There was time when it took a single man to run an NHL bench, and fedoras, not baseball caps were the headgear of first choice for grownups. Billy Reay, the winningest coach in Chicago Blackhawks history, was one of the last to abandon his flashy felt coverings and was also one of the last coaches to fly solo.

His teams were among the most spectacular and successful in regular season play, posting a .589 winning percentage, and featured numerous future Hall of Fame members. They never managed to play up to their potential once the postseason rolled around, but Reay had his share of hockey success before he and his scarlet headgear became a fixture in Chicago.

He won everything there was to win as a player. The Winnipeg native scored the winning goal as a member of the cross-town St. Boniface Seals team that won the 1938 Memorial Cup. He was a major force on the Quebec Aces squad that took the Allan Cup in 1944, Canada’s senior amateur squad.

Making it to the big time with Detroit, he saw very limited action and didn’t really begin his NHL career until the 1945-46 season when he was acquired by the Montreal Canadiens. The small center was placed on Dick Irvin’s second line. A solid two-way pivot, he used speed and guile to stop the efforts of the best in the league while still managing to pick up 29 points, a respectable harvest for a rookie in the 1940s.

The Habs went all the way in the spring of 1946 and Reay completed his hockey trifecta, winning the three top titles in the game. He picked up 22 goals the next year and tied Maurice Richard with six more in the postseason as the Habs fell to the Toronto Maple Leafs, who would take home the silverware three times in the next four years.

In 1948-49, Reay led all Canadiens scorers, putting 45 points on the board and repeated the career high the next season. Bringing down the curtain on his NHL career as he had raised it eight years earlier, Reay had his name engraved on Lord Stanley’s Cup a second time in 1953. Coaching, where he concentrated his hockey efforts for the next quarter century, had been an interest for some time. He had first stepped behind the bench in 1941-42 with the Sydney Millionaires of the Cape Breton Senior Hockey league.

He did two years as player/coach with the Victoria Cougars of the WHL before joining the Seattle Americans strictly in a coaching capacity. The next year he was still running a team with the same name, but one that played out of Rochester in the AHL. The 1956-57 Amerks, a Toronto affiliate, went to the finals and got Reay a promotion to the big club.

Howie Meeker had coached the Leafs to a last place finish and was, inexplicably promoted to the GM’s job. Reay did what he could with the Leafs, a team with very little resemblance to the powerhouse squad of a few short years before, but couldn’t get the team into the playoffs. He did make one significant and lasting change when he brought up a somewhat reluctant 34-year-old netminder who was quite happy in Cleveland, backstopping the Barons. Johnny Bower came to enjoy Toronto and have a fair bit of success in the years to come. Reay, however, was long gone by the time the Leafs turned things around.

Meeker got the axe after the 1957-58 season and Reay was offered the general manager’s job. He turned it down and the Silver Seven, the committee that took over managing the team hired George “Punch” Imlach, a gritty ex-forward who had played on numerous Toronto area teams before winding up his playing days with the Quebec Aces, where he made the transition to bench boss.

Twenty games into the 1958-59 campaign, Reay was history in Toronto. Imlach originally announced that veteran Bert Olmstead would be taking over the reins but within a week, had reconsidered and added to the coach’s job to his GM duties. Reay found work back in the AHL and bided his time. He took Chicago’s top farm team, the Buffalo Bisons, to the finals in 1961-62 and guided them to the Calder Cup the next spring, adding a fourth significant piece of hockey silverware to his trophy case.

Promoted to the Blackhawks the next season when it became clear that Rudy Pilous, who had been the man behind the bench for the 1961 Stanley Cup triumph, the third and most recent in Chicago’s history, Reay quietly led the team to 13 consecutive winning seasons and made three trips to the Stanley Cup finals, falling to the Montreal Canadiens each and every time.

The Blackhawks have had 13 winning seasons since Reay was relieved of his duties, but it took them 30 years to do it. Billy Reay, named coach of the All-Time Blackhawks Team during festivities celebrating the team’s 75th anniversary in 2001-02, died on September 23rd, 2004 at the age of 86.