Gallinger: A Life Suspended                          Release: November 2023

Chadburn Press, Oro Medonte, ON                  ISBN:  9-781738-049103

chadburnpress.com                                           366 pages / trade paperback 6 in." x 9 in.

 

“Gallinger skated too close to the sun. This isn’t just a hockey story, it is a morality play.”

Joe Fiorito, journalist and author

Don Gallinger was a gifted athlete and a teenage phenomenon. In the fall of 1942, as a seventeen-year -old, he made the unprecedented jump from Junior B hockey to the Boston Bruins of the NHL. He scored two overtime goals in Stanley Cup competition and led the Bruins in scoring in 1945-46.

In 1948, at the age of 22, his career ended when he bet on NHL games and was suspended for life in. Attempts to clear his name and have the suspension lifted were fruitless. He tried to build a life for himself and his family outside the game, but the odds were stacked against him. He lost his career and his fortune, and in the end, his family and his health. In the history of organized hockey no one has ever walked in shoes quite like his.

Gallinger: A Life Suspended is a sweeping biography that takes us on an unforgettable ride through good times and bad, from exhilarating highs to bottomless lows and everywhere in between. Addis underpins his exhaustive research with a carefully crafted narrative bent on balancing the official version of events.

“In a time when sports wagering is everywhere and Las Vegas now boasts a Stanley Cup champion, Fred Addis gives us a fascinating look at the life and hard times of Don Gallinger, the stormy centre of  the NHL’s worst gambling scandal.”

Eric Zweig, author of Art Ross:The Hockey legend Who Built the Bruins

FRED ADDIS retired as curator of the Leacock Museum National Historic Site in Orillia, in 2016. He is a long-standing member and past-president of the Society for International Hockey Research and has written for their Hockey Research Journal and Pucklore: The Hockey Research Anthology, Vol.1. He has also contributed to Total Hockey Encyclopedia, the Hockey Hall of Fame’s Legends magazine and the Windsor Review. Since its inception in 2017, he has produced the annual Gathering: Festival of First Nations Stories in association with Arts Orillia and the Chippewas of Rama First Nation. Gallinger: A Life Suspended is his first solo publication. Fred lives in Oro Medonte, near Orillia, Ontario, Canada