12, December 2024 Kraig Lee & Gary Bergstrom Talk Wannaska Hockey

THE RAVEN

The Spirit of Wannaska Hockey   

Volume 9 Issue 4, 2009

 

Memorial to Kraig Lee (1953-2024)

Kraig Lee and Gary Bergstrom grew up together in Wannaska playing hockey. They met with me one Saturday morning in 2009 to talk about the old days... 

 

Loyd Melby and his Wannaska team

Steve: I’ve learned that Kenny Eggen played hockey in Wannaska and Roseau up until 1945, during which time he scored the first goal of Region 8 Play. His senior year of high school he attended Oak Grove Lutheran in Fargo during which time his Roseau High School class of 1946 went on and won the first Minnesota state hockey tournament. That had to be some real torment to miss out on the state tournament after playing with those guys all those years.

 

Kenny Eggen played hockey in Wannaska and Roseau up until 1945, during which time he scored the first goal of Region 8 Play.

 

Kraig: Francis Grahn updated me on that 1946 team just the other day. He said he was in the service at that time in The Cities. He walked almost a mile to the arena with his uniform on to watch Roseau play but didn’t have earflaps on, and froze his ears...

Steve: You mean, he walked all that way for ‘a taste of up-home?’

Kraig: People talk about how Minnesota towns are dedicated to hockey. Yeah they are, but they were never dedicated like Wannaska and Roseau...

Steve:  Did your parents skate? Your moms? Your dads?

Kraig: Mine did, I don’t know about yours. Kraig’s dad, Leland Lee, skated in the Wannaska’s adult mens hockey team. He chose the maroon and gold color of the University of Minnesota, his alma mater, for his Wannaska team and those to follow.

 

Gary:  Oh, my dad did. He wasn’t a hockey player, but he skated...

Steve: How ‘bout your moms? Or was this a gender thing?

Gary: I don’t ever remember my mother, skating... maybe a little bit when I was young, but she came from Fosston, they didn’t have hockey. 

 

Laughter

 

Kraig: I can remember my mother skating one time down on the old rink here, maybe more than once, but I skated with my sister Sandy most of the time, who was twelve years older than I was.

Steve: Did she really teach you to skate or did she just let you fall down and get back up?

Kraig: Fall down. Torture me. Twelve years apart. She had to take me with see? This was part of the deal. She couldn’t go to the rink alone. 

 

Steve: Did you guys start out on figure skates?

Kraig: I started on double runners, I can remember that. My mother insisted I stay on them. My sister insisted I didn’t, so I went to town and I bought a pair of hockey skates. It wasn’t my mother’s choice, but I never put the double runners ever back on again. 

 

Gary: But that’s what you started out on. Don’t know if they’re still around, but I remember we had a pair.

Steve: Double runners? About an inch apart?

Gary: Not that far, probably. I’d say a half an inch.

 

Kraig: Half inch ... for stability supposedly. I don’t know if they make double runners anymore. 

Gary: They probably don’t. They weren’t speed skates..

Kraig: No cornering. You went from one end to the other an’ ran into whatever you hit. Then you turned there. They were straight forward, that’s all they were. 

Steve: During what years were you two kids?

 

Kraig and Gary: Nineteen sixties? Sixty-five?

Steve: Did you live in town, Gary?    

Gary: No, when I was younger we lived on a farm west of Kraig’s, the old Walt Storey place.

Kraig: I remember your mother hauling you around in a 1955 Chevrolet pickup...

Gary, chuckling: Yeah, she pretty much got us to the rink and other stuff in it. 

Steve: So when you came in for school, that was when your hockey time started?             

 

Kraig: We used to start hockey practices at 7:30 if I remember right, didn’t we? 

Gary: Yeah, we’d have morning practices, but that was after the rink moved to the east side of the highway. I don’t remember playing hockey on the west side. It was a 1st or 2nd grade level type of thing. We started out on that rink, north of the church. I can remember putting skates on at the school and walking across the tar and all through the gravel with skates on to skate there. That’s how you did it. When you were real young you had to put them skates on first and wear them across the tar--to sharpen them up a little--because the warming house was pretty small. Then they moved it to the existing spot and built the rink house.

