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More rocky hockey at Rockefeller Center, Part 2

KEEFE MICHAEL RILEY, our oldest son, attended hockey school in Montreal, conducted by Eddy Palchak, trainer and equipment manager for the Montreal Canadiens. One of the instructors at the school was New York Rangers Captain Rod Gilber, shown shaking hands with Keefe in New York City. Keefe played hockey at SUNY Plattsburgh and he and his teammate Tom Jennings had a fun trip to Europe in their junior year, including a tryout with the Holland National team. That didn’t work out quite the way they planned, but hitch-hiking around Europe did.

It is a pain when writing a two- or three-part series because one has to recap the first parts, under a strict journalism rule, assuming that there will be new readers of the second part.

So last week we wrote about our Pee Wee hockey teams playing at Rockefeller Center in January 1968 (they were so popular were asked to play there again the next year), an idea conceived by me and then carried out by my colleague at the Enterprise Rip Allen, and most of all made possible by my good friend and Saranac Lake native Gene Walsh, who was then a big shot with NBC and the Johnny Carson Show.

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