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The passing of Keith Allen: A fond farewell to "Keith the Thief"

February 5, 2014, 3:48 PM ET [5 Comments]
Scoop Cooper
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As a pro player beginning in 1941 as an 18-year old defenseman with the EHL Washington Eagles to finishing up his on ice career as player-coach of the WHL Seattle Americans in 1957, Saskatoon-born Keith Courtney Allen was known by the nickname “Bingo”. As a coach, General Manager, and Hockey Hall of Fame builder of the game, however, he was better known respectfully -- and admiringly -- simply as “Keith the Thief”, a moniker earned by dint of his extraordinary ability to make often one sided trades that helped his team become -- and constantly stay -- among the NHL’s elites.

“Keith Allen was the best there was at trading ‘a canoe for a battleship’,” a rival NHL GM once told me years ago. And that he surely was.

The first coach of the Philadelphia Flyers in 1967, its second GM in 1969, the architect of six Conference champions, four Stanley Cup finalists including two Cup winning teams in 1974 and 1975, and the genial but sly “Father” of the “Broad Street Bullies”, Keith “The Thief” Allen passed away peacefully on Tuesday, February 4, at the age of 90. No pro sports executive in Philadelphia over the almost half century since he arrived in William Penn’s “greene countrie towne” in the spring of 1966 was more successful, respected, and beloved by the men who played for him, those such as myself who were lucky enough to know him for any or all those years, and most of all by the blue collar city’s hardscrabble sports fans to whom he delivered such great teams.


Keith Allen and the Stanley Cup


When the Flyers were awarded their franchise on February 8, 1966 as a part of the NHL’s expansion from six to twelve teams, the nascent club’s first need was for an experienced hockey staff which it started building almost immediately with its first hire, veteran hockey executive Norman "Bud" Poile, the then long time GM/coach of the Edmonton Flyers of the minor pro Western Hockey League who was recruited as the Flyers’ first GM. And Poile’s first hire came almost immediately thereafter when he selected the then 43-year old Allen, his old friend and WHL rival as GM/coach of the Seattle Totems for the previous decade, to be the team’s first coach. Poile and Allen then spent the next year scouting and building a book on the players likely to be available in the Expansion Draft which was to be held at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal on June 6, 1967. The first one they claimed was Bernie Parent from the Boston Bruins.


The 1967-68 Flyers - Keith Allen (right end middle row)


Keith Allen’s accomplishments in hockey are well known and will be written about by many over the next few days. Therefore I will instead use this space to relate just four of my many personal recollections of interactions I had with Keith over the decades. I will begin with one of my favorite stories that he told me about how after almost a dozen years in the minor leagues he came to unexpectedly join the Detroit Red Wings late in the 1953-54 season and end up getting his name on the Stanley Cup just a few weeks later in his first of two brief stints playing in the NHL.

“From 1946 to late in that 1953-54 season I played for Eddie Shore with his AHL Springfield Indians and Syracuse Warriors,” Keith told me once while we were sitting together in the pressroom at Hersheypark Arena in 1979 when the Flyers’ farm club, the Maine Mariners, were visiting the Hershey Bears. “Amazingly”, he continued, "it was a loss in this building that gave to me my chance at winning the Stanley Cup in 1954. The Warriors were mired in last place that season and Shore was not at all pleased with us. Late in the season we were going on a four game road trip and Shore announced that if we did not win all four games he would clean house.

“Amazingly we won the first three games but despite a good effort dropped the fourth one here against the Bears, a club that would go on to make the Calder Cup finals that spring before losing to the Cleveland Barons,” Keith continued, “and Shore was good to his word. I bunch of us got moved the next day and I ended up with the QHL Sherebrooke Saints which was then a Detroit farm club. After just three games there, however, I got an emergency call up to the Red Wings as a sixth defenseman and ended up playing in ten regular season and five Stanley Cup games as the Wings went on the beat the Montreal Canadiens in the finals. If we had not lost that game in Hershey I probably would have never gotten a shot at the NHL let alone get my name on the Cup!”


Keith Allen - Detroit Red Wings 1954


A second story involving Keith also came at Hershey when the Mariners visited the Bears on April 2, 1982. The Flyers had played a home game at the Spectrum the night before against the then two time Stanley Cup defending New York Islanders and it being April 1st I had written an elaborate April Fool’s Day story for the program about a new invention I called “Comp-U-Puck” that I claimed was going to be adopted by the NHL for the next season.

