My favourite Leaf of all time - a class act. R.I.P. George Armstrong.

I became a leaf fan in the mid-50s at the age of 4.  At the time we lived on O'Connor drive near Coxwell Ave.  My father who had been a soccer fan all his life immigrated with my mother and I to Canada from Scotland in 1950.  He immediately fell in love with the game and I remember gathering around the radio on game nights to listen to Foster Hewitt's broadcast.  My father who wasn't satisfied with just hearing the game would bundle me up and we would walk to a TV store on Coxwell just south of O'Connor where they had televisions on display in the window.  We would stand shivering looking through the glass at the game on those display models.  My father had to stop bringing me when I couldn't last till the end of the game.  One night after coming home after one of those games he managed to convince my mother to buy a television.  We were incredibly poor then so it meant getting a loan from HFC for $450.00 a huge amount at that time.  George Armstrong became my hero and in 1962 my team won the Stanley Cup.  I was thirteen.  It was such an incredible thrill!  On the day of the ticker tape parade for the champions I grabbed my Kodak Brownie Hawkeye and snapped this photo of my hero.  Harold Ballard is seated to his right and Punch Imlach and King Clancy are in the vehicle behind.