They started in 1930 when Jerry was picked for the All-American College Hockey Team in his senior year. Some twenty years later, in 1951, he received hockey's highest tribute when he was chosen for the first "College Hockey Coach of the Year" award.

In 1952 he served as a member of the U. S. Olympic hockey selection committee, and that same season he was chairman of the NCAA Eastern hockey selection committee. In 1955 he was elected secretary-treasurer of the American Hockey Coaches Association and served for eight years. Currently he is president of the Association.

One of hockey's highest compliments was paid him in 1964 when Jeremiah was named to coach the U. S. hockey team for the Winter Olympic Games in Austria. And only two months ago his Ivy League colleagues honored him by electing him president of the Ivy League Hockey Coaches Association.

Back in the early forties Jerry wrote a book, drawn from his coaching experiences, called Ice Hockey, and he later revised it for publication in 1952. The book attracted some international attention and was used by the Copenhagen Skating Clubs in Denmark as a guide for their teams.

Jerry's first love has always been Dartmouth and his Class of 1930, and there is little doubt that the 1930 fellowship has been of enormous help to him. They have honored him with testimonial dinners and have stuck by him in the hard years, and he has a host of close friends in the class.

JEREMIAH was born in Worcester, Mass, and lived for some years in Charlestown, an industrial section of Boston, before moving at the age of nine to Somerville, which became the family's permanent home. At Somerville High, where he took commercial subjects, Jerry proved a standout athlete, winning varsity letters from sophomore year on in football, hockey and baseball and being elected captain of the baseball team his senior year.

"Actually, I wasn't as interested in hockey then as I was in the other sports. If Somerville High had had a gymnasium and basketball court in those days I probably would have gone out for basketball in the winter. But they didn't have a basketball team, so I went out for hockey."

As the oldest son Jeremiah fully intended to go out and earn a living immediately upon graduation from Somerville High. But on commencement day fate stepped in. Here's how Jerry tells it:

"I proudly walked out of the school auditorium with my diploma and turned left (thank God!) because that turned out to be the right turn for me. I met Miss Campbell, the head of the commercial department, who asked if I wanted a job as a bookkeeper in a corset business. Brother, my mind went into a real whirl because suddently I had visions of E. J. - the three-star athlete - sitting on a high stool perched over bra and corset accounts for the rest of his life. I said 'no, thanks,' and immediately rushed back to tell my old coach, Dutch Ayer, that I wanted to go to college. He recommended some extra preparation at Hebron Academy first.

Jerry spent two years at Hebron, again winning varsity letters in football, hockey and baseball and serving as captain of the Hebron hockey team. One day, during practice, he was approached by a stranger who asked him about his college plans and whether he had thought of going to Dartmouth. The "stranger" turned out to be Paul Harmon 'l3, who held the Dartmouth College mile record from 1913 to 1944 until it was broken by Don Burnham '44.

"Harmon got me first interested in Dartmouth," Jerry admits, "but it was really Sid Hazelton '09 who sold me. Sid came down one day with the Dartmouth freshman baseball team to play us, and when we got rained out he talked to me for a long time. I knew then Dartmouth was the place for me, although I sure didn't have any idea that I'd spend more than half my lifetime there!"

There's a battered registration card, still on file at the College, filled out in bold, scrawling handwriting which shows that one Edward John Jeremiah was duly enrolled at Dartmouth College with the Class of 1930 on September 22, 1926. Jeremiah still intended to go into business, so he majored in economics but spent much of his time in athletic pursuits.

"I weighed in, soaking wet, at 155 pounds in those days," he recalls with a grin, "and found it pretty tough to keep up with some of my heavier and more rugged classmates."

But Jerry did all right, winning two varsity D's each in football and baseball and three in hockey. For a while baseball appeared to be the sport to offer Jeremiah a professional career. A number of professional scouts came to Hanover to observe him. "But as soon as they'd spot Red Rolfe (Robert A. Rolfe '31, now director of athletics at Dartmouth) playing shortstop they forgot all about me," says Jerry.

Rolfe remembers coming to Dartmouth a year later than Jerry and watching the talented Jeremiah cavorting at the shortstop position.

"I thought I was in trouble," admits Rolfe, "for I just didn't think I could beat out Jeremiah for the shortstop position. Fortunately, Jeff Tesreau solved the problem by trying Jerry at second base where he was just as good."

The Rolfe-Jeremiah combination was one of the greatest double-play combinations in Dartmouth baseball history but little did the two young ball players imagine that years later they'd both be back together under the DCAC's aegis.

