These memories remain sacred

By Kevin Paul Dupont, Globe Staff, 2/3/2003

he drive back to Boston University from the Garden was slow and treacherous, with car after car abandoned along Commonwealth Avenue in the whiteout. Inside the Terriers' team bus, the satisfaction of a 12-5 first-night win over Boston College was elevated to euphoria as Jack Parker's charges learned that Tuesday's classes were officially canceled.

''Not that class was paramount in everyone's eyes to begin with,'' recalled Dave Silk, one of the star Terrier forwards of the day. ''But, boy, that got everyone going. As the bus plodded through Kenmore Square, we got Jack O'Callahan to go up to the front to ask Jack [Parker] to let us off at the Dugout. We all lived at West Campus - what's that, about a mile? - and there was no question that we were all going to the Dugout.''

Long the campus watering hole, the Dugout beckoned as shelter from the storm. But with the school's athletic director aboard, and the coach's presence of mind intact, Parker couldn't order the bus to pull up in front of a barroom door. Imgaine how that picture might have played in the school's next daily edition of the Free Press.

''`Tell ya what,''' Silk recalled Parker telling O'Callahan. ''`I can't let you out at the Dugout. But I can let you out at Marsh Chapel - on the other side of the street - just in case anyone wants to go to Mass. How's that sound?'''

Never in the history of college hockey was a bus full of players so quickly converted to holy rollers.

''Off we go to Mass, right, hootin' and hollerin' out the door and into the blizzard,'' said Silk. ''And I'll never forget Billy Cotter's face as we're getting up to go. Unbelievable. Billy was a Charlestown kid, nice kid, I mean maybe the best teammate you could ever have, and this was his freshman year, so he hadn't caught on to everything yet. As I'm going by him, he grabs me, and again it's the look on his face, as he says, `Hey, Silky, I'm a good Catholic kid and everything, but we just won in the Beanpot - I don't want to go to Mass.'''

It was right about then, recalled Silk, that Parker, eyes rolling, reached for a package of cigarettes.

''You could see Jack lighting up, thinking, `Oh, my God, where's this going?''' he said.

Frivolity and good cheer inside the pub lasted into the wee hours, well beyond closing hour. For those who grew too tired, there were common rooms at the nearly adjacent dormitory, 700 Comm. Ave., offering the comfort of chairs and couches. Some of the Dugout's patrons - not all of them triumphant Terrier hockey players, of course - simply benched down in the pub's inviting booths and waited out the winter wonderland in a state of Budweiser bliss.

A day or two later, Silk recalled, Parker made his way through the Dugout door, issued a solemn, ''OK, boys, that's enough,'' and practice resumed.

''What I like to say,'' said a wistful and whimsical Silk, who today is a Loomis Sales vice president in charge of institutional sales, ''is by the time we came out, the snow was gone - and so were the '70s.''

This story ran on page D6 of the Boston Globe on 2/3/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.