Hockeytown's Henry Boucha was columnist's 'first in-person hockey hero'
He was different, meaning special, by any measure. Henry Boucha of Warroard earned the "legend" label in Minnesota, rising above all the others who made his hometown a hockey hotbed.
My first sportswriting job was at the Duluth News-Tribune and Herald, starting in December 1965 as a 20-year-old and for the kingly sum of $76.08 per week.
The frightening part was being in a city enamored of hockey to the point it was building a new arena to house the Minnesota Duluth Bulldogs — and my experience with the sport had been watching the 1960 U.S. Olympic team defeat Czechoslovakia to clinch the gold medal on a small-screen black-and-white television.
Sports editor Bruce Bennett took note of my hockey ignorance and restricted my duties for the sport to monitoring the Duluth Hornets, a senior amateur team that played Sundays at the drafty old Curling Club next to the big lake.
Four months in Duluth, and I then escaped to the safety of the St. Cloud Times, where we covered basketball, a little wrestling and more basketball during the winter.
Thus it was I came to the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch on Labor Day in 1968 still unlearned in the ways of puck. Once winter arrived, I was told: "You are now a hockey expert. Head for Aldrich Arena and don't come back until the Saturday tripleheaders are complete."
Which was OK, but it was not the true enlightenment that took place in that winter of 1968-69.
There were tales making their way to the Twin Cities of this wondrous player from the hinterlands of Warroad — a Native American kid who had learned to fly on ice by skating the river under the moonlight.
https://www.startribune.com/henry-bouch ... 600305937/