 

Steve: Did all the boys play hockey?

Kraig: Pretty much, I think. Our hockey years were just a lot of fun and everybody played it.There were a just a few that didn’t.

Gary: Yeah, not many though, you know. It was just kind of expected and it didn’t matter how good or how bad you were. Everybody was kind of, stitched in. So, yeah, I suppose it was about 5th or 6th grade before you really started playin’ some hockey. You would continue on up and obviously the better players got to play more I mean, let’s put it that way.

 

Kraig: Kenny’d throw other players out there so they’d get a chance to play but he’d want somebody out there fast enough to recover in case somebody made a mistake, you know, someone that could hustle back and pick up the slack.

Gary: Kenny liked to win games, but he was very fair. He made sure you were going to get a chance to play.

Steve: So it was a game to him. It wasn't about winning at all cost?

Gary: That’s what he was passionate about.

 

Kraig: I remember he’d sit and give pretty good speeches, “You guys make sure you go to the bathroom the first thing you do. I don’t want you skating out there with a full bladder. I don’t want anything going on like that..."

 

Steve: I don’t want your parents calling me saying... 

Kraig, adding: “Kenny won’t let me go to the bathroom..” 

Then, turning toward Gary he said: I just kind of remember that speech, I don’t know if you can remember that one...

Gary: Nooo, not specifically...

 

Kraig: Of course, we were nervous then too, that arena would fill all up when we’d come in for our Thursday night league. You’d look up into the crowd of upwards of 300 people... We’d meet Malung, Salol, Ross, Roseau... We went up to Roosevelt and played. Canadians came down too. When these country teams came in they meant business. Usually, they cleaned up these city teams quite often... What did they call that when we’d have our relays and hockey tournaments besides?"

 

Gary: I can’t remember the name of it. But during those events they had skating races for girls and boys, all the way up. Then they’d always have a hockey tournament, it was like, I suppose, a two or three day event. It encompassed every rural school in the Roseau District. Everybody came in. 

Gary: You know, we spent hours at the rink.

Kraig; ... because we never had a gym.

 

Gary: Not only did we spend a lot of time on the ice playing hockey, but we spent a lot of time on the ice--taking snow off. That’s another thing, we took the snow off by hand. We literally used the nets to push the snow to the sides and then shoveled it off. One year it snowed every other day, so we spent most of our time probably shoveling snow that year.

Kraig: That’s what you’d call, ‘leg building,’

Gary: We didn’t have snowblowers.

 

Kraig: It was training. If you were on the team, you shoveled snow.

Gary: The good thing about it, was you’d get out of class to go make sure the rink got shoveled because it had to be cleaned for the rest of the school too. They used it for Phy.Ed., because everybody had to skate in the afternoons. 

Kraig: Kenny devoted a lot of his time to that rink, flooding it in the fall, pumping water from the river... 

Gary: That’s one of the things I remember about Kenny you know, taking that on and fighting that pump and gunk, and fight them cold hoses at thirty below zero and doing things like that. But we used to help him a lot as kids, then on into high school. We took the rink on a few of us and flooded it and took care of it.

 

Kraig: We were taking snowmobiles on those old ones, and pulled that float around there to pack it down...Then Kenny built what you’d call a pull-type ‘Zamboni,’ that didn’t shave the ice but put a nice coat of hot water on to smooth it out you know.  It’s still in the rinkhouse. 

Gary: And he had the skate sharpener he’d use to sharpen skates. He had that right in the rinkhouse. Yeah, he did alot. He probably was one of the few who spent alot of time there, and obviously liked kids. 

Kraig: He and Vivian devoted alot of time to the team. 

Gary: Loyd Melby coached some when Kenny wasn’t available but Loyd wasn’t the skater Kenny was. Walt Storey skated well and definitely helped. He came when we were in about sixth or seventh grade. Palmer Norberg coached for awhile too.  I can remember, after you (Steve) sent us this letter, I thought of how frustrating coaching can be. I haven’t done a lot of it, but I used to coach Saturday morning league when my kids were growing up, and 4H softball, and things, the frustration of trying to teach a kid or tell ‘im to do this and they do it completely backwards six times in a row. I don’t ever remember Kenny getting wildly mad or whatever, but that he had such an even keeled disposition. I’m sure inside he’d just like to smack you sometimes, but I don’t ever remember that he lost his temper.

