Kennedy: Remembering Kingston greats ‘Dinger’ Bellringer and Joe Kotowych
Kingston’s Don Bellringer, a member of the Junior A champ Guelph Biltmores, playing against the Montreal Junior Canadiens at The Forum. Future Hab Donnie Marshall is next to goalie Roger Morrissette. Submitted photo
August 22, 2023
By Patrick Kennedy
Kingston Whig-Standard
When it comes to consecutive championship seasons, Don “Dinger” Bellringer’s winning record was a humdinger. His enviable string of victories began when he was 12 and endured through his teens and into his 20s. The thrill of victory. Every blessed year.
From Don’s first year playing hockey, and for several seasons that followed, his teams capped each campaign with whoops and hollers and the kind of joyous faces that come with a title-winning triumph. Teams played on captured championships in “scout” (peewee), bantam, midget, juvenile and junior, where he won the 1949-50 Ontario Junior A crown with the Guelph Biltmore Mad Hatters while playing alongside future NHL hall-of-famer Andy Bathgate. “Apparently,” says Bellringer’s nephew Paul Murphy, “if you had Uncle Don on your team, chances were pretty good you’d win.”
Bellringer, a splendid two-sport athlete who during his two years in Guelph was an infielder on the city’s Intercounty Baseball League ball club, died recently. Dinger was 93 when the final bell tolled for him. Surviving him are Joyce, the Kingston Collegiate high-school sweetheart he married 70 years ago, daughters Wendy and Tracy, a half-dozen grandkids, and a pair of great-grandkids.
Don’s impressive championship win streak ended when he headed east after junior hockey to answer the call of the minor-pro Charlottetown Islanders of the Maritime Major Hockey League. Returning home midway through the next season, he became a fixture and a dominant star on local senior clubs, including a memorable three-season term (1953-55) with the Kingston Goodyears, a beloved squad that fans embraced like no other before or since.
In three magical seasons, two of which ended with the Goodies sporting those aforementioned joyous mugs, Bellringer and his teammates — Teddy Nicholson, George MacGregor, Don Senior, Tom Goodfellow, Bob Londry, Jack White, Clint Tinkess, Johnny Myke, Kenny Johnson, playing coach Les Douglas and others — drew some of the largest and loudest throngs in Kingston’s hockey history.
In 1953, an announced crowd of 4,870 fractured the Memorial Centre’s fire-code limit and shoe-horned its way into the fairly new arena to watch Bellringer and the “Goodies” cop their first Ontario Senior B title. (Years later, longtime building manager Jim McCormick was asked where Kingston fire chief Vic Brightman might’ve been on that night when attendance exceeded capacity by 1,500. “I believe Vic,” the dapper impresario replied without missing a beat, “was in Section 12.”) For the 1955 championship season, the team’s average attendance was 3,117, which was actually bigger than the rink’s listed seating capacity of 3,079 (3,300 including standees).
Mind you, huge crowds were nothing new to Bellringer. As a member of a blue-chip Biltmore club coached by ex-NHLer Alfie Pyke, he’d played in pivotal playoff contests before sold-out multitudes at Maple Leaf Gardens and the Montreal Forum.
“Don told me the toughest job he ever had in hockey was checking (future NHL hall of fame forward) Dickie Moore,” recalls another nephew, Kirk Twigg, himself a fine multi-sport athlete in his day. Guelph lost Game 7 to the Moore’s Montreal Jr. Canadiens in the 1950 Eastern Canada Memorial Cup semifinal.
“I always enjoyed listening to Don tell stories from back in the day,” Twigg continues. “The stories were always about his teammates, never about himself or the things he accomplished.”
Family friend Bill Clarke can attest to Don’s humility. Rev. Clarke shepherds the flock at St. Thomas Anglican church in Reddendale, which the Bellringers attended when Don and Joyce resettled in this area following his retirement. (Don had a 35-year career at C.I.L. plants in his native Kingston, then Montreal, and finally Sarnia, to where the couple eventually resettled to be closer to family.)
