Portland Buckaroos (1960-1976)

Western Hockey League (1960-1974)
Western International Hockey League (1974-1975)
Northwest Hockey League (1975-1976)

Background

The Portland Buckaroos were a popular, powerhouse minor league hockey club of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. The club joined the Western Hockey League in the fall of 1960, set to play in the brand new Portland Memorial Coliseum that would open its doors to the public that November. The club revived the ‘Buckaroos’ identity used by an earlier Rose City hockey team that skated in the Pacific Coast Hockey League from 1928 through 1941.

On The Ice

The Buckaroos were consistently terrific on the ice. In fourteen seasons of action, the Bucks suffered only one losing campaign and appeared in the Lester Patrick Cup Finals an amazing nine times. Their record in those Cup finals was rather less impressive, losing six of their nine appearances. Still, the Buckaroos claimed the league championship in their debut season of 1960-61 and again in 1965 and 1971.

Center Art Jones was the iron man of the Buckaroos. He was the only player to skate all fourteen seasons that Portland played in the Western League between 1960 and 1974. He was the club’s all-time leader in games (981), goals (492), assists (869) and points (1,361). Jones was one of only two players to record 1,000 assists in the Western League, alongside long-time Seattle Totems star Guyle Fielder (who also played briefly for the Buckaroos in the early 1970’s.

Centerman Larry Leach, forwards Bill Saunders and Dick Van Impe, and defenseman Mike Donaldson and Connie Madigan joined Jones in a group of players who all played 10 or more seasons for the Bucks. Goaltender Dave Kelly manned the nets for parts of nine seasons between 1963 and 1974.

Decline & Demise

During their early seasons at the outset of the 1960’s, the Buckaroos rewrote the Western Hockey League attendance records. Crowds peaked during the winter of 1961-62, when Portland averaged 8,420 fans per night at the Coliseum for 35 home dates.

The boom years faded as the 1960’s drew to a close and the encroachment of the National Hockey League began to chip away at the foundation of the Western League. The WHL lost two of its key markets, Los Angeles and San Francisco, to the NHL’s 1967 expansion round. Three years later, the senior circuit plucked away Vancouver as well.

Disaster truly struck during the 1972-73 season. The Bucks’ experienced their first (and only) losing campaign in club history and attendance plummeted. Late in the season, Buckaroos owner Harry Glickman required a bailout from the rest of the league to complete the season.

Meanwhile, a new Major League challenger to the NHL, the World Hockey Association (WHA), began play that same winter. Within the space of a year, the rise of the WHA would set off an arms race for expansion markets across the U.S. and Canada.

The Buckaroos would return for the Western League’s final season in 1973-74 as a league owned club, operated by the management of the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings and serving as a Kings’ farm club. The team recovered some of its former form and made it back to the Lester Patrick Cup finals for the ninth time, falling to the Phoenix Roadrunners 4 games to 1.

The 1974 Patrick Cup finals proved to be the last games held by the Western League. In June of that year, the NHL awarded poorly vetted expansion team to Western League cities Denver and Seattle. Both expansion bids were troubled and neither would ever make it to the ice. But combined with the WHA’s simultaneous move into Western League stronghold San Diego and its poaching of the WHL’s Phoenix Roadrunners franchise, the cumulative effect of these moves was to kill the league and the Buckaroos with it.

Aftermath

A couple of months after the Western Hockey League and the original Buckaroos franchise folded in June of 1974, a group of Buckaroos alumni banded together to form a “senior amateur” club to play in the Western International Hockey League.  The senior amateur Buckaroos featured many of the top Portland players of the WHL days, including Art Jones, Connie Madigan, Bill Saunders, Dave Kelly and brothers Arnie & Cliff Schmautz.  Andy Hebenton served as player-coach and the players ran the club with help from several of their wives. Penny-pinching out of necessity, the senior amateur Bucks left the Memorial Coliseum behind in favor of the far-smaller Jantzen Beach Ice Arena.

The Buckaroos played two seasons of senior hockey. The old-timers’ last hurrah came on March 7th, 1976 when the Bucks’ alumni defeated the North Shore Hurry Kings from British Columbia in front of 1,713 fans at Jantzen Ice Arena to claim the playoff championship of the amateur Northwest Hockey League.

In June 1976, the junior hockey Edmonton Oil Kings of the Western Canada Hockey League relocated to Portland and became the Portland Winter Hawks. Coincidentally or not, the senior-amateur Buckaroos never played another game, disbanding three months later in September of 1976. The Winter Hawks became an institution in Portland and continue to play at the now 63-year old Memorial Coliseum to this day.

The popularity of the amateur Winter Hawks on the Portland sports scene has created an unusual dynamic. Portland remains the only Western League city of the 1970’s that has never had another stab at professional hockey. As of 2024, the Portland Trail Blazers will become the only NBA team to have played fifty consecutive seasons without ever sharing their market with a pro hockey team.

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ICE WARRIORS

The Pacific Coast/Western Hockey League 1948-1974

By Jon C. Stott

 

Between 1948 and 1974, more than 2,500 minor-league professional hockey players skated across the Pacific Northwest states and western Canada as part of the 23 teams that made up the Western Hockey League (known as the Pacific Coast Hockey League before 1952). Some of the young players went on to enjoy careers in the National Hockey League; others were former NHLers willing to extend their careers by returning to the minors. Many of the most colorful, however, were minor-league “lifers” who simply had hockey in their blood and built their reputations in the WHL and other minor pro leagues.Ice Warriors traces the WHL’s origins, rise and fall, and includes interviews with players, coaches and fans as well as statistical records and pictures from the era.

 

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Portland Buckaroos Video

Kings of the Road: The Story of the Portland Buckaroos.  The complete 96-minute documentary on the Buckaroos, originally produced in 2010, is now available on YouTube.

In Memoriam

Right wing Andy Hebenton (Buckaroos ’64-’65 and ’67-’74; player-coach ’74-’76) passed on January 29th, 2019 at 89 years of age. New York Times obituary.

Long-time Buckaroos executive and owner Harry Glickman died on June 10th, 2020. Glickman was also the founder of the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers in 1970. He was 96 years old. Oregon Live obituary.

Buckaroos all-time games & scoring leader Art Jones passed away at the age of 86 on February 3rd, 2021.

Links

Western Hockey League Media Guides

Western Hockey League Programs

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