The United States Hockey League of the 1960s was just the place for a player like Elov Seger.  As an All-American on college hockey's best team, he had the skills which might have made him a successful professional.  However Seger's engineering degree offered better career prospects than the always-uncertain life of a minor leaguer at a time when the NHL had only six teams.  

USHL "senior hockey" came to Waterloo in 1962.  Elov Seger also arrived that same fall, two weeks before the opening game.  Like his teammates, he worked 40 hours during the week, then skated on weekends.  Seger was the Black Hawks' Most Valuable Player during the inaugural season.  By early 1965, he had helped Waterloo win a pair of league championships.  But by March of 1968, Elov Seger was dead.  His life was cut short by a brain tumor.

He was three months from his 28th birthday.
Fort Frances, Ontario, and International Falls, Minnesota, share a bridge across the Rainy River.  Small farms, thick forests, and a variety of wetlands surround the otherwise remote cities.  The landscape has always attracted hunters and fishermen.  Mando – the Minnesota and Ontario Paper Company – operated mills on each side of the river in the mid-20th Century, and the two communities enjoyed a symbiotic, hard-working prosperity across the international border.

Elov Seger was born on the Canadian side in the summer of 1940.  He was the youngest of five and the only son in the family.  His eldest sister was 18 when he arrived.  Seger's father – a Swedish immigrant – died before Elov had turned seven.  
 
Seger was still a pre-teen when the Rainy River area achieved hockey fame across Canada.  The local Fort Frances Canadians reached the Allan Cup final in back-to-back years.  After a loss in their first attempt, the Canadians won the trophy in 1952, earning distinction as the country's top senior team.  The morning after their championship-clinching home win versus the Stratford Indians, newspapers across Canada reported on the passionate support shown by Fort Frances fans:

Last night, the town was jubilant.
The strong partisan crowd, many of them plaid-clad pulp mill and bush workers had ably supported their team through the final.  Some stood in line for hours for tickets and even had meals brought to them.

Seger soon began making his own reputation at the local rink.  During the 1956/57 season, he was fast approaching his adult height of six feet, with blond hair trimmed high and tight.  Skating for a squad known as the Palcos, Seger and his teammates celebrated the local championship for their age group.  When the season was over, area hockey leaders presented him with the community's Calder Trophy as the top juvenile player in Fort Frances.

One sports season led into another, and Seger seemed perpetually in motion.  He played basketball, golf, and even badminton with some noteworthy renown.  Football was his most prestigious pursuit away from the ice.  In 1957, Seger was the quarterback and captain of the Fort Frances Muskies high school squad.  He and his teammates would travel across the river to use International Falls Sports Stadium for their most significant home games.  In late October, that's where they reversed a long run of success by their rivals from Kenora, winning 26-7 behind Seger's two passing touchdowns and a rushing score.  He shared the offensive huddle with Art Berglund, who would eventually make his way into both the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame and IIHF Hall of Fame.  Berglund had a remarkable career as a USA Hockey executive, helping to lead over 30 American national teams into international competition.  Those achievements came after he left Fort Frances for hockey stardom at Colorado College.

Like Berglund, Seger was also planning for college south of the border.  He was regularly an honor roll student, and – as was customary at that time in Ontario – remained in school for Grade 13, focused on college prep courses.  In the spring of 1958, he graduated with 72 classmates.  The commencement speaker – a local business leader – admonished the young graduates that the challenges of the era would require them to work harder, while returning to the fundamentals.  It was a message that the hockey-playing, 18-year-old Elov Seger must have relished.
"Hank Akervall and Elov were the two key defensemen for us, and basically they played solid defense," remembered Bob Mikesch more than six decades after he was Seger's Michigan Tech teammate. "Neither one of them were big scoring threats, but they were very good defensively and really passed the puck well. They made the plays you need to make to get out of your own end."

When Seger arrived in Houghton, Michigan, his new school was officially still known as the Michigan College of Mining and Technology.  Then – as now – Michigan Tech was regarded as an academically stringent institution.  Any student with uncertain math skills was bound to struggle.  There were no shortcuts for star hockey players.  Seger went to work in the Civil Engineering program.

In that era of college sports, freshmen were not eligible to play varsity games.  Seger and his classmates were relegated to the freshmen squad.  The 1958/59 Huskies frosh team went undefeated, showing great promise for a program which was already earning strong results.  The varsity was a solid 16-10-1 that winter under third-year head coach John MacInnes.

