Group celebrates 60 years on ice. No signs the organization and its members are slowing down
By Tom and Jerry Caraccioli
On Oct. 25, 1964, an organization that would ultimately help define winters in Oswego for generations of boys and girls to come was born at the home of Oswego State University’s first hockey coach, George Crowe.
Oswego businessmen, teachers, laborers and civic leaders including Minnow Dixon, Jim McGrath, Dick Benjamin, Bob Edwards and Jim Howard sat around Crowe’s kitchen table and gave birth to the Oswego Minor Hockey Association.
Dixon would become president; Benjamin, vice president; and Edwards, secretary.
Several weeks later Harry Nash was added as treasurer and Pete Davis, Crowe, Howard, McGrath and Charlie Usherwood joined the four officers as the first board of directors.
That group also would come to be recognized as the Oswego Minor Hockey Association’s Founding Fathers.
The first season in 1964-65 saw approximately 100 boys sign up to learn how to skate and play hockey.
Through the generosity of Oswego State, spearheaded by Crowe and athletic director Tony Wells, they offered use of its new ice rink in Romney Field House. The city’s service clubs including the Elks Club, Lions Club, Kiwanis Club and Rotary Club, as well as businessmen and other individuals contributed the necessary funds. The new organization held fundraisers while parents, friends and volunteers offered their services as coaches, referees, timekeepers and chauffeurs.
“Originally, it was just two groups. One was what they called Pee Wees (8-12 years old) and Bantams (13-16 years old),” Dan Dixon, 71, remembered as one of the first players in the OMHA. “It didn’t resemble anything like what USA Hockey, AHAUS back then, had as rules but that was the start.”
Two years later in 1966-67 as the game gained popularity with the city’s kids, the program’s participation more than doubled as 230 boys signed up to play ranging in age from 5 years old to 18. Teams were formed for house league play, as well as selected outside competition against teams from Syracuse, Auburn, Rome and Ithaca with Oswego showing promise by winning 50% of its games.
Local businessman Mike Cullinan, funeral director of Dain-Cullinan Funeral Home and one of the first local skaters to eventually play for the Oswego State Lakers team, was 7 years old when he started playing in OMHA’s second year of existence.
“My earliest memory is that I didn’t play the first year,” Cullinan, 67, reminisced. “The night before the second season started, my uncle Joe Scanlon, who was a charter member, called and talked to my father. He was beating the bushes trying to get people to play and my father said, ‘Mike will play.’ That started us scurrying around. I had to find a pair of skates. At the time, the only ones we had were my older sister Patty’s white figure skates. So, that’s what I ended up putting on, going out and learning how to skate. Lots of times, our parents didn’t know the difference between figure skates and hockey skates. The next week my father went out and got some black dye and we dyed those skates black. I was put in the Tigers Group, kids that couldn’t skate, and Norm Pease taught me how to skate.”
The following year was highlighted by the opening of the city’s first rink, the James P. Cullinan Jr. Ice Rink at Kingsford Park. Mike’s father, Jim Cullinan, who served the city in Mayor Shapiro’s administration as the clerk and purchasing agent, traveled back and forth to Albany extensively in order to help secure a grant to build the first rink that continues to bear his name. That year also saw the first year of hockey at Oswego High School with Jim McAllister becoming the team’s pioneering coach.
As the association continued to grow in the mid-to-late 1960s, so did the volunteers who also helped build it and serve on the board of directors including: Fred Dixon, Joe Scanlon, Norrie Jones, Jerry LaFond, Jim Cullinan, Ken Sicke, Jerry Brown, John Dufore, John Rice, Bob Crego, Oswego State’s second hockey coach Herb Hammond, Mike McCrobie, Dee Heckethorn, Dan Howard and McAllister.
An annual end of the season tournament, “Hockey Jamboree,” also was established where outside competition from Auburn, Utica, Rome, Cazenovia, Alexandria Bay and other towns would play within the three divisions of Pony, Pee Wee and Bantam.
