The first game of organized hockey in the U.S. was played more than 60 years ago at St. Paul's School, near Concord, N.H., and no St. Paul's grad has ever let anyone forget it. On the black ice of Lower School Pond (it's a bad year when the ice won't bear by Thanksgiving and last till Washington's Birthday), 400 of St. Paul's 437 boys play on 30 intramural teams, on six outdoor rinks, under a dozen assorted coaches. Hockey has always been the school's major sport. The most famed college star ever to wear skates, the late Hobey Baker, in whose memory Princeton named its memorial rink, learned the game at St. Paul's. Other S.P.S. lads founded college hockey (at Harvard and Yale), introduced the game to Paris and St. Moritz, built Manhattan's first indoor rink (St. Nicholas). Now that artificial ice has popularized the game, "the cradle of U.S. hockey" is no longer in a class by itself, but it still turns out first-rate schoolboy teams.
At Madison Square Garden last week, on the 50th anniversary of its first game in New York, St. Paul's (which once was too good for anything less than a college team) skated fancy circles around Deerfield Academy, 6-to-1.