 

Gary, continuing: I remember a game in town, I think it was against Sprague (Canada). We started out scoring--and we were ahead, when the game just turned around and we got behind. Like you said, Kenny never---well, he wouldn’t scream and holler, like some coaches just actually go to the cursing thing. 

I don’t ever remember him doing that, but I remember being in the box ready for the next shift, standing right next to him and -- it’s funny how things stick in your head -- I mean, you could see he was frustrated. We had this game and now we were losing it and just as I was going out he said, “Get out there...’ and I know he said, “Muck it up,” but it sounded like something different to me. And I’m sure that’s what he said, but I’m like “Now he didn’t just say what I thought he said???” That has always stuck in my head.

 

Kraig: If you made a fatal mistake, he might take you out a shift, something like that.

Gary: Yeah, he knew the discipline part of it.

Kraig: It got them thinkin’, “I don’t want to lose this spot, I better correct this problem..” 

Steve: Did younger guys play with older guys?

Gary and Kraig: Oh yeah...

 

Kraig: I was in fifth grade playing with the older ones in sixth grade...

Gary: That was our ‘feeder system’...

Kraig: My first experiences on the ice were with Manfred Loe and Terry Rygh, the next year was the group above me, Jeff Tangen, Bob Brateng... That class wasn’t so big. Clifton Edberg, ... Sellen. That’s what really brought people to Roseau. Roseau had their own teams that were set up, nicknamed by the store sponsors like Hartz, Coast to Coast, and the like...

 

When we went to play the VFW Bantams, Kenny had a  little rule here that we could play for the Bantams if we wanted or play rural hockey, but it was one or the other.  Which in a way, I guess, was okay. I wanted to skate somewhere in town at the time, but I didn’t get to do that... I think we were the only team from a school to do that because a lot of those guys from Malung and Ross were playing Bantams at that time. Seeing as Kenny made that rule, that wasn’t engraved in stone but it stopped ya, you were never allowed to play out here then.

 

Gary: It went from rural hockey outside schools playing each other to the Thursday Night League, is kind of how it ended up being. We did less and less of the schools going to each other and that became the outlet of playing hockey on Thursday nights.

 

Kraig: We did play other schools, like we would play Malung in Roseau. We would play Ross in Roseau. We’d play Salol in Roseau. I know there was a group of outside schools that had their whole different tournaments at one point in time, and then the big tournament was when we went and played all the town teams too. But most of the time when we got up to the top four teams it was the outside schools that were winning, you know, the country schools. Everybody didn’t think that was quite right, but I said, when you don’t have a gym, you don’t have anything else, all you got is your pair of skates... you’re going to get good on those things after while.  It maybe isn’t [strictly] our passion for it, but you gotta do something for activities. The addition of the gym changed a lot of people, kids wanted to do something else. The absence of a gymnasium made hockey players out of us whether we wanted to do that or not...

 

Steve: If the Bantam League wasn’t school...it was put on by who?

Kraig: The VFW was the one that sponsored there. It was put on by... say, Bernie Burgraff. He was a big player in that, setting us up, lining it up with Kenny Eggen. We’d just put a little scrimmage away. It wasn’t a standing game or anything. It was just their team against ours because ours was the only group of guys that could go in, and if I remember right the first time we played them... I was looking at this... You know they played longer periods than we did because I think that group played up to ninth grade, so their periods were ... fifteen minutes at that time? I was trying to think of this the other day... We were actually ahead of them the first two periods until they wore us out in the third period.

Gary: We weren’t used to skating that long.

 

Kraig: I think he made the first goal in the first game we played them, if I remember that right

Steve: Who did?

Kraig, gesturing at Gary: This guy here.

 

Gary to Kraig: Me? We’ll just go with that...

 

Kraig: It was the first time we played them, is why I remember. We’re out there and take off. We’re not much more than, maybe two minutes into the game, and I’m skating outside, he’s more center. I came down with that thing and he was heading for the net wide open and I just dumped the puck and he hit it into the net..