Though early teams would take their lumps especially against the teams from Syracuse, Ithaca and Rome, the program was steadily growing. In 1969-70, registration fees were established at $2 per boy (a family maximum of $4 for more than one player) and insurance charges were $1, $2 or $3 depending upon the boys’ ages. The OMHA also sponsored its first very successful State Bantam Tournament on March 13-15, 1970, at Romney Field House in which Amherst won the title beating Troy.
The 1970s ushered in an era of growth in participation and winning as the next wave of Oswego’s youngsters learned to play and new members of the board of directors including White Warner, Neil Lloyd, Dan Mulcahey, Clark Morrison, Paul and Pat Furman, John McPherson, Floyd Kunzwiler, George Greene, Dick Pratt, Jack Fitzgibbons, Bill Greene and others continued to help build the program.
In 1972-73, the OMHA saw a record number of more than 350 boys register to play. But the organization also suffered a tragic loss with the sudden death of Scanlon on Sept. 10, 1972, of a heart attack. He had helped grow OMHA from its beginnings serving as treasurer and coach for seven of the eight years of its existence.
OMHA’s growth that year also was spurred on by Oswego State coach Hammond and Oswego High School coach McAllister starting a hockey school (“The Clinic”) for the entire membership of the OMHA on the first day of skating at Romney Field House. Hammond, McAllister, along with the players from Oswego State including then Lakers and Oswego natives Mike Cullinan, Jim Howard Jr. and Chip Wallace, taught hockey fundamentals in three weekly two-hour sessions for three weeks for $15.
At the end of the year banquet sponsored by the Elks Club, two awards were given in memory of two of OMHA’s pioneers. The first was the Joseph J. Scanlon Memorial Award for exceptionally outstanding service to the OMHA awarded to the members of the Scanlon family. The other was the William Lupien III Memorial Award in memory of William Lupien who lost his life in a bicycle accident in the summer of 1972. With Heckethorn serving as the catalyst, the success of the ’72-‘73 season also persuaded the city of Oswego to build its second city rink on the east side at Fort Ontario.
The mid-1970s became a milestone era for greater success on the ice for OMHA teams. In March 1975, the Oswego Squirts Road Team became the first team in the Oswego Minor Hockey Association to earn a berth in the New York State Tournament.
The Squirts’ qualification proved to other communities in Central New York that Oswego hockey was no longer a burgeoning program but one that would see their teams win sectional championships and qualify for state tournaments regularly from the mid-1970s throughout the 1980s and beyond.
Despite near misses of state championships from those earlier teams in the 1970s, the OMHA’s first state championship was won in 1982-83 when the Oswego Squirt Tier II team, coached by current Oswego State Lakers head coach Ed Gosek, defeated Albany. That win became the first of several others state titles to follow in the 1980s including the Pee Wee and Bantam teams both winning in the 1988-89 season over Nassau County teams. Oswego’s U16 boys’ team won OMHA’s latest state title in the 2023-24 season.
Along with the success of teams in the Oswego Minor Hockey Association through the years, OMHA was the beginning for players like Mike Johnson, Lou Usherwood, Jason Mantaro, Alex Kurilovitch, Erik Cole and T.T. Cianfarano who all went on to play hockey in college for Division I programs at Cornell, West Point, Air Force, St. Lawrence, Clarkson and Quinnipiac, respectively, while many others played for Division III programs with great success.
Cole became an All-American at Clarkson University and was drafted 71st overall in the 1998 NHL Draft by the Carolina Hurricanes where he won the Stanley Cup in 2005-06. He also played for the Edmonton Oilers, Montreal Canadiens, Dallas Stars and Detroit Red Wings, as well as Team USA in the 2006 Olympic Winter Games. During his career he was considered a prototype power forward; big, great skater with a scoring touch, who wasn’t afraid to mix it up in front of the net or in the corners. He finished his 13-year NHL career playing 892 games, scoring 265 goals and 267 assists for 532 points. He is the first and only player, thus far, from the Oswego Minor Hockey Association to make it to the NHL.
