A Look At Chick Webster

Chick Webster was a World War II veteran that had a brief stint with the New York Rangers in the 1949-50 season.

The late John ‘Chick’ Webster had a lone stint of playing fourteen games with the New York Rangers in the 1949-50 season.

A Toronto native originally, Webster lived in the Mattawa, Ontario, area for the majority of his life and was very active in the community. For being 95 years old when I interviewed him, Chick was still in tremendous shape. He was still driving around his small town and hanging out with all the 60 year olds at the local coffee shop in Mattawa.

I called up Mr. Webster one morning and we had a really good chat about his hockey career and life. Webster talks about growing up during the great depression and how he got into hockey, “I grew up in Toronto and started playing hockey in 1926 when I was six years old. The kids would all go out on the road to play, or in the backyards we had little rinks. That’s where I started skating, and eventually we had teams we played against. I just worked on the sport over the years and got into playing midget hockey and then so forth. When I first started to really get into it was high school hockey. We had a really good team when I was fifteen, but then my father took me out of school because we were in really hard times in the great depression and he was able to find me a job. That’s when I started to play junior hockey in Toronto.”