Before the Blues, St. Louis had this hockey team

You’re looking at the St. Louis Flyers, the minor league hockey team that the Blues eclipsed from our collective memory. This is a team from the 1930s, when former Flyer Alex “Shrimp” McPherson coached. In 1936, the team led the American Hockey League all season; club owners gave Shrimp a car in thanks. Shrimp loved hockey so much, he’d stuck with the team for five seasons even though the club owed him $6,000 in back pay. During the offseason, he odd-jobbed it at the Arena parking garage and Forest Park Highlands and ushered at Sportsman’s Park. When he lived in the same building with one unscrupulous team owner, he and his hungry teammates “foraged” for groceries through the guy’s open kitchen window. Shrimp was a slow skater but knew “all the tricks of hockey,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and his assists were always “greater in number than the goals scored.” The team dissolved in 1953, but Shrimp’s Flyers kept visions of pucks and nets dancing in hockey fans’ heads till we landed a pro team, in 1967. “He always believed,” the paper wrote, “that given a good team and a good league, St. Louis would be a great hockey town.”