From Head Tax to Hockey Heroes

When Rose Chin gave an eight-year-old Paul Henderson a pair of hand-me-down skates, she didn’t know that this boy, a classmate of her son Alan, would go on to famously score three winning goals in the 1972 Canada-Soviet Summit Series. What she did know was how it felt to go without as a child and how hockey was helping her family weave itself into the fabric of a Canada rife with anti-Chinese racism. 

It was 1951, and the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 (also known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, see “Acts of discrimination”), had been repealed only four years earlier. Its dissolution, however, had no immediate impact on long-standing anti-Asian attitudes. From the 1858 arrival of Chinese gold miners in British Columbia to laundry and head taxes, the message was clear: Chinese were not welcome. In the village of Lucknow, Ontario, however, the Chin family story was different — in large part because of brothers Bill, Albert (Ab), and George. 

For a sizable stretch of the 1940s, the trio was an on-ice force to be reckoned with. Still, small-town Ontario newspapers like the Sault Star dug into stereotypes, describing them as “The Flying Chinese.” The Detroit Free Press’s discrimination was more overt. “There’s a line playing for Lucknow, Ont., in an amateur loop composed of the Ching [sic] brothers,” it reported in 1944. “Even if those fellows can’t play hockey, we can use them to do the laundry and cooking.” Locally, however, they were the hometown hockey prodigies of Charles and Rose Chin, the owners of the popular Chin’s Restaurant on Main Street.   

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Rose — born Lee Gun Ho — was brought to Vancouver from China in 1911 at age six by her deceased father’s relatives, Lee Ying and his wife, Lee Hong Shee. They found her a job as a mui tsai (servant girl) for a wealthy Chinese immigrant family. When Rose was seventeen, Mrs. Lee took her to Toronto for an arranged marriage with another Chinese immigrant, Charles Chin. 

Charles — born Chin Kee Chan — was seventeen when he arrived in Toronto in 1909. He worked in the laundry business together with his father, who had immigrated to Canada in 1903, paying the one-hundred-dollar head tax. 

Charlie and Rose’s first child, James Fook Sun Chin, was born in 1922 in Newmarket, Ontario, a town about fifty kilometres north of Toronto, where Charlie was working at a cafe owned by his father. Over the next nineteen years, the couple had thirteen more children: Harry, Sam, Frank, Bill, Ab, George, Mary, Margaret, Morley, Gladys, Charles Jr., Jack, and Alan. All were born in Canada, except for Ab, who was born in Hong Kong during a family trip in 1927. The family returned in June 1928, minus sons Jim, Harry, and Frank, who stayed behind for a Chinese education and to keep their grandparents company. 

Three months after returning, Charlie and Rose moved to Lucknow, Ontario — a town about two hundred kilometres west of Toronto, near the shores of Lake Huron — where they established Chin’s Restaurant. But the town’s nearly ninehundred residents of largely Scottish descent didn’t flock there for kung pao chicken or ginger beef — Chinese- Canadian food had not yet been invented. Instead, they came for sodas and fish and chips. Chin’s Restaurant soon became a favourite dining spot and helped the Chins blend in with the other families in town. 

The 1940s marked the beginning of organized minor hockey with the establishment of the Ontario Minor Hockey Association (OMHA) in 1935 and the Western Ontario Athletic Association (WOAA) in 1944. During the 1941-42 season, Ab and George, then thirteen and twelve, were on Lucknow’s bantam (under fourteen) team, and spearheaded the winning of the OMHA Bantam Championship. Bill, then fourteen, competed at the juvenile level (under eighteen). The following season, moving up to the juvenile level, Ab and George joined Bill to form the famous Chin line. That season, the brothers led the Lucknow Maple Leafs (the name of Lucknow’s juvenile team from 1943 to 1948) to capture the 1943 OMHA juvenile championship against nearby rival Wingham Indians. 