 

Steve, to Gary: This guy is going to have to speak at your funeral...

Gary, grinning: Yes, he will.

 

Kraig: That’s all I remember of that and I remember the puck going in the net. It was such an ideal situation and I’m positive it was him. I remember of having about two of those blue and white jerseys comin’ straight for me and I hit the brakes and dumped the puck straight across and I hit him right on the tip of his stick--and in the net it went. And the lead was taken there all the way up through two periods and then they finally came back and played us down. Stan Ostby was coaching at that time.

 

Steve: That was another family that was pretty passionate about hockey.

Kraig: Stan, Tiger, --all those guys were at the games just being part of that family tradition of being at the game. Tiger ever play hockey? Was he in the goal?

Gary:  Tiger was student manager.

Steve: He would’ve been been a good goalie..

Kraig: And he was double-jointed. He could twist in any direction he wanted...

 

Steve: What about the rivalry between Wannaska and Malung. How’d that get started?

Gary: These rivalries also come into play because of 4H softball...

Kraig: Oh yes!

Gary: That was a BIG rivalry, especially with Malung/Wannaska when we grew up through the high school 4H years. We had some really good ball teams. Malung had exceptional teams--and that just kinda played on into hockey. The same people play and ...

Kraig: ...That’s where these rivalries started.

Gary: It gets people to come and watch. 

 

Steve: Someone said the girls would suit up against the sixth graders boys once in a while?

Kraig: I don’t remember that.

Gary: It might have been after we were through...

Kraig:... cause that’s when the girls started playing. I can’t remember them hardly even holding a stick...

 

Steve: No truth to the rumor then that girls could skate better than boys?

Kraig: There might’ve been some girls down there that could’ve skated better than the boys, I wouldn’t say that. There were some pretty good skating girls that would come and skate with us. At the races and stuff they were good... 

Gary: But definitely not that early...

 

Laughter

 

Kraig: Some of those girls had a great time out there. I think if you’d taken them figure skates off ‘em and put them on a regular pair of skates, and skated awhile, they would’ve stayed right with us,

Gary: Actually it was pretty amazing that they skated that well with what they had to skate with, as figure skates are terrible for anything but figure skating. You can’t push, you know, you can’t stride with them...

 

Steve: You can’t stride with a figure skate?

Kraig and Gary: Oh gosh no, you can’t.

Gary: Not to the extent of a hockey skate.

 

Using a pen and paper, Kraig drew out a figure skate and a hockey skate: "A figure skate is a flat blade like this. Figure skates are pretty much flat, they have a little arc in the back, then it comes up and barely arcs over here. It’s got all them picks up here...They’re flat like that, so you try to stride and these picks are biting in on ya... Then you take a hockey skate and say a defensive skate, my hockey blade is just like this... I’m only touching, ‘right there,’ but on a turn they slow you down. That kind of skate, they want to go straight ahead. If you could have two pairs of hockey skates, one with a flatter blade and one with a rocker blade, you could get a  a lot more speed out of that flat blade. You’d just have to watch yourself in corners.

 

Steve: Did you see some serious injuries in elementary school?

Gary: Well, other than the broken arms, concussions, fingers sliced, missing teeth and stuff like that, it was fun. Nothing, I guess I can remember was, uh... terrible.

Kraig: Oh yeah, I got a cracked tooth from one. I caught quite a few of them.
Gary: There were always some injuries, I had a concussion once. I wasn’t smart enough to have a helmet on you know, playing chinny hockey.
Steve: “Chinny hockey?”

Gary: And road hockey, we played a lot of road hockey in front of the school on packed-down ice because you didn’t always have time to skate in your fifteen minute recess. It’s something that was actually done for years, what the boys played. That’s probably where those guys learned their stick handling skills so well because they were constantly out there doing it. They weren’t skating but that developed afterwards
Kraig:  Oh we played a lot of road hockey...