A Toronto native, MacInnes was well-positioned for success as an NCAA coach.  He had been a goaltender at the University of Michigan and played professionally in the International Hockey League.  More importantly, he had strong Canadian recruiting connections.  At the time, Canadian collegians dominated the sport, particularly at schools in the Midwest and Colorado.  For example, when Seger was a sophomore, the Huskies were runners-up for the 1960 NCAA title, falling to Denver in the national championship game.  The Pioneers only had one American on their roster.  Michigan Tech had two.  That spring, some college coaches advocated a ban on recruiting Canadian junior players.

The remoteness of Houghton, Michigan, was sometimes a more practical recruiting and travel obstacle.  For Seger, the woodsy Keweenaw Peninsula likely felt reminiscent of Fort Frances.  It may have been a much different experience for teammates imported from Toronto and more urban settings.

"Getting in and out sometimes would be a challenge," confirmed Mikesch. "Most of the time we went by bus. But if you were going to fly out of here, you'd have to plan on leaving at least one day in advance, because you could never rely on the weather."

A Huskies' bus trip from Houghton to Ann Arbor was over 500 miles.  It was actually a shorter ride to play the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.  Life on campus was rugged in some ways but came with other compensations for Michigan Tech players.

"They lived in barracks, old army barracks that were behind Michigan Tech," said Mikesch, who himself commuted to campus from his nearby home in Hancock, Michigan. "Of course [the players] being old enough to drink and everything…They weren't allowed to do too much drinking in public during hockey season, but they used to have a lot of good times."

In 1959/60, the Huskies finished 21-10-1.  They had beaten Denver in three of four meetings before falling in the national title game.  Seger eased his way into the lineup.  As one of four sophomore defensemen, he played in just over half of Tech's games.

The 1960/61 campaign was an off year for the program.  Top scorer Paul Coppo had graduated.  He was on the way to the Green Bay Bobcats, and eventually the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame.  Seger earned more ice time, but Michigan Tech finished 16-13-0.

Seger was never destined to be a centerpiece of the offense, but he had learned a lot in three years on campus.  He played in every game during Michigan Tech's 1961/62 NCAA Championship season, serving as an alternate captain and bringing a steady presence to the blue line.  One measure of his success that winter: when the Huskies created a "Most Improved Player" team award later in the decade, they named it in Seger's honor.

Michigan Tech lost the first two games of the season during a trip to visit their rivals from the University of Michigan.  A month later in Houghton, the Wolverines prevailed again, 4-2.  Tech would not lose another game during the remainder of the season.  Their January 6th victory in a rematch against Michigan was the beginning of a 21-game winning streak which carried all the way to Utica, New York, the site for that year's four-team NCAA Tournament.

One of the most important wins during the streak came in Ann Arbor during a crucial fifth meeting with the Wolverines. It was the championship game of the Western Collegiate Hockey Association Tournament on March 3rd.  The 6-4 result assured Tech's bid into the National Semifinals.  

Wolverine supporters must have been confident early.  Described as "a record University of Michigan crowd of 3,882," the home fans cheered their team to a 2-0 lead, but two Huskies goals in the last minute before intermission sent the two sides to their dressing rooms with a tie score.  The Wolverines retook the lead with the only goal in the second period.  However, Seger scored to re-tie the matchup in the third. Tech wouldn't trail again.  They took their first lead 13 seconds later, then got the goal which proved to be the winner with 7:25 to go in regulation.

Besides Tech, Michigan was also invited to the national tournament.  Clarkson and St. Lawrence were waiting in Utica for the western schools two weeks later.  The weekend began with a stunning upset; Clarkson edged the Wolverines, 5-4.  

"They did a hell of a favor for us," admitted Mikesch. "We beat Michigan that year – twice – but that was unusual. Michigan generally was one of the top teams to beat."

In the other semifinal, Michigan Tech easily coasted past St. Lawrence 6-1.  The championship matchup against Clarkson was just as one-sided: Huskies 7, Golden Knights 1.  Tech scored early, led the entire night, and broke the game open during a one-sided third period.  Seger and Akervall were both chosen for the All-Tournament First Team along with Huskies forwards Lou Angotti and John Ivanitz.

"They had a huge, huge gathering at the airport when we flew back into town," said Mikesch, remembering the estimated 1,500 fans waiting to celebrate when the Huskies emerged from their plane. "Yeah, we got treated like kings."

