Each day from now until the Winter Classic, Sportsnet will count down the greatest Toronto Maple Leafs of all time.
Harry Lumley isn’t a name that comes up often in discussions of the NHL’s all-time great goaltenders. And that’s probably the way old “Apple Cheeks” would want it. Never one to boast, he just played the game, took his lumps and made his saves. His tenure with the Maple Leafs was shoehorned between the grander eras of Turk Broda and Johnny Bower, yet Lumley managed to string together four incredible seasons in Toronto and earned his place among the best goalies to ever wear the blue and white.
Growing up in Owen Sound, Ont., Lumley was determined to be a goalie. “I’m Frank Brimsek!” the ruddy-cheeked pre-teen would say as he mimicked the Bruins’ star netminder in the laneway next to the house, stopping pucks made of frozen horse droppings. He made his own pads using bags of rice and that ingenuity paid off when, at 17, he became the youngest goalie to ever play in the NHL, suiting up for the Detroit Red Wings in 1943. When he managed to take over the starting role in 1944, Barrett, his older brother, was stationed in the Far East. In their letters to the pilot, the family failed to mention Harry’s news. “I thought he was out there with the rinky-dinks,” says Barrett, now 90. “I didn’t know he was in the NHL.” Lumley played five seasons with Detroit, capped off with a Stanley Cup victory in 1950.
He joined the Leafs in 1952, after a couple of miserable seasons in Chicago. When he entered the dressing room that fall, his arms were pasty white, but by the end of the year they were black and blue. “The crazy son of a bitch wore no arm pads,” says Howie Meeker, who played with Lumley that first season in Toronto. It wasn’t strictly true: Lumley only wore elbow pads—one properly and the other backwards. “I’d say time after time after time, ‘Harry, for Christ’s sake, you’ve got to have some protection.'” Lumley just brushed Meeker off: “The bruises go away.” In the end, it was the all the same to the Leafs. “He stopped a hell of a lot of pucks,” Meeker says. “But in practice none of us raised the puck off the ice. We didn’t want to be responsible for his bruises.”
Bare arms and all, Lumley was a first-team all-star in his debut season with the team, playing in all 70 games. He was even better the next season: 13 shutouts (still a Leafs record) and a 1.86 GAA. Lumley carried the Leafs to the Stanley Cup semifinals that year, where they fell to the Red Wings. He also won the Vezina Trophy for the first and only time in his career.
Lumley was known as one of the smartest goalies in the NHL, studying the tendencies of each opposing shooter. But he also led all goalies in penalty minutes seven times. “He used his stick a lot to create a swath around his net,” says Gordie Howe. “You had to shoot from further out or you would be eating some lumber.”
In retirement, Lumley rarely spoke about his NHL days. His son, Harry Lumley Jr., remembers dad standing at the back of Shallow Lake Arena near Owen Sound, quietly watching his grandsons’ games, avoiding attention in a town that considered him one of its finest exports and named a rec centre after him. “Don’t be a goalie,” he’d warn them. “You don’t need any brains to be a goalie.” Lumley died in 1998, at 71, in the town where he once kicked away horse dung with homemade pads, and where he returned after becoming one of the greatest—if oft-forgotten—goalies in Maple Leafs history.