Years of training together is what made this trio unbeatable. George recalled that Ab was the “muscle,” digging out the puck along the boards for his brothers. George’s secret weapon was his speed. Practising in the restaurant basement, he and Bill could pass the puck raised three to four inches off the ground. Bill was the sharpshooter, practising his aim on tin cans in upper and lower corners of the net. And they had mastered blind passing — exchanging the puck without looking at each other nor at the direction the puck was to go.

From October 23 to 25, thousands of fans turned out to watch the highly anticipated three-game Blue-and-White exhibition set to be played in Owen Sound, St. Catharines, and Toronto. Ted Kennedy, then a nineteen-year-old future Leafs captain, led the Blue team, while the Chin brothers played on the White team featuring veteran winger and two-time Stanley Cup winner Lorne Carr and future Hockey Hall of Famer, Sweeney Shriner. 

During game one, George assisted on future Leaf defenceman Pete Backor’s goal in a 9-6 loss. In game two, Bill scored an unassisted power-play goal through the legs of Babe Pratt, the Leafs’ 1944 Hart Trophy winner and a veteran NHLer. As for Ab, he got a shiner in the 11-5 loss. The final game was played at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens before a crowd of 12,105 spectators. Although they played magnificently in an 8-2 loss, the Chin line didn’t scored any points in game three. 

Following this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, neither Bill nor Ab received a callback from the Leafs. George, under age sixteen, was ineligible. Reports that they would suit up somewhere as a unit in higher-level hockey at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto or playing for Port Colborne (about a thirtyminute drive from Niagara Falls) came up empty. Their demise may have stemmed from their small stature. In an era when the game of hockey meant hard hitting and fighting over finesse, agility, and speed, it isn’t difficult to understand why few envisioned NHL success for the Chin brothers. 

Whatever the reason, hockey fans in Lucknow were not sorry to see their stars returning to play at home. During the 1944–45 season, George played on both the Lucknow midget and juvenile teams. It would be Bill’s last year playing juvenile, as he turned eighteen in 1945. Coach Pelt McCoy moved the whole team up to the junior level so that the three brothers could play together for the 1945–46 season. 

McCoy’s winning combination did not claim the Ontario Hockey Association Junior C series championship that year. Leading up to the bestof- three finals, leg-weary Lucknow had played five games in ten days. After losing game one, Bill left the rink with a bad hip, a sprained thumb, and a gashed lip. Even then, in game two the Chin line thrilled the sellout home crowd, tallying all four goals in a 5-4 loss to the Goderich Flyers. 

When the inaugural Windsor Spitfires Juniors held their tryouts in 1946, George made the cut, and the Chin line was broken up for that year. The brothers reunited for one final season as a line in 1947-48, leading the Lucknow team to win the 1948 WOAA Intermediate B series championship. 

Between running his businesses and watching his sons’ games, Charlie had been in his glory, revelling in his boys’ stardom for ten years before having a fatal stroke in 1951 at age sixty. Rose, meanwhile, wanted her children to focus on their studies. Her message to them was: “You’re Chinese, so you need to get an education.” They listened. 

In 1950, George entered the University of Michigan on a hockey scholarship, after winning the Turner Cup with the Chatham Senior Maroons. While no NHL offers ever came, as a phenomenal member of the university’s Michigan Wolverines hockey team George was named twice to the National Collegiate Athletics Association All-American team, leading the Wolverines to win back-to-back championships in 1952 and 1953. To further his studies in geological engineering, George went to England for his post-graduate studies and to play more hockey as a Nottingham Panther. Inducted into his alma mater’s hockey hall of fame in 1977, George was named in 2018 as the thirty-sixth best player in Michigan Wolverine ice-hockey history. George passed away in 2023. 

Following in older brother Sam’s footsteps, Bill studied at the Ontario College of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto beginning in 1949. He graduated in 1953 and became a retail pharmacist. Later, Chuck would join them, co-owning Hallwyn Pharmacy in Toronto. Bill passed away in 1994. 

Acts of Discrimination