Louie Corrado, who was believed to be the oldest surviving Trail Smoke Eater, has died at 100.
Corrado, a defenseman, joined the senior Smoke Eaters in 1948 after brief stints with the Spokane Spartans and Kimberley Dynamiters. He played for the Smoke Eaters through 1956.
While his statistics are incomplete, according to the Society for International Hockey Research database, the Trail native played at least 157 regular season games in the Western International Hockey League and scored 11 goals and 42 assists. In the playoffs, he added one more goal and seven more assists in 27 games.
Corrado’s junior hockey experience was limited to two months after he got out of the army. He was recruited by Spokane in its first year in the WIHL, but as he was belatedly finishing high school, he only played a few games.
In a 1999 interview when the WIHL held a reunion in Trail, he said the early 1950s were glory days for local senior hockey: “People didn’t have TV. They lived hockey. And we’d sell out the crowds every game. That was our lives. Everybody’s life. They talked it all year. You talked about it at work.”
Corrado grew up watching the Smoke Eaters of an earlier generation who captured the 1939 world championship, and he became good friends with one of them, Jimmy Haight. Decades later, they would ski every day together.
Corrado was one of the very few remaining people who could remember playing hockey in the Trail Fruit Fair building on the south end of Bay Avenue before the Cominco Arena opened in 1949.
“At the end, when we played our last game [in the fair building], they’d only allow 1,000 people in, and that would be sold out,” he said. “Our first game here [at the Cominco Arena], we had over 5,500. It was just thrilling.”
Corrado’s local upbringing only went so far in cracking the Smoke Eaters roster, he said. Players came from across Canada hoping to secure jobs at Cominco as well as spots on the team. “I remember one year 500 people came here for work,” Corrado said. “They all said they were hockey players, but I think we took one or two.”
Corrado said sports fans in Trail were “professionally minded” and not easily fooled.
He said the highlights of his career were playoff runs where “loads of people” would follow the team to road games in Trail, Kimberley, and Spokane.
Corrado also played competitive baseball, as a catcher. In 1947, he attended a school put on by the St. Louis Browns of Major League Baseball.
Corrado, who lived in Rossland, died on Oct. 22. He is survived by Maureen, his wife of 65 years, their five children, and many grandchildren. A service will be held Thursday at 7 p.m. at Sacred Heart Church in Rossland.