BUT while professional baseball did not pick up Jeremiah, professional hockey did and the youthful Jeremiah went right from Dartmouth to playing hockey for the New Haven team in the old Canadian-American League, and serving as assistant football coach at Somerville High in the off season. The next year Jerry moved up to the National Hockey League where he played for the Boston Bruins part of the season and then for the New York Americans. In 1932-33 he played for the Boston Cubs (a Bruins farm team) and again for New Haven, and then spent the following season with the Philadelphia team in the Canadian American League.

During the 1934-35 season Jeremiah was called up by Cleveland in the International League. Cleveland was in a tough pennant drive that year, and the last ten games were crucial, hard, rough battles. Cleveland made the playoffs but got eliminated by Hamilton.

"After that last game," Jerry relates, "I remember sitting in a dark corner of the locker room just completely exhausted. 'Jeremiah, get out before it's too late,' I kept saying to myself over and over. So, I quit then and there and decided to try my hand in the business world."

A few months later the 1930 class notes in the ALUMNI MAGAZINE carried this brief squib: "Ed Jeremiah these days is struggling on behalf of the United Drug Company. Jerry has given up hockey!"

Jeremiah's employment with United Drug was short-lived. "I just wasn't cut out to be a business man," said Jerry, "so one day I dropped in to see George Brown, my old friend who ran the Boston Arena and Boston Garden, and asked him for a job - any sort of a job."

Brown did a one-paragraph memorandum to Eddie Powers at the Boston Garden suggesting that Powers find a job for Jeremiah. The memo ended with a sentence which has long haunted Jerry: "He says he's good with figures."

At the Boston Garden Jeremiah coached the Boston Olympics, a Bruin farm team, and under his tutelage the Olympics won the national AAU hockey championship. Off season the versatile Jeremiah did promotional work for the Bruins and Olympics.

Jerry returned to Dartmouth as hockey coach in 1937. Some years earlier he had applied for the post but had not even been granted an interview.

"This time, as the negotiations were being completed," he recalls, "I had a long talk with Clarence McDavitt 'OO, then chairman of the Dartmouth College Athletic Council. I told Mr. McDavitt I thought the salary was low and I didn't like the one-year probationary contract they offered, but I wanted very much to return to Dartmouth. Mr. McDavitt said he was confident that the salary would be increased and my contract extended if Dartmouth hockey improved. I thought he meant in wins and losses, but he told we that the DCAC was more concerned with the morale of the hockey players and with producing scrappy teams - win or lose."

In that first season under Jerry's tutelage the Big Green won eighteen games and the Ivy title, and lost only four, with three of the defeats coming at the hands of Canadian teams. The next year the record was 17-4, again with three of the losses to Canadian clubs.

It was also in 1937 that Jerry married Constance Curran, a girl he had known since undergraduate days at Dartmouth. The couple were divorced in the early 1950's, and in 1954 Jerry married his present wife, Lois Timmons, whom he met while she was an admitting officer at Hanover's Mary Hitchcock Hospital. Although he has had no children, Jerry says, "I sort of feel that the Dartmouth hockey players are my family. We've developed a pretty close relationship with many of them over the years and I sure couldn't ask or hope for a finer group of boys and men."

WHILE the awards, trophies and achievements of Jeremiah's career speak for themselves, there can be little doubt that his greatest contribution and the one for which he will be most remembered is the warm and close relationships which he has so assiduously developed as coach, adviser and friend to many hundreds of Dartmouth athletes and students.

Some small testimony to this is offered elsewhere in this section where extracts of letters from a few of his players and friends are reproduced.

The Jeremiah philosophy of "Look Up and Keep Fighting" is not just a hockey motto but a guide to living which has served many of his players throughout their postgraduate careers.

"The 'Look Up' part means I always want my players to look and think," explains Jerry. "I want them always to play a 'heady game,' to think before they act, not just to react. The 'Keep Fighting' part is equally important. I want these lads to keep trying, never to give up, so that win or lose, they'll do it fighting and can be proud of that."

In his early years as Dartmouth hockey coach Jeremiah started his own "Alumni Records" file, a large file drawer containing names and information on every Dartmouth man who had a connection with hockey. Over 800 cards are now in that file, including many players now deceased but still very much alive in Jerry's memory. A card is started as soon as a boy comes out for hockey, and during his playing career Jeremiah meticulously traces his development. One key sentence will often highlight an important episode or refer to some major achievement or crisis.

