A Glimpse of Where Chicago Hockey Was in 1934 CHICAGO - Here is a bit more Original Six lore as we await Wednesday night's opener of the Chicago-Boston Stanley Cup finals. We turn to the University of Chicago Library and its online copy of the Oct. 1, 1934, issue of The Chicagoan, a brilliant magazine of the period that was meant to be the Second City's version of The New Yorker, and the article "Falconer McLaughlin: The Boss of the World's Champion Black Hawks." The article, about the Hawks" mercurial owner, Maj. Frederic McLaughlin, was written in the wake of the club's first Stanley Cup by Kenneth D. Fry, a Chicago sportswriter and sports editor who later became a news editor at NBC and a founder director of the Voice of America. But our interest here is how Fry portrays McLaughlin, who founded the Hawks in 1926 and fired coaches 14 times in his 16-year tenure. To whet your appetite, here is how Fry begins: Maybe the man's right and maybe the man's wrong, but the fact remains that through the deadly, weary, and occasionally satisfying years that Gottselig, Couture, Cook, March, et al., have been scoring goals and making hockey a major sport in this uncouth town, Major Frederic McLaughlin, literally and figuratively, has been down there scowling behind the cage and under the little red light every minute. During the eight years that hockey has grown from a frank experiment under the rafters of the Coliseum to big business and a championship team to the tune of the mighty organ at the Stadium, the Major has blazed the trail with a never-ending succession of managers who left behind them a string of harsh words, an under-current of uncomplimentary and biter comments by athletes and business associates, lawsuits, an apparent habit of turning petty, minor incidents and habits into major controversies - and the feeling in some quarters that perhaps here is a man who is the disciple of discipline and hard training that finally brought to Chicago the world's title and the Stanley Cup in the toughest game since lacrosse. They don't write "em like that anymore. So while you ponder how Wednesday night's Blackhawks will counter the Krejci-Lucic-Horton line and whether Joel Quenneville is right to split up Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane, take a few minutes to read up on how Chicago's hockey story began, and where it stood in 1934.