Seger was an All-American, one of four Tech players to be chosen for that honor by the American Hockey Coaches Association.  He finished his college career with six goals and 20 assists in 72 games.  Three months later, Seger also wrapped up his academic career, successfully earning his Civil Engineering degree within four years.  The graduation ceremony was three days after he had turned 22.
Leonard "Okie" Brumm was the hockey equivalent of Johnny Appleseed. He planted teams at seemingly every stop during his long association with the sport. In 1962, he came to Waterloo.  

That summer, a major renovation of Waterloo Auditorium on the National Cattle Congress grounds had included a new floor and ice-making equipment.  The versatile old building was ready to welcome a new team.  Launching new clubs was Brumm's specialty.  A year earlier, he helped establish the Des Moines Oak Leafs.  The Marquette, Michigan, native had worked everywhere from his Upper Peninsula hometown to Alaska.  In Waterloo, he would simultaneously be a defenseman and the head coach, plus taking the added responsibility of building the first Black Hawks roster.

With Brumm's roots in the U.P., a vast number of people could have tipped him off about Elov Seger's exploits at Michigan Tech.  Brumm might have heard directly from Huskies Coach John MacInnes; a dozen years earlier, Brumm and MacInnes had been teammates at the University of Michigan.  Or perhaps Seger just found his way to Waterloo because it's where everyone else from the Rainy River area seemed to be going.  Reportedly as many as a dozen skaters from Fort Frances, International Falls, and nearby communities tried out for the Black Hawks in 1962.  In addition to Seger, Brian Latta, Dan Dillworth, and Don Millette all made the roster.

Regina, Saskatchewan, native Don "Butch" Leskun also came south to join a Waterloo roster filled with new arrivals.

"We had to have a place to stay," Leskun remembered, "And we always said, 'Oh, we're staying at the Hotel Yumka,' and they'd say 'Where the heck is that?' 

"And I said, 'Well, it's on the river there.' Then finally, we'd have to tell them it's the YMCA. We did little things like that and got to know each other. We became a really good family because of how we met and the type of people that Oakie Brumm accumulated there. We all became pretty good friends."

It didn't take long for Leskun to appreciate Seger, both as a friend and a teammate. 

"He was a kind of a lumbering, big, nice guy," said Leskun.  "You know, he'd never get into fights. He was good. You could never get around him, because he was tall, and he had a good reach, but he never really roughed it up. He just was a good hockey player."

The Hawks lost their debut game on November 17, 1962, falling at home against the Rochester Mustangs 6-2.  A rematch the next night was closer, but Rochester came out on top again.  

A week later in Des Moines, the Hawks played a back-and-forth game against the Oak Leafs.  Just less than three minutes were left when Seger and Leskun set up the first game-winning goal in Black Hawks history.  Brian Latta scored it, and then added another seconds later, to lift Waterloo to a 7-5 victory.

Waterloo defeated Des Moines again a few nights later for the team's first home win.  The Hawks spent the entire season right near .500, rarely above that mark but never more than a couple of games below.  They had some of their best results in February, then lost four of their last five as the season ended in early March.  At 16-16-0, Waterloo placed third in the five-team USHL.

A middling record was still good enough for local fans to embrace the team.

"The people of the town all invited us for dinners all the time or Thanksgiving and Christmas," said Leskun.  "You know, they took to us."

Seger finished the season with four goals and 15 assists.  On March 10th – the final night on the home schedule – Team President Bob Keller presented Seger with the Black Hawks Most Valuable Player award at intermission.  The recognition included a trophy and a letterman-style jacket.  To make the selection, team leaders polled local media, as well as opposing USHL coaches.  Seger had made a strong first impression, and the next fall the game program described him as a player who "…excels at taking his man out of the play, retrieving the puck, and starting a break out play…"

That offseason, Seger was a regular on Waterloo's golf courses.  He and Leskun became members at Sunnyside Country Club.  In August, they both entered the Waterloo Open.  Seger shot an 80 during the amateur competition, five strokes away from the chance to play with the pros on Sunday.  The summer was even more eventful in Seger's personal life as he courted Diane Steen, a local girl who worked for the Waterloo Courier.  The couple had a late September wedding in Zion Lutheran Church on the city's west side.

Seger also settled into his fulltime job working for Waterloo Steel & Equipment.  His engineering talents were well-utilized, including for one feature of Waterloo's multistory downtown parking ramp, which Leskun remembered.

"[There was] a galvanized chute where they would put snow and push it down onto a truck, and you'd see [the chute] hanging on the side of the building. I don't know if it's still there or not, but he designed that, and he was pretty proud of that…[He] always said 'See, that chute? I designed that.'"

