Celebrating 50 Years Of The Goalie Mask

This Sunday the NHL will honor the goalie mask. It was Fifty years ago Monday at Madison Square Garden in New York, Jacques Plante of the Montreal Canadiens changed the face of hockey forever. This was not lost on us budding Blues fans when Plante was traded to the Blues in 1968.

We played a lot of street and pond hockey after the Blues came to town and Billy C. was our goalie. One day we decided he needed a better kewler mask than the plain old white Cooper mask Billy had. All the local goalies had the plain Cooper mask, we'd be the first with a Plante Bird mask in our neighborhood. The problem was a new official Plante Bird mask went for as much as a pair of new CCM Tacks skates at Giesler Jorgen Sporting Goods, which back then was well over $100 big ones.

"How hard could it be to make a mask?", we asked ourselves, it was just some fiberglass and a mold? We'd done paper mache' heads in school so this would be a snap.

We got some fiberglass, some wire window screen mesh and some resin and took a face mold off Billy's face. We used aluminum foil to keep the Plaster of Paris mold from sticking to his face. We poured the resin onto the fiber and screen and VOILA!! Instant mask, just like Plante's.We drilled a bunch of ventilation holes and added a headstrap and some stick on cushion pad on the inside. Then it was off to test it out. Hell, we even painted it Pattonville Green with a Blues' Note for good luck.

At first Billy started to wobble in goal as we lined up on Mark's back porch to put the prototype to the test. We weren't sure what the problem was.

Bad vision out of the eyeholes?

Were his glasses fogging up with poor ventilation?

Nope, the resin fumes had made him see starz and he was higher than a kite it appeared. No worries, we were almost done, just a couple shots and we'd have our answer.

Mark could whistle a puck high around the ears like the pros so he took the first shot. The mask exploded like a grenade and  Billy tipped over like a freshly cut pine tree. We thought we had killed our poor goalie so we drug him into the garage so Mark's mom wouldn't see all the blood pouring out of his forehead.

After reviving Billy we assured him it was a minor setback and we'd have a new version ready in no time. Billy said no thanks and bought the Plante Bird mask from Giesler Jorgen the next week. We all chipped in since we felt so bad about all the fiberglass embedded in his head and eyes.

The rest is history they say as others went on to steal our thunder as future mask makers.