8 things you (probably) didn’t know about Mickey MacKay
- Greg Nesteroff
- Jun 3
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 11
Who was the Pacific Coast Hockey Association’s all-time leading scorer? It depends whether you include the statistics of the WCHL/WHL, the league the PCHA merged with in 1924. Some sources do, others don’t.
If you stick only to the PCHA proper, then the honor belongs to Cyclone Taylor, who put up 159 goals and 104 assists for 263 points in 130 regular season games with the Vancouver Millionaires and Maroons between 1912 and 1923.
If, however, you also include WCHL/WHL totals for 1924-26, then Mickey MacKay rises to the top. In the PCHA alone, he had 159 goals and 82 assists for 241 points in 192 games played with the Vancouver Millionaires/Maroons between 1914 and 1924. In his two seasons with the Maroons in the WCHL/WHL, he put up another 39 goals and 10 assists for 49 points in 55 regular season games, giving him a total of 290 points in 247 games.

Mickey MacKay, circa 1918-19. Some newspaper editor applied liberal amounts of white out to the photo so that he and his stick would better stick out. (Stuart Thomson/Vancouver Public Library 17975)
MacKay led the PCHA in regular season goal scoring three times and assists twice. He was a seven-time PCHA/WCHL first all-star and three-time second all-star. He also played a few more seasons after that for Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Boston in the NHL. He won the Stanley Cup with Vancouver in 1915 and Boston in 1929 and was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1952.
Frank Patrick called him “perhaps the greatest centre we ever had on the coast” and “the hockey idol of the gods.”
Here are eight bits of not-so-well-known trivia about him.
1. Before making his PCHA debut, MacKay played a year with Grand Forks, BC, of the Boundary league, which has been regarded by hockey historians as the PCHA’s unofficial farm league. I recreated MacKay’s statistics from newspaper reports and discovered that in 1913-14, he led the league in scoring with 15 goals and two assists in 10 games.
To put this in perspective: the rest of his team combined only scored 20 goals. In the rest of the league that year, Phoenix scored 26 goals and Greenwood had 20. So MacKay single-handedly accounted for over 18 per cent of league scoring!
2. MacKay returned to the BC interior each off season, as his wife, Annie May Reburn, was from Grand Forks. They married in that city on June 12, 1916. In 1956, she became Grand Forks’ postmaster, the first woman to hold the job. She outlived her husband by more than 45 years, dying on Jan. 29, 1986, age 90. Her last address was 7151 Third St. in Grand Forks, directly across the street from her childhood home at 7120 Third. She and Mickey were married in the latter house and reportedly lived there for a while. The house was torn down in 2023.

Annie Reburn’s childhood home in Grand Forks, where she married Mickey MacKay, as seen in 2021 when it was vacant and condemned.
3. After leaving hockey, MacKay got into mining, but wasn’t very successful. He bought the Yankee Boy mine near Grand Forks and organized a hockey team made up of employees who challenged another local mine to a game. He was also involved with the Providence mine near Greenwood and was co-proprietor of a grocery story at Fruitvale.

Nelson Daily News, Aug. 31, 1936
4. In August 1937, MacKay reunited with Cyclone Taylor at Rossland, where MacKay had recently moved. Taylor was visiting as part of his duties as chief commissioner of the immigration department. Probably at that time Taylor persuaded McKay to take part in a benefit game a few months later in Vancouver involving old pros against a junior team that included Taylor’s son.
As Don Tyerman wrote in the Province of Nov. 27, 1937: “Answering the cheers of 3,500 fans last night … 13 of the greatest names in hockey skated again to the once-familiar roar of the crowd, and fuel was heaped on the old feud between Mickey MacKay and Cyclone Taylor.”
In fact, there was no feud. In 1947, Taylor named MacKay as one of the greatest players he’d ever played with or against. (Lester Patrick was another.) But when Taylor was awarded an assist on MacKay’s goal during the benefit game, MacKay obliged with mock outrage: “You gave Taylor an assist on my goal? Why, the ‘Cyc’ never gave me a pass in my life and I only gave him one.”

Mickey MacKay is seen at left and Cyclone Taylor at centre in the Windsor Star, Dec. 4, 1937.
5. In 1938, MacKay contemplated buying the Spokane Clippers of the Pacific Coast Hockey League. “While mining is my principal business, I’ve been feeling an itching in my feet regarding hockey,” he said. But it doesn’t sound like the deal went through.
6. By the fall of 1939, MacKay was selling insurance in Salmo. He was supposed to move into a duplex being remodeled in Salmo, but a day or so before he was scheduled to take possession, the house caught fire while being painted. The painter jumped to safety from a second-storey window while a family in the other unit escaped, but the house was destroyed. It wasn’t reported whether it was insured.
7. MacKay died one evening in 1940 on the main street of Ymir, near Salmo. His car hit a power pole. While it was assumed the impact killed him, the district coroner discovered McKay had actually suffered a heart attack. He’s buried in Grand Forks. Three claims were filed against MacKay’s estate, one involving a promissory note and two for wages owed. But I don’t know the outcome of any of them.

Mickey MacKay’s grave marker in the Grand Forks cemetery.
8. In 2018, a delegation led by Gerry Foster approached the City of Grand Forks about having the alley behind the city’s arena named Mickey MacKay Lane or renaming the building Mickey MacKay Place. The city went for the first option. There’s now a sign to that effect, seen below, but the name doesn’t appear to have been officially gazetted, as it doesn’t show up on any map I can find.


Hockey synergy: Mickey MacKay Lane in Grand Forks with a Tim Hortons in the background.
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