Wayne Wirkkula – who later became one of Seger's Waterloo teammates – noted Seger's willingness to share his math skills with his Waterloo Steel coworkers.

"Those people that ran that company, they loved him," said Wirkkula. "He would work with some of the manufacturing people and was teaching them algebra and all kinds of stuff like that. Elov had personality and intelligence, very smart…And you couldn't ruffle him in any way.  He would have a smile and [just was] a good, pleasant guy."

When the 1963/64 hockey schedule began, the Black Hawks struggled during their early games.  However, Waterloo began winning consistently over the weekend after Thanksgiving.  That included defeating the U.S. Olympic team during an exhibition matchup in early December.  Seger tallied an assist on a third period goal which kept Waterloo out of reach.

By mid-February, the Hawks were 17-8-0 and in position to earn at least a share of the USHL championship in just their second season.  Half of Waterloo's losses had been against the Green Bay Bobcats.  Green Bay visited on February 16th and Seger did his part to help secure a share of the title.  His three assists helped Waterloo build a big lead and weather a four-goal Bobcat comeback.  The Hawks finally prevailed 7-6 in overtime in front of 4,855 relieved home fans. 

That 1963/64 season had included more steady play from Seger.  He scored four goals and set up 22 others.  In March, he even added a goal during a 4-3 non-league matchup versus the Cincinnati Wings, the Central Professional Hockey League affiliate of the Detroit Red Wings.

Yet, the Black Hawks' success did not prevent significant offseason changes.  Brumm left Waterloo. He returned to Marquette where he would establish another new USHL team, the Iron Rangers.  Bud McRae became head coach.  McRae had joined the Hawks in 1963/64 and made substantial contributions to the championship season.  In the autumn of 1964, Waterloo also added veteran Bill Dobbyn, already illustrious as a professional skater in North America and Europe.

McRae, Dobbyn, and Bernie Nielsen were each excellent defensemen, and with Seger, Waterloo was loaded on the blue line for 1964/65.  However, depth at forward was a problem, especially in the absence of Tim Taylor, who was called away at midseason to join the U.S. National Team for the IIHF World Championships.  By New Year's Day, Waterloo was just 2-7-0.  It was a situation which called for creativity; McRae's solution was to make Seger a centerman. 

"Elov was an extremely good stick handler and puck controller, and saw the ice…[He was] just a very, very good hockey player for our league," said Wirkkula.  "That opening developed at center, and Elov went along with it. He liked to carry the puck and he did very well at center. We won the championship again that year."

Waterloo began to roll and earned a 7-2-0 record in January.  During the final weekend of that month, the Hawks battled for a crucial weekend sweep of the league-leading St. Paul Steers. Seger scored goals in each of the two wins.  He added more timely points in February, and the Hawks kept winning.  

Waterloo needed all the victories and all the scoring they could manage to stage a remarkable comeback.  By winning 10 of their last 12 games, the Hawks edged the Steers for the USHL title.  An imbalanced number of games meant the race came down to winning percentage, with Waterloo at .607 (17-11-0) and St. Paul at .577 (15-11-0).  Had the Hawks lost one of their January matchups against St. Paul, the championship would have flipped to the Steers.  Playing much of the season away from his natural position, Seger tallied five goals and nine assists.  Dating back to his senior season at Michigan Tech, the 25-year-old had been part of three championship teams in four years.

Nonetheless, within three months of Waterloo's last 1964/65 game, Elov and Diane Seger were new residents of Rochester, Minnesota.
"Definitely he wanted to play defense," said Wayne Wirkkula, explaining Seger's abrupt northward relocation and eventual reemergence as a member of the Rochester Mustangs.  "And he knew a lot of those guys. He'd played against a lot of the [Bill] Reichart's and those guys…[Tom] Yurkovich…those guys up there were at North Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan Tech, the Western Collegiate Hockey League, so he knew a lot of those guys."

Lou Nanne was one of the WCHA alumni playing for Rochester.  As a Minnesota Gopher, he had met Seger's Michigan Tech teams, then faced him during subsequent seasons in Waterloo.  Six decades later, Nanne had a few lasting impressions of the big defenseman.

"I remember playing against him," Nanne said. "First of all, he was a real nice guy and a very, very solid player…He knew his position well. He was tough to beat defensively. He was very, very consistent."