The gist of the story was that each game puck would contain a computer chip which when it entered the goal would interact with an antenna in the net’s frame and would automatically turn on the red goal light. This, I said, would eliminate the need for goal judges so that the teams could then sell the seats behind the nets. The story was full of spoof details about how this would work, ridiculous quotes from NHL executives, and all sorts of clues that it was all a gag. The next night in Hershey, however, Keith came up to me in mock anger and told me that this story had caused him very considerable consternation the night before.

“Scoop I started reading the story in the Director’s Lounge before the game last night,” Keith said, “but got interrupted and didn’t get to the final couple of paragraphs. I spent much of the game pondering it, however, and getting more and more perturbed as the game went on wondering why this big change was going to be made by the league and nobody had ever told me about it. It was not until I got home after the game that I read the rest of the story and found out it was an April Fool’s gag, and I’ll have to admit it was the best one that ever got me!”

Before coming to the Flyers, Allen had been the GM/coach of the WHL Seattle Totems for almost a decade. The “front office” of a minor league team in those days, however, was nothing like it is today and was usually just a few person operation at most. The Totems were no different so besides being the GM and coach, Allen was also the team’s business manager, book keeper, traveling secretary, PR man, program editor, and just about everything else at one time or another. While visiting with Keith in his office at the Spectrum one day I asked him what was the most valuable lesson he learned about the operation of a pro hockey team during his days in Seattle.

“The most important thing was knowing when to send the check for Greyhound to United Airlines and vise versa,” Keith said. “Teams like ours operated on very tight budgets and depended on gate receipts to stay afloat. There was not always enough money in the bank to cover our day to day expenses, however, so I would have to improvise. When that happened I would intentionally send the checks to the wrong recipients and by the time they were returned a few days later we would have had another home gate to cover them and I could then send them along to the right place. It worked every time!”


The 1962-63 Seattle Totems - Keith Allen (2nd from right, back row)


My final story has to do with the only forfeit of an AHL win that came after the game was over. Midway through the 1978-79 AHL season Keith reassigned Maine Mariner goalie Rick St. Croix (who is now the Toronto Maple Leafs goalie coach) to the lowly Philadelphia Firebirds in order to give Pete Peeters more playing time in Maine. When All Star Flyer goalie Bernie Parent's career was unexpectedly ended by a freak eye injury on February 17, 1979, however, St. Croix was recalled to the Flyers briefly and then returned to the Mariners as Peeters and Robbie Moore were alternately called upon to back up Wayne Stephenson.

St. Croix won his first game back with Maine in Hershey but Bears' GM Frank Mathers was suspicious that his playing for the Mariners again might be against the rules. At the time I was stringing for the Portland Press-Herald covering Flyer happenings involving the Mariners as Maine’s parent team as well as games the AHL club played in Philadelphia and Hershey. Mathers mentioned his suspicion to me after the game and indicated that he might well protest the game. When I saw Keith at a Flyers function the next day I asked him about it.

Keith was surprised because he had not heard of a protest but told me that he had checked it out in advance with AHL President Jack Butterfield as the AHL had a rule that did not permit a player to be reassigned within the league more than once in a single season unless he had been traded to another organization. Even though Butterfield had given Keith the go ahead, when the Bears then filed a formal protest Maine's victory was forfeited to the Bears, 1-0, and St. Croix was forced to return to the Firebirds for the remainder of the season. So far as can be determined, this remains the only such forfeit awarded after a game had been completed in AHL history!

I got a front page story in the Press-Harald out of it (the Mainers were then the defending Calder Cup champions and the biggest sports story in Maine), but Keith was always a gentleman about the blunder (not really his fault) and bad publicity and never held my “scoop” against me.

I have many other memories of my dealings over many decades with “Keith the Thief” but I will leave it as just his being one of the most outstanding -- and upstanding -- of the thousands of people I have known in our game over the past 45 years.

So “Thanks for the memories” Keith, and Rest in Peace. The mark you have left on hockey and the Philadelphia Flyers will, as Fred Shero would say, “live forever.”


Keith Allen and Fred Shero
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