That is not to say there haven’t been others connected to the OMHA who found success in the NHL. Hammond became a successful scout for the New York Rangers organization and would later have his name etched on the Stanley Cup when they won it in 1994. And the grandson of one of OMHA’s “Founding Fathers” and son of a dad who played in the beginning years of the OMHA, Jimmy Howard III, was the 64th overall pick in the 2003 NHL draft by the Detroit Red Wings. He played goal for 14 seasons for the Wings and was a member of the organization when they won the Stanley Cup in 2007-08. Howard played 543 games registering 246 wins. He became only the third goalie in Detroit history (along with Terry Sawchuk and Chris Osgood), 71st in history and just the eighth United States-born goalie, to reach the milestone of 500-or-more NHL games played.
In the late 1970s, the OMHA started a girls’ hockey program that lasted several years before falling off. A successful girls OMHA program was relaunched in 2011 and came on the heels of Oswego High School’s only state championship for hockey when the girls won it all in 2010. The girls’ team was led by standout T.T. Cianfarano, who would later participate in the U.S. U18 National Team before playing Division I college hockey at Quinnipiac College. During her career at Quinnipiac, she was selected to the ECAC Hockey All-Academic Team, named to the ECAC Hockey All-Rookie Team, named ECAC Hockey Rookie of the Month in January and named ECAC Hockey Rookie of the Week five times in her first season. She followed in her sophomore season with ECAC Hockey Player of the Year, ECAC Hockey Forward of the Year, All-ECAC Hockey First Team and New England Division I All Star recognition in 2015-16.
“The growth of the Oswego Minor Hockey Association for boys and girls through 60 years is an outstanding accomplishment for our community and is a great legacy for those who were there at the beginning and continue to be here today,” current OMHA President Tom Roman said.
And despite reaching middle age, there are no signs the Oswego Minor Hockey Association and its members are slowing down.
“Hockey is a big part of the community and it certainly got a big shot in the arm when Erik Cole did what he did,” Mike Cullinan added. “It probably won’t go away anytime soon.”
When pressed to put into words what hockey means to the city of Oswego, its youth, current and founding members, as well as players of the Oswego Minor Hockey Association, Dan Dixon spoke of its legacy to all who have been a part of it.
“That’s really hard to put into words. It’s a lifetime gift that my dad, Charlie Usherwood, Joe Scanlon and the rest gave us,” he said. “They probably didn’t realize it at the time, but that’s what it was.”
Early Contributors, Supporters
Throughout the 60 years of the Oswego Minor Hockey Association thousands of local residents have contributed to its growth and success. It is impossible to include every name. The following is a list of names of some of the earliest contributors and supports of the organization.
Will Allen, Brad Ames, Dick Auyer, Mark Becker, Fred Byrne, Rick Cabello, Dave Campbell, Bob Clark, Norm Clark, Dominic Clavelli, Tom Cole, Jim Collins, Mayor John Conway, Paul Chwalek, Chuck Fierro, John Fisher, Joe Gosek, Dennis Gould, Jim Gray, Mel Hanson, Ted Hinckley, Bob Hogan, Dan Howard, Dick Johnson, George Johnson, Bob Knock, Fred Le Pine, Leo Maniccia, John McCullough, Garth McGill, Ernie Mears, Bob Murchie, Lorraine Nash, Lou O’Donnell, Marty O’Toole, Warren Patterson, Ed Pechoda, John Raby, Gordon Reeves, John Rice, John Rogers, Leo Rogers, Steve Rose, Ed Schrader, Earl Sharkey, Charles Shoemaker, Ron Sova, Frank Strang, Ed Wallace, Joe Walker, Rich Zollitsch.
Source: Oswego Minor Hockey Association Bob Crego 1973, revised by David Kahn 2013.
Tom and Jerry Caraccioli are freelance writers originally from Oswego, who have co-authored two books: “STRIKING SILVER: The Untold Story of America’s Forgotten Hockey Team” and “BOYCOTT: Stolen Dreams of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games.” They also started playing hockey in the OMHA in 1971-72.