Gary: Do you remember when they finally made us quit that because we weren’t on the ice as much? We weren’t skating at recess, we were playing this, so they thought we should be skating instead of playing road hockey. It kind of made us get to the rink, you know, which wasn’t a bad thing
Kraig: Lots of times we’d go right down the main street and set-up here you know, shootin’ the puck back and forth.
Gary: Like you were talkin’ with the Brotens (Neal, Aaron) the kids in Roseau did a lot of that too. They maintain that that’s part of where they got their stick handling skills by spending all that time doing that. 

 Kraig: Part of the stuff, you know, they even say now hockey is too strictly coached. Parents push their kids to be the best and stuff  like this--- They get ‘em coached and those kids are completely coached from end to end. They can’t develop any of their natural characteristics about hockey. The old timers in town say that too. It’s just not good for the kids not to be a kid anymore. They’re forced to do all this stuff...
 

Steve: It becomes too regimented?...
Kraig:  Yep, these kids develop their skills so they can handle a stick. I know a guy that can put his stick down and within a split-second have the puck on top of his stick. He’ll pick it right off the ice with the flat part of the stick and he’ll put it on top of the stick and go. He’ll skate with the puck laying on top of his stick. You don’t get that from being coached. That’s what some of this rink-rat stuff is, that you sit and diddle around with your stick and you make the puck do things..
Steve: Is this necessary?

Kraig: Well it can sure make a difference in a critical game if you can do some goofy things with a puck. You can just baffle the guy that you’re going against. It just eats at these guys -- look at Gretzke. These things just baffle the other guy--you just handcuff them is what you do. They’re not expecting it. It turns things around, completely. If you watch a good hockey game and get some guys that are really talented... I got beat so bad on defense one time that I didn’t know what happened. Some of these good hockey players just do something completely different to you. It’s like they hypnotize you out there.
 

Gary: It’s really a highly skilled game actually. To get really good at it, the first thing you have to do is learn to skate, which isn’t natural in the first place. Then after that you have to learn to manage a stick. It’s not like basketball, where you get to stand on two feet---you have to learn to shoot, sure but you’re not having to learn the other skills. Where if you can’t skate, you can’t play hockey.
Kraig: When I go down to these rinks, I don’t say I go ‘a lot,’ but there’s a lot of talent that uses them. The country air is it for hockey. That icy hockey makes it. You see them out on the ice there, they’re naturals. They see the ice and read the ice, that’s all it takes. You put a good pair of skates on these guys and give them a stick. Hey, that makes a hockey player right away. That’s one of the biggest downfalls I had, I liked skating and I liked playing but I couldn’t see the ice real well.

Steve: You couldn’t see the ice real well?
Kraig: Well, you can see the ice, but not see the whole sheet and what’s moving. It’s what’s taking place across the whole ice sheet. You had to have that peripheral vision that you knew what this guy over here was doing...
Gary: Not a lot of people have that...

Kraig: No, and that’s one of the things that when you play hockey with someone that has that, it’s unbelievable. He’d be looking a completely opposite direction and he’d pass that puck and put it right on your stick. It’s unbelievable because he knows you’re the open guy. If say, I’m going to pass the puck to you, all of a sudden he gets it on his stick when I’m looking at you... I mean it throws the whole other group off, it’s what makes hockey interesting...

Gary: It’s kinda like a quarterback too, being able to see all the receivers, where they’re all at, and know which to throw to. Some of them are good at it--and some aren’t so good at it, and hockey’s basically the same way. Percentage-wise, you could take a hundred of them and only get two or three that could read the ice and be that good at it. It’s not something taught, it’s something they just ‘have.’

Steve: It must be something to know and understand all these things, experience them firsthand, then pass them onto young new impressionable players. Not only that, you learned true sportsmanship. You guys were lucky to have had a coach like Kenny Eggen.

Gary: My dad said about Kenny, after he died, was Kenny very rarely had a bad thing to say about someone. He might think it, like the rest of us--and some of us will say it, but Dad said if he did, he’d apologize. I mean Kenny was that kind of a man. His integrity was really strong.

Then turning to Kraig, Gary said:: That’s what I always thought of your dad (Leland Lee) too... You could beat him over the head with a 2x4 and he’d turn around and smile at you, but you know, Kenny had that same kind of integrity to me. I guess that’s why we liked him..