Joe Patrick, Vancouver’s prize baby

Frank and Catharine Patrick must have been proud parents: their son, Joseph Alexis Patrick, earned a perfect score in the Better Baby Contest.

This item is from the Vancouver Daily World of Aug. 24, 1918, and explains how little Joe “is a well-developed little fellow, with broad shoulders and chest. The muscles in his little limbs are already taking on fine round curves for he is chubby, without being fat.”

As a teenager, Joe worked in his father’s silver mine near Kamloops. Eric Whitehead, in The Patricks: Hockey’s Royal Family, described him as “A good but not exceptional hockey player in a city industrial league [who] had no burning ambition to play pro hockey.”

The Society for International Hockey Research database lists Joe playing in 1932-33 with Vancouver Ex-King George of the Vancouver City Junior Hockey League, who that year played in the Memorial Cup Tournament.

When his father became coach of the Boston Bruins in 1934, Joe enrolled at a prep school, then entered Harvard in 1936, where he became a star forward on the Crimson hockey team and was awarded the Memorial Cup for all-round ability. Whitehead says he made the all-American team and set a record by scoring 11 goals in seven games against Yale.

Vancouver Province, April 28, 1937

A 1939 game between Harvard and Toronto Varsity pitted Joe against former teammate John Taylor, who was Cyclone Taylor’s son. They played on the same line together while attending Prince of Wales High School in Vancouver, with John’s older brother Fred Jr. making up the rest of the line.

Joe graduated in 1939, attended New York Rangers camp in Winnipeg with his cousin Muzz, played two full seasons for the New York Rovers of the EAHL and appeared in eight further games between 1941-43 before signing up with the US Army. He became a lieutenant. As of 1947, Joe was a referee in the American Hockey League. But I can’t find anything about his life after that.

Joe was born on Nov. 7, 1916 in Vancouver and died on May 4, 1990 in Princeton, Ill., age 73.

Updated on April 1, 2025 to add the 1937 clipping and on April 2, 2025 to add more details about Joe’s hockey, military, and refereeing careers.