Former Chiefs’ Boss Really Not Such A Bad Guy

The last time Bob Strumm was in Spokane the Chiefs were leading the West.

In accumulated disasters.

Forty-five losses in 1988-89, financial setbacks that piled up at about the same alarming rate; brush wars with the city over terms of a harsh Coliseum lease; scrapes with the press.

At the time, the Prince George Cougars were still in Victoria, the Chiefs were languishing in the Boone Street Barn and major junior hockey in this town was anything but the cash crop it is today.

A decade later, comfortable in his new job as a pro scout with the expansion Columbus Blue Jackets of the National Hockey League, Strumm was back in Spokane, sharing a laugh over his often rocky experience here.

Like the night the fans at least half-seriously urged him to off himself with a leap from the old Coliseum press box.

History suggests that the abuse he took that night was misplaced.

Some of the hostility, certainly, was a smoldering reaction to the diminutive Strumm’s combative nature. He made friends; he made more enemies. And while the folly of some of his decisions was obvious, what we didn’t see was the genius of his personnel moves.

Strumm in the late 1980s was stockpiling an array of impressive young guns.

One of the last in the holster was Jon Klemm, who went on to captain the ‘91 Memorial Cup-champion Chiefs. He’s one of the select few with Memorial Cup and Stanley Cup rings.

But when Klemm showed up here as an unknown, he was caught up in one of the most unpopular moves of an unpopular regime. Dean Ewen - among the toughest of the tough - was traded to Seattle for Klemm.

“It was my last year here,” explained Strumm, who was in the Arena 17 days ago to take in the Chiefs’ win in the fourth and final game of a first-round series with the Tri-City Americans. “We knew it would be a tough year. Ewen was a very popular player here and I traded him.

“I wasn’t winning any popularity contests that year, anywhere, and that just added fuel to the fire.”

Strumm remembers glancing out of the open press box in the old Barn, probably counting the house in his head, when some of the hostile customers greeted him with a bellowing “Jump, Strummer, Jump!”

Strumm laughs. He probably had to laugh then, too, if red-faced.

“Klemm ended up a helluva player, but back then it was ‘Jump, Strummer, Jump,”’ Strumm said, peering out over the Arena ice, some 160 feet below. “Is there anywhere to jump from in this building?”

Would it matter? Strumm knows that today’s management has no reason to wonder, or to be urged. The turnstiles are clicking as the Chiefs hit the stretch run to May. That is the goal of every hockey operator on the continent.

Assigned to scout the Western Conference of the WHL, and the International League, Strumm is in the market for players who can perform professionally right now. His visit was only partly professional.

Some of it was personal, gratifyingly so.

Although what he left here seemed like shambles, history again suggests otherwise.

In the three-odd seasons he managed the Chiefs, from 1986 through ‘89, an acceptance of junior hockey was taking root. However shaky the financing, the pool of young talent was extraordinary.

It took two years after his exit for anyone to notice.

But without Bob Strumm and his boss, the then-vilified Vic Fitzgerald of Penticton, British Columbia, there wouldn’t be a playoff game tonight - this the first battle of a best-of-7 West Division championship series between the Chiefs and the Prince George Cougars.

That’s because there wouldn’t be a team.

A case can be made that Spokane would still be casting about for the ways and means of demolishing the Barn and raising the Arena, simply because we wouldn’t have the WHL franchise that spurred Spokane’s visionary Arena organizers through years of disappointment.

Don’t give Strumm too much grease for what you see tonight, for, to his credit, he claims none himself. But he was the man in charge here in a critical period of transition, between the last senior amateur team and the second major junior franchise to operate here.

Remember the WHL Spokane Flyers? They lasted a year and a half.

When junior hockey re-appeared here in the mid-80s, the point man was Strumm.

The system - specifically the terms of the team’s Coliseum lease - was stacked against him. His belligerence didn’t help.

His nickname was, after all, Bummer Strummer.

The Chiefs of the Bob Strumm era were bankrolled sparingly by an absentee owner who made enough in the gravel business to buy the Kelowna Wings. When he hit a stone wall in the lake city he diverted the franchise south, to the River City.

Four years after losing its first major junior team, Spokane - like it or not - had the same game to ignore all over again.

Who knew then that the once-wandering franchise that started as the Wings would one day routinely play to Saturday night crowds in excess of 10,000?

“The main task we had was to convince the fans here that this type of hockey was as good as, or better than, senior hockey,” Strumm said. “They were big-time senior fans.”

The campaign was only partially successful. It wasn’t until Strumm and the Chiefs parted ways, after Bobby Brett, his brothers and partners came up with more than $700,000 to buy the club.

So much for Fitzgerald’s lack of business acumen. You can buy a load of dump trucks for 700 large.

On his night back in town, Strumm peered over the cable that stretches in front of the press box of the Arena while the place began to fill.

“This is fantastic,” he said. “It’s as good as any facility in the country, for this level. It would be a great building in a minor pro city. Like Las Vegas. They need a building like this in Vegas, badly.”

Strumm would know. He worked Vegas for the last six seasons as GM of the International League’s Las Vegas Thunder. That enterprise finally collapsed.

“Our franchise went dark this year,” Strumm said, “but the timing couldn’t have been better. They say one thing has to end before something better comes along.”

Strumm parlayed a past association with Blue Jackets GM Doug MacLean into the pro scouting job he seems to enjoy so much today.

He looks better, sounds happier.

Of course, on the night I saw him nobody was demanding he hurl himself out of the press box.