After graduation the card entries continue - marriage, children, jobs, visits to Hanover, service careers, often supplemented by news clippings, family photo- graphs, notes on Christmas cards, and finally, for some, the obituary notices.

This is Jeremiah's personal repository, stored in his Davis Varsity House office, and it is an experience to watch him skim through the cards, for with each one Jerry's amazing memory can recreate a game, a story, or an amusing anecdote.

Each year Jeremiah also sends out to the alumni hockey players a pre-season and post-season newsletter, written in his own inimitable style. He tells about his teams, how they shape up, then later on describes how the season went. These hockey letters are probably the most fully read and enjoyed of any publication sent out from the College.

A few years ago President Dickey observed in an admiring way that "Jerry, with an old DCAC mimeograph machine, has probably done more for alumni relations than most of our other alumni programs."

And, of course, there is the traditional alumni hockey game each March when former Big Green players return to Hanover to match aging skills against the youthful drive of the varsity team. In recent years an Alumni Sons' Game has been added to the weekend so that the youngsters can return to Hanover with their fathers.

During the first twenty years of Jeremiah's career at Hanover the Dartmouth hockey teams practiced and played on the natural ice surface of Davis Rink. But natural ice was hard to maintain in the rink, and many a year Hanover observers spotted Jerry searching the Hanover environs for a suitable patch of outdoor ice for his team to practice on. Yearly, in his newsletters and public pronouncements, Jerry would talk about "natural ice and artificial players," in his effort to get an artificial ice surface for Davis and some alumni help in recruiting outstanding schoolboy hockey players.

And as admission requirements at Dartmouth stiffened in the postwar era, Jerry would become understandably riled when some of the better hockey players he had persuaded to apply to Dartmouth were turned down for admission. And this despite the fact that one of Jerry's classmates and closest friends, Al Dickerson '30, was then director of admissions.

In a moment of particular pique, after a really great candidate had been turned down, Jerry wrote a long letter of complaint to Dickerson, starting off with the now legendary salutation - "Dear former friend."

But the days of natural ice, at any rate, came to an end in 1953 when artificial ice was finally installed at Davis Rink after a fund-raising campaign led by Herbert F. Darling '26. Interestingly enough it had been Herb Darling who, while a student engineer at Thayer School, had made a detailed study of local ice and weather conditions leading to the conclusion that maintaining an effective natural ice surface in Davis Rink during the winter was just not feasible.

It is rather ironic that Jeremiah closes out his career this year with a Dartmouth team which is one of his weakest and is picked to finish at the bottom of the Ivy League. Princeton's former great hockey coach Dick Vaughn once called Jeremiah "the Pagliacci of Hanover - laughing on the outside, dying on the inside." Jerry says it's not quite that way, but admits freely he doesn't like to see his teams lose. "After each home game I go over to the office with a few friends and we have a quiet drink together," he reports. "We swap a few anecdotes and jokes and soon everyone is laughing, but inside I'm still churning and thinking about what we did wrong."

Way back in his professional hockey career Jerry was known as "Handy Andy Jeremiah," because he could play wing, center or defense. This versatility has stood him in good stead over the years he has coached three sports, served as an official, and become an author, a prolific writer of personal and news letters, a noted raconteur, and one of the best speakers among hockey coaches.

So this March 4 when Edward John Jeremiah '30 walks from Davis Rink for the last time as a Dartmouth hockey coach, may the applause echo long and loud for Dartmouth's rugged, versatile and beloved "Handy Andy." And if you listen carefully that evening you will hear the echoes of other cheers and applause, flooding in from those bygone years at Davis when those Big Green teams of legendary names and fame swept down ice, stick handling and passing through the defense, carrying in for that blurred shot which, streaked past the goalie into the upper corner of the net.

There'll be other great hockey teams and coaches in the years ahead, probably a new and bigger hockey rink at the College, but Eddie Jeremiah and Dartmouth hockey will forever be linked together as part of the College's athletic glory and legend.

Jerry in Davis Varsity House with trophies and pictures of his eleven teams thatwon the Ivy League championship. Pictured at lower right is the Thompson Trophyfor the international intercollegiate title that was shared with Toronto in 1947.

Jerry, on the job in Davis Rink, gets in a last word before the contest begins.

Jerry in 1956 with Captain Ab Oakes'56, who returned in 1963 as freshmancoach and now moves up to the varsity.