A Team Capreol Story

by Robert “Stibby” Stibler

For your amusement and laughter please read this true story from the winter of 1985.

   We had a beer strike that winter and it appeared the strike would last through our Annual Railway Workers Hockey Tournament in March, which as you can understand would have had a devastating effect on our means to run a successful Tournament. I had approached the local Brewery in Sudbury, Northern to ask them if they could supply us beer for the Tournament. They said no, they could not even keep up with the public coming to buy beer at the Brewery.

   The Brewers Retail were all shut down due to this strike and, worse, the union was poised to have workers in other provinces walk off the job in a move that would’ve created a national shortage in an age before imports were big and when inter-provincial trade barriers meant beer had to be brewed where it was sold. Craft breweries were but a twinkle in someone’s eye.

   We came up with a plan through our Labatt's Rep, Rick Comtois to travel to Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec where Labatts had a huge warehouse and buy our beer. He would set it up with the people there to allow us to enter the warehouse and pick up the beer. As you can imagine there was numerous other problems we had to overcome. First of all, we needed $10,000.00 to purchase the 350 cases we required, plus Labatts wanted us to pick up another 100 cases for them, so a total of 450 cases. Since it had to all be hush, hush, in case we got caught, no way could Labatts lend us the money. I went to the CIBC Bank Manager, named Wayne Greer who was not a bad hockey player and asked him if he wanted to play hockey for Team Capreol this coming weekend. Of course he said yes, then I hit him with the big one, I asked him to lend me $10,000.00 for the weekend and to not ask any questions, I would repay the money on Monday, he agreed!

   We rented a 5 ton U-Haul truck and Eddie Hanzel was the driver with me as the co-pilot. We needed a French speaker, so we had Elmer St. Jules, who spoke French and George Boucher ahead in another vehicle as blockers to warn us of any OPP road blocks which they periodically set up around the Quebec border crossings to prevent beer smuggling into Ontario. We were in constant contact using borrowed CN radios.

   All went well on our trip to Rouyn-Noranda, although we did see numerous OPP vehicles patrolling the highway. We entered the warehouse, had our truck loaded with 450 cases of beer and one case of "La Bon Carnival", heavy duty high alcohol content beer 13% to celebrate when we got home.

   We had just left Temagami on our return trip when we had a flat tire on the rear of the truck. Elmer and George went back to Temagami, about two miles away to get us some help. They brought an old fellow from the local garage with his jack and a spare tire. He was unable to lift the truck and asked us "what the hell do you guys have in there", our cover story was plywood from the mill at Smith Falls, thank God he accepted that and went back to the garage to get another stronger jack. In the meantime, the traffic was flowing by us on the highway, with a couple of OPP cars also passing by, who we waved to. It was a very nervous time, but the old fellow got the truck lifted and the tire changed, we gave him a good tip and away we went.

   To stay off the main highway as much as possible we turned off to travel through Field and onto Highway 17 at Verner, plus it obviously cut our time, but the road was very rough that time of year and we had to keep our speed down. We finally arrived home about 9:00 pm, the trip had lasted about 14 hours and we quickly celebrated by finishing off the case of "La Bon Carnival" beer. This was on a Thursday, the next day was the start of our Hockey Tournament. Labatts picked up their 100 cases on Friday morning from the back of the rental truck.

   What we did now will really make you laugh. All the beer cases were in French, fortunately we had planned for this and had about 50 empty English cases stored that we kept transferring the beer bottles to before we brought the beer into the Arena bar upstairs. Want another laugh, all the beer bottles were also in French, but our story line when asked about this, was that we had bought all our beer before the strike in Hanmer, which everyone knew was a French community and could be expected to sell French labelled beer! Crazy, but it either worked or no one cared!

   Another funny part, our dances required us to hire off duty Police Officers to be stationed at the entrance to the Arena, we kept them well away from the bar and very, very happy! Also, I had called my good friend at the Liquor Inspection to tell him it would not be a good time to inspect the Hockey Tournament that weekend, he said no problem, he would inspect some other areas for the weekend!

   In closing, we obviously had a fantastic weekend and sold out all our beer, it especially helped when the word got out we were the only place that had beer, people flocked to the Arena. Paid the $10,000.00 back to the Bank on Monday.