Ralph Mellanby dearly loved a good story, and one of his best was about the October day in 1970 when the Buffalo Sabres played their first home game.
His story stars a rat who haunted the Aud, but this is a hockey story. Mellanby was a hockey guy, through and through.
He died on Saturday, at 87, to a host of hosannas across Canada. Even if you don’t know his name, you know his style: Mellanby practically invented the way we watch hockey as executive producer of "Hockey Night in Canada" from 1966 to 1985. He developed innovative camera angles and gave Howie Meeker his telestrator – and Don Cherry his soapbox.
“Ralph is to television what the Orrs, Howes and Gretzkys are to hockey,” wrote Mike Brophