The Citizen, 2016-03-31, Page 10PAGE 10. THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MARCH 31, 2016.
Blyth man spent years engraving Stanley Cup
The holy grail
Ernie Phillips, seen here several years ago holding a poster
of the Stanley Cup, spent over a quarter-century applying
his signature engraving to one of the most famous trophies
in sports. In addition to the many famous trophies he's
engraved, Phillips also plied his trade for free for Blyth
Public School and the Blyth Lions Club. (Fite photo)
By Shawn Loughlin
The Citizen
Very often the life of Ernie
Phillips from just north of Blyth ran
on an annual cycle, coinciding with
a number of different seasons.
Whether it was the hockey season,
curling or skiing seasons or the fiscal
year, many of Phillips' customers
presented awards or year-end gifts
on an annual basis, which is where
an engraver comes in.
And Phillips, who lives on
Moncrieff Road just north of Blyth
with his wife Emily, has made his
mark on some pretty notable
seasons.
He says he'd hear from the same
customers every year, eventually
knowing when a specific sales
company would hold its year-end
awards banquet, or when a curling
club would present its annual
bonspiel trophy. He would get to
know his customers and consider
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many of them friends.
One big customer would come
calling year after year: the National
Hockey League and its famed
Stanley Cup.
For over a quarter-century,
Phillips, living in Montreal at the
time, would lend his hand to
engraving the winning team's name
on the collar of the Stanley Cup.
Between the 1940s and the late
1970s, when he last engraved one of
the most famous trophies in sports,
Phillips was one of only a handful of
people authorized to engrave the
cup.
During this time, he would also
work on several of the NHL's annual
awards, such as the Hart Memorial
Trophy (most valuable player), the
Lady Byng Memorial Trophy (most
sportsmanlike), the Calder Memorial
Trophy (rookie of the year) and the
Conn Smythe Trophy (most valuable
player in the playoffs) to name a few.
The Conn Smythe Trophy is
Phillips' favourite, he says. The
trophy, which relies heavily on
Maple Leaf Gardens for its design, is
the most beautiful trophy Phillips
says he ever worked on.
Phillips also remembers weeks of
cursing and long days in the years he
would work on the 15 -inch
miniature cups awarded to every
player — from "the water boy on
down" as Phillips remembers it —
when a team wins the Stanley Cup.
The cups, which usually
numbered over 40 for a full team,
would often adorn the young
family's home in Montreal, stored
under beds and baby cribs for safety,
after Phillips' shop had been broken
into several times.
On the Stanley Cup, the winning
team is engraved along the collar,
which runs just under the top — the
cup portion — of the trophy, which is
what Phillips would engrave by
hand. On the bands of the cup, the
names of players on winning teams
are engraved, but they're done by a
punch and not by hand.
One of Phillips' more memorable
brushes with Lord Stanley's Cup
was, essentially creating it in 1969.
After nearly 80 years of being
hoisted (and abused), the NHL
decided to retire the original cup to
the Hockey Hall of Fame and
commissioned Carl Peterson to build
an exact replica. Phillips and his
boss Fred Light were hired to
engrave the new bowl and were
ordered to replicate the original
exactly.
This was tricky, Phillips said,
because in the early days the original
cup often didn't make it much
further than the nearest tavern after a
team would win it. Frustrated that
their names weren't yet engraved on
the cup, players would sometimes,
by way of a pen knife or any other
sharp object they could find, take
matters into their own hands.
Phillips and Light engraved the
new cup, complete with players'
names scratched in. This cup is now
the Stanley Cup today's hockey fans
know and love; the trophy that gets
hoisted annually by way of playoffs,
which begin every April.
After engraving the cup for over
20 years, Phillips and Emily
eventually moved to their current
home on Moncrieff Road, so when
the company Phillips worked for
was slated to engrave the cup one
last time before passing it along to
another engraver, the collar made a
trip to the Phillips home — but only
for a few hours.
Phillips remembers that day, as
two men drove from Montreal to
Blyth with the collar, awaiting
Phillips' steady hand Phillips took
the cup to his basement workshop
for a few hours and engraved the
season's winners, the Montreal
Canadiens, on the collar before the
men continued through to Windsor,
bringing the cup to the next
company that would handle the
trophy.
"They didn't even stay for supper,"
Emily said.
The men had car trouble that day,
so some friends of the Phillips
family — amateur mechanics as
Phillips remembers them — helped
get the car back on the road,
although it would only make it to
Elmira before it needed proper
professional attention.
Phillips was 15 when he decided
he was going to leave school, but
even by that point, he knew he had
an artistic knack.
"I knew I wanted to be an artist or
an architect," Phillips said. "I was
really good at drawing — cartooning
and the like."
He turned heads in school with his
skills, but one day he turned heads
for the wrong reasons and his
dreams were dashed.
In art class, Phillips was working
on a water colour painting of a vase
full of beautiful blue roses that sat on
the teacher's desk. But, to a chorus
of laughter from his classmates,
Phillips was told that the roses were
actually pink. That day he
discovered he was colourblind and
would likely never be an artist.
Then, following what Phillips
calls a dispute with one of his
Continued on page 11
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