Rev. Clarke delivered the eulogy at Bellringer’s funeral service. “Don was an amazingly gentle, generous and humble man,” Clarke recalls. “In all the years I knew him, he never once said a word about his exploits in sport. I didn’t hear about all of that until after he’d passed.
“I like to think of him as the uncle that everyone wants around the family dinner table, a good, decent, gentle guy with a great laugh and a few stories to tell.”
This scribe interviewed Bellringer in 2005 for a piece to mark the 50th anniversary of the Goodyears’ 1955 championship season, the team’s last and its final season ever. Don was 75 at the time, about five pounds over his 175-pound playing weight, and freshly back from competing in an over-70 oldtimers hockey tournament in Quebec. “That ‘55 was a great team to play on,” he reminisced. “It was a good mix of guys. Everyone played as a team.”
That latter sentence was about as close as the Dinger ever came to talking about himself. He was an unbending disciple of the adage, “There’s no ‘I’ in team.”
Among his family and friends, Don’s quick wit was cherished. Like the time Kirk Twigg’s wife Wendy spotted a deer on the Bellringer property. She turned to the owner and asked: “How can you shoot these sweet, beautiful animals, Uncle Don?” Dinger, an ardent hunter, responded: “It’s the only way I can get them in the freezer.” Twigg was the star of the 1970 Kingscourt Expos in the bantam division.
Eddie Long, the old Kingston Aces’ tireless Energizer bunny, remembers the elder Bellringer as “a good, talented hockey player, an up-and-down checker, and as good as he was, he was even a better guy.”
* * *
It had been a tough week for Eddie, what with Bellringer’s death being preceded days earlier by the passing of another old childhood pal, 83-year-old Joe Kotowych, the highly touted right-hander of yesteryear.
“Joe and I grew up together, him on Montreal Street, me around the corner on Stephen Street,” Long remembers. The two were teammates and top-of- the-rotation hurlers, one from each side, on the KBA’s Cardinals club. “Another one … gone,” Eddie the southpaw laments.
It’s no stretch to say that for a time in the 1950s young Joe Kotowicz was arguably Kingston’s best pitcher. He was deemed a prospect for the pros by none other than longtime Whig-Standard sports editor Mike Rodden. Rodden’s report of a 1957 Kingston Baseball Association senior final playoff that hailed the teenager’s post-season dominance over the powerful pennant-winning Razors (19 innings, zero earned runs): “Young Joe Kotowicz, talented and icy-cool 17-year-old right-hander, revived memories of a budding Arnie Jarrell. This is pitching guile that bespeaks rare ability … a pitching masterpiece by a youngster who is headed for a place in the sun.”
Joe never reached his “place” in the baseball sun. His journey was cut short by the reality of everyday life — marriage, raising a young family, earning a living, etc. Fate also played an unkind role. Invited to pitch before a St. Louis Cardinals scout, young Joe was stricken with the Asiatic flu and nearly died. He recovered but never got a second invite. He was just 25 when he pitched for the final time.
“All I did as a kid was play ball, every single day I could,” Joe said in a 2021 interview from the white frame house where the Kotowych clan had resided since Joe was in short pants and where he was found after his heart gave out. “The game meant everything to me.”
As a boy he worked the ballgames across the street at Megaffin Stadium, the spanking new ball yard that housed the city’s pro team, the Ponies, from 1946-50. “I got in free for working any job they gave me,” he said in that same 2021 interview. “I sold programs, manned the scoreboard, served as bat boy a few times, peeled potatoes for the concession. I even climbed up to the press box and played (pre-game) music. If you were lucky, you came home with a few coins and maybe a ball and a broken bat, which of course you fixed and used again.
“It was a magical time,” he added. “You could be free and be a kid. You went to the games with friends, you came home afterwards, and your parents never worried.”
Patrick Kennedy is a retired Whig-Standard reporter. He can be reached at pjckennedy35@gmail.com