Lester Patrick on film and tape

I’m only aware of two brief bits of surviving footage of Lester Patrick and three recordings of his voice. A 1931 newsreel shows Lester refereeing a New York Rangers intrasquad game. It aired at some point on Turner Classic Movies and was posted to YouTube in 2021.

This is probably part of a 10-minute film from 1931 listed on the Internet Movie Database as Sports Slants No. 1, in which “Ted Husing visits various branches of athletics,” including “Lester Patrick [coaching] the New York Rangers during hockey practice.”

The other bit of film is from 1933 and at one point shows Lester awkwardly reading lines from a cue card and towering over an even more awkward Foster Hewitt. I’m not sure what program it’s excerpted from, but you can see it below.

Lester starts talking at the 1:17 mark. Here’s the transcript.

Foster: Say, Lester, how is hockey going over in the United States?

Lester: Well, Foster, I tell you, it’s remarkable the way the game of hockey has been accepted into the hearts of the great American centres. And I honestly believe that its possibilities have merely been scratched.

Foster: Well, certainly the Rangers have increased the popularity of the game in New York. How would you rate the Rangers of this year with other years?

Lester: Well, in my opinion the Ranger team of 1932-33 is the most crowd-pleasing, colourful, and polished machine it’s ever been my pleasure to handle.

Foster: That’s quite a tribute. I guess I’ll see Ching Johnson now.

Lester: Yes, Ching’s just around the corner somewhere.

The audio from this exchange was also included in an LP produced in the 1960s called Great Moments in Hockey.

(Lester’s line about 1932-33 Rangers must have been well-rehearsed, for in a letter to a former teammate, published in the Nelson [BC] Daily News of June 12, 1933, he described them as “a very good crowd-pleasing and colourful team …”)

Additionally, a 10-minute film in 1940 called Two of a Kind was said to feature “famous brothers and sisters pairs … who are stars in the world of sports,” including Lester and brother Frank (plus Joe and Dom DiMaggio, among others). It was co-written by Ted Husing, also responsible for the first film mentioned above. Alas, if the footage still exists, I can’t find it mentioned anywhere online.

A documentary that aired on Fox Sports Network in 2008 on the April 7, 1928 game where Lester went in net for the New York Rangers during the Stanley Cup playoffs featured a few seconds of Lester speaking about the incident, but I don’t know where it originated. I have it cued up below at the 14:45 mark.

Lester says: “I donned Mr. Chabot’s uniform. Everything fit me like a glove… Except the skates and shoes were were a size or so too large. But I managed to overcome that handicap by putting on extra socks.”

There’s also another very similar snippet of Lester talking about it from a separate interview or speech, featured in Tradition on Ice: A 62 Year History of the New York Rangers. It used to be publicly available on YouTube but has since been removed.

Lester says: “Some of the players started to say ‘Well, Lester you go in.’ I says, ‘Aw, no, I don’t want to go in.’ Finally, I donned Mr. Chabot’s uniform, skates, and so forth. Everything fit me like a glove, except the skates and shoes which were a size or so too large. The game proceeded, and as luck would have it, the boys went all out and gave everything they had to protect me, and we won with the extra goal in overtime.”

Eric Whitehead, in The Patricks: Hockey’s Royal Family, quotes from the same speech on page 175, and indicates that it came during Lester’s Madison Square Garden farewell party, presumably in 1947. His version has another sentence at the start and and a few other minor differences:

We thought at first that it was just a mild injury to Chabot's eye and that he’d return shortly, but it was worse than we thought and some of the boys said, ‘Lester, you go in there …’ But I said no; I didn’t want to. However, they persisted, so I donned Chabot’s uniform, skates, and what have you, and everything fit like a glove except the skates. I took care of that by putting on an extra pair of socks. So when the game proceeded, the boys went all out to protect me, and as luck would have it we won with the extra goal in overtime.” 

Lester’s memory of everything fitting well was at odds with what Basil O’Meara wrote in the Ottawa Journal. He said of Lester: “his lanky legs [were] upholstered in brown pads that seemed to fit him like father’s old clothes.”

A brief recounting of the same game in a video produced by the NHL features a recreation of the radio broadcast that might have accompanied it.

I don’t know where the audio came from. I thought perhaps it was from the aforementioned Great Moments of Hockey LP, which was a mix of interview clips, narration, and realistic play-by-play recreations, but the whole thing is available on YouTube, and it’s not there.

Another LP called Hockey Night in Canada was issued a few years later. From an excerpt available online, it appears to be similar or identical to the earlier Great Moments of Hockey album.

A third such album called NHL 50 Years was narrated by longtime St. Louis sportscaster Dan Kelly. The back of the LP specifically mentions Lester’s 1928 Stanley Cup heroics, yet it doesn’t appear to have been mentioned on the actual recording.

Finally, the Ottawa Citizen of March 9, 1956 carried a listing for a half-hour program on CBO radio called “The Lester Patrick Story,” a “semi-documentary account of ‘the silver fox’ of hockey.” It is not clear if the program featured Lester himself or someone portraying him.

Updated on Jan. 18, 2025 to add the links to the various LPs. Updated on Jan. 19, 2025 to add the clip from Tradition on Ice. Updated on Jan. 27, 2025 to add the quotes from The Patricks: Hockey’s Royal Family and the Ottawa Journal. Updated on April 1, 2025 to add the quote from Lester’s letter published in the Nelson Daily News and the program on CBO.