May's Women in hockey feature story
Induction honour long overdue for one of our best
Dogged work by a great nephew has led to a tribute to Shirley Moulds, a 1920s star of women's hockey and many other sports, Blair Phillips reports.
View the original story By Blair Phillips, The Ottawa Citizen May 4, 2010
Many historians consider the 1920s is considered the first golden age of sports.
On the world stage, Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Suzanne Lenglen and Percy Williams dominated the headlines. In Ottawa, fans celebrated two Grey Cup victories for the Rough Riders, then known as the Senators, while the hockey Senators racked up four Stanley Cups.
However, there was another Ottawa sports story that was less celebrated during that era, one that is far less known today: Propelled by the scoring of speedy left-winger Shirley Moulds, Ottawa women's hockey teams consistently competed for regional and provincial titles.
That oversight will be corrected Wednesday night, when Moulds is inducted into the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame, 37 years after her death and eight decades after she hung up her skates.
In a way, the road from relative obscurity to recognition began a few years ago, when two of Moulds' great nephews, Kevin and Jeff Phillips, noticed a photo of her softball team hanging on the wall of a Rideau Street sports bar.
"I questioned relatives about it and started to discover that she was quite the athlete," Jeff Phillips says.
Soon after, Phillips read hockey historian Brian McFarlane's book Proud Past, Bright Future, which features Moulds as one of the key figures in Ottawa women's hockey of that era.
There was plenty more, though. Unlike many women of that, or any, era, Moulds excelled at an array of sports. Beyond her hockey ability, she was a leading basketball scorer, a slick-fielding, power-hitting shortstop for the city's top softball team, a three-time Ottawa tennis champ and a bowling champion in well into her 50s.
With McFarlane's support, Phillips began to put together a case for her inclusion in the sports hall of fame.
His first efforts were rejected. The hall selection committee considered Moulds too obscure and documentation about women's hockey in the 1920s too insufficient to support her induction.
However, Phillips persisted, and he was finally rewarded for his work late last year.
What is known about Moulds is a fascinating story. She was born Oct. 12, 1904, to James and Nancy Moulds, and with two brothers grew up in a Fifth Avenue house where she lived all her life.
An excellent skater, Moulds started playing hockey at First Avenue Public School in 1918 and by the next year -- at age 15 -- was already good enough to join the Ottawa Alerts Women's Sports Club.
Women from the club competed in several team sports, including softball, tennis and basketball, all of which Moulds played exceptionally well, but it was as a hockey player that she really attracted attention.
Newspapers quickly caught on to her clutch scoring performances, and more than once writers referred to her as the "ladies hockey marvel."
However, women's hockey was not regarded on nearly the same level as the men's game; accounts of the Alerts were infrequent and very few records were kept. As a result, statistics for women's hockey from that era are close to non-existent.
Female athletes were also typically depicted as frail and delicate, and competition was considered unladylike. In most provinces, women had only recently received the right to vote, and many men still viewed them as intellectually and emotionally inferior.
The men who refereed women's games tended to treat the players as novelty acts, a sort of Harlem Globetrotters on ice. Penalties were rarely called, which led to highly physical games featuring slashing, pushing and holding, all of it seen by critics as proof that women had no business playing hockey.
Moulds, though, was not known for her physical play. She was famous for her speed and a hard, accurate shot. The press nicknamed her the city's "scoring ace" as the Ottawa Alerts went on to win five consecutive district titles from 1919-20 to 1923-24.
In 1923, the Alerts met the Toronto St. Patricks for a two-game, total-goal series to decide the Ladies Ontario Hockey Association title, then considered the Canadian championship.
Ottawa won its home game 1-0. Then, in Toronto, Moulds had her signature breakout game, scoring four goals and leading her team to a convincing 6-2 two-game total victory.
In 1925, sponsorship of the Alerts was taken over by the Ottawa Rowers Club, but, with Moulds as the star scorer, the winning tradition continued.
In the opening days of the season, Moulds scored five goals in a 7-0 romp over the Hull Interprovincials. That same year, the Rowers Club earned a district championship on a winning goal from Moulds, but lost the LOHA title to Toronto St. Pats.
After winning their third consecutive district title in 1927, the Rowers Club met the Toronto Pats in the LOHA final. Moulds scored two of three goals in a decisive 3-0 win to regain the coveted crown.
She continued with the Rowers Club during the 1928 season, when sponsorship was transferred to Solloway Mills, a major local employer. The team again won the regional finals, but lost in the LOHA series to the St. Pats.
However, as ice time became harder to find and sponsorship interests faded, the club folded after the 1929 season.
Later that year, Solloway Mills was accused of scandals stemming from the market crash, leading to the company's bankruptcy in the 1930s.
Moulds' popularity took longer to fade, though. In a 1933 poll sponsored by the RKO Capitol Theatre, she earned more than 72,000 votes and placed fourth as Ottawa's most popular female athlete.
By then, she had already hung up her skates. She took a job at the Canadian Livestock Records -- her surviving family members are not certain what she did there -- where she worked until the late 1960s.
She never married, but she did remain active in sports. Well into her 50s, she was a local bowling champion.
Moulds never boasted about her athletic accomplishments. Instead, she kept a scrapbook of headlines, most of which did not include dates or names of publications.
Instead of reminiscing with her family about the past, Moulds, a big football fan, preferred to discuss the Rough Riders.
A fan attending Moulds' 1973 funeral approached her nephew, Don Moulds, and told him that, if times had been different, his aunt could have competed with the junior boys.
Asked how he thinks his aunt would have responded to her belated acknowledgment as a hockey player and athlete, Moulds says: "She would be thrilled to death, especially being recognized by her home town."
He believes she would have accepted the nomination with grace and thanked her teammates and family.
Her biggest thrill, he says, would have been adding newspaper clippings about her Hall of Fame induction to her beloved scrapbook.
April's Women In Hockey Feature Story
7th Annual Cassie Campbell Street Hockey Festival
Play hockey to support the Ronald McDonald House Southern Alberta. The Cassie Campbell Street Hockey Festival is being hosted April 30 - May 1st at the Olympic Oval in Calgary. There are tournaments for adults and youth, while family and friends are invited to come cheer you on, enjoy the Family Street Festival and watch the Celebrity Street Hockey Game featuring Curtis Joseph.
Download the event flyer
February's Women In Hockey Feature Story
Elizabeth Graham - First Goaltender to Wear a Mask
Queen's University (Kingston, ON) netminder Elizabeth Graham is credited with being the first goaltender to ever wear a mask for protection. The historic event took place in 1927, three years before NHLer Clint Benedict strapped on his leather mask. As reported in the Montreal Daily Star at the time, Graham "gave the fans a surprise when she stepped into the nets and then donned a fencing mask." Myth has it that Elizabeth's father pressured her into 
wearing the mask after she underwent extensive dental work.