While he played for both the Blackhawks and the Blues, it is as a member of the New York Rangers that Camille Henry spent most of his NHL career, playing over 600 games as one of the most popular stars in team history. The Quebec City native wasn’t a big kid and he never really put on a growth spurt either. Listed at 5’ 7”, 152 pounds, he was probably both shorter and lighter. The diminutive forward was a natural skater and a pure stick-handler, skills he picked up early that carried him to the NHL despite his small stature.

Rangers’ management took a chance and kept the kid who had scored over 100 goals in his last two years of junior play. Used almost exclusively on the power-play because coaches, Frank Boucher and later Muzz Patrick, didn’t think he could hold his own when the teams played five-on-five, Henry answered the call, picking up 24 goals in 1953-54. Fifteen of them came on the power-play, a team rookie record that stood until last season. A late season four-goal outburst against Terry Sawchuk made the rest of the league sit up and take notice of the rookie, who ended the season with the Calder Trophy, repeating Gump Worsley’s exploit of the previous season.

As Worsley found out the previous season, rookie of the year honors don’t guarantee a spot on the roster. Henry split the 1954-55 season between the Quebec Aces and the big team, appearing in only 21 NHL games. A disappointing five goals and a pair of assists were all he had to show for his efforts with the Blueshirts that year. Off to Providence for the next year and a half, Henry produced. Playing a regular shift, he potted 50 in 1955-56 and had hit the 30-goal mark by the midpoint of the next schedule when he got the call to return to Gotham.

Phil Watson may not have been the best coach in the league and may not have known how to handle athletes, but he did give Henry a shot at a regular spot on a forward line. Henry made the most of his opportunity picking up 29 points in the second half of 1956-57.

By now one of the most popular athletes in New York, the lean Henry’s slippery skill at weaving in and out of traffic without ever seeming to get hit, earned him a nickname, the Eel. In 1957-58, he enjoyed the best year of his career, lighting the lamp a team-leading 32 times while helping teammates do it on another 24 occasions. When came time to count the ballots cast for the players who best exemplified both skill and gentlemanly play, Camille Henry won the Lady Byng Trophy, taking home his second piece of individual silverware. He was also named to the NHL’s second All-Star team.

Henry’s Ranger years saw him rack up five more 20-goal seasons as he kept proving that opponents couldn’t hit what they couldn’t catch. He peaked at 37 goals in 1962-63 and picked up over 250 while wearing New York colors, often he only offensive bright spot in a lacklustre team performance. Always popular with the fans, Henry enjoyed his celebrity status and made the most of Manhattan’s nightlife, developing an affection for alcohol that became a dependency. As popular with the press as with the crowd, he was frequently featured in the papers, always ready with a handy quip when the scribes gathered round.

With time and excesses away from the rink slowly chipping away at his speed, Henry, no longer the offensive threat he had once been, but still able to attract interest from other clubs, was dealt away. Traded to Chicago midway through the 1964-65 season, he made it to the finals with the Blackhawks that spring, losing to the Habs after stretching the series to its full seven games.

Calling it a career after spending 1965-66 with the Hawks’ St. Louis Braves affiliate in the CPHL, Henry was enticed back by post-expansion salaries and had his rights returned to the Rangers where he split the year between New York and the AHL Buffalo Bisons, by now nowhere near the potent force he had been in his prime.

Even at 35 he managed to find a job in the recently doubled, much diluted NHL. He headed back to St. Louis and scored 17 goals for the Blues, making it to the finals for the second time in his career, picking up seven points in the process, his most productive postseason performance. As was the case in the spring of 1965, Henry’s team fell to the Habs, this time in four straight games. After starting the next season with the Blues, Henry turned his hand to coaching, first with the Kansas City Blues and later signing on to run the bench for the very short-lived New York Raiders of the WHA.

Alcohol and illness plagued Henry for the rest of his life as he took a series of dead-end jobs to cover the cost of his next binge, what money he had made in hockey long disappeared. The man, who had once been the toast of Broadway, for a time married to Quebec’s leading show business personality, was reduced to scuffling for work as a janitor or night watchman. Finally stopping his drinking in 1985, the damage he had done to himself was irreversible and Henry spent much of his last decade under medical care before dying, succumbing to the long-term effects of diabetes 12 years later.