Nanne and Seger were Rochester teammates for two seasons. However, they didn't have as many opportunities to become acquainted as players in Waterloo.  Nanne was part of a commuting contingent who traveled in from Minneapolis, carpooling to games and practices along with approximately half of the Mustangs roster.  The rest of the team – including Seger – were fulltime Rochester residents.  The Mustangs had been American senior hockey's dominant team during the 1950s, and the city's enthusiastic hockey community embraced the club.

"It's a wonderful city. You know, at that time, we were less than 45,000 people. Now they're over 100,000," said Nanne. "You had a great city…a city of means. So, it was great living conditions, and good players would come there, because [Rochester] could afford to run a good program. But the most important thing was the jobs that [players] could get."

IBM was one of the prominent employers.  International Business Machines was perhaps the premier technology company of the era.  Their employee roster included the Mustangs' talented goalie Yurkovich, their scoring star Reichart, player/coach Bert Aikens, and others.  With Seger's math and engineering background, he was a natural fit.  In Rochester, he was also reunited with at least one Fort Frances native, Dick Carpenter, and a Michigan Tech teammate, Gene Rebellato.

On game nights, the Mustangs came together to skate in one of the smallest rinks around: Mayo Civic Auditorium.  It was considerably shorter than most ice sheets, including a building like Waterloo Auditorium (later renamed McElroy Auditorium).  In fact, the neutral zone in Rochester was so skinny that there wasn't enough room to include a center red line.

Nanne admitted that the tight confines created challenges.

"We had the worst rink in the league, but we'd sell out. It was a very physical place to play, because there's no room for anybody to operate. You know, you're always seeing bodies."

Waterloo tended to play better than most teams traveling to Civic Auditorium.  The first time they visited Seger and the Mustangs in 1965/66, the Hawks came away with a 6-4 victory.  Although Waterloo eventually claimed their third straight championship that season, the clubs split six head-to-head games.  Seger played in each meeting, notching one assist.

"There were never any hard feelings or anything like that," noted Leskun.  "You joke around. If he happened to hit you, you'd say 'Geez, Seeg, you do that one more time, I'm gonna deck you,' and he'd just laugh."

After the regular season, Seger made an unexpected trip back to Waterloo for a special game against the Hawks.  In early April, the USHL staged a benefit for St. Paul goaltender Bill Halbrehder, who had lost an eye as the result of an accident in practice.  Seger was a late addition to the visiting All-Star team, replacing Green Bay's Carl Lackey.  Waterloo topped the USHL's best 7-4, and the game raised over $2,300 for Halbrehder.

Less than two years later, fans at McElroy Auditorium were taking up a collection for Seger.  

He played through the 1966/67 season, but by the summer of 1967, something was clearly wrong.  Living in Rochester, Seger had access to some of the best medical specialists in the world.  By August, they had discovered a formidable brain tumor.  At age 27 – married for less than four years and father to a young daughter – Seger had major surgery at St. Mary's Hospital on the Mayo Clinic campus.

He would rarely leave the hospital in the months before his family, teammates, and fans lost him on March 8, 1968.
On the Sunday of Seger's funeral in Rochester, the Black Hawks and Mustangs were on a bus together, headed for the Lake Superior shore.  The two teams drove halfway across Minnesota for a Sunday exhibition in anticipation of Duluth joining the USHL the following season.  Seger's service at Rochester's Congregational Church was winding down around the same time warm-ups were beginning at Duluth Auditorium.  Butch Leskun and Tom Yurkovich missed the game and attended the funeral as pallbearers.

"My wife and I went up and saw him in the hospital, and then the next time we went was for the funeral," said Leskun.

Seger had been the best man when Don and Nancy Leskun were married in 1964.  The Segers and the Leskuns, and the Black Hawks and the Mustangs couldn't have anticipated how quickly Elov Seger's illness would take him away.  

Star athlete.  Talented, hard-working employee.  Big likeable guy.  Gone in less than nine fleeting, yet agonizing months.

"I think he could have gone pro, if he was a meaner guy," said Wayne Wirkkula.  "Everybody respected him, and he had the size where nobody going to bother him, but he just played the game, played it extremely smart."

Two days after his funeral in Rochester, Seger was buried in Fort Frances.  

He might have played a few more seasons in the USHL.  His engineering career might have lasted into the 1990s or even the early 21st century.  He might still be with us today to tell his own story.

"Elov was kind of a quiet, gentle giant…a really, really, really nice guy," said Bob Mikesch.

He was three months from his 28th birthday.  A lot of people would have liked nothing more than to celebrate that birthday – and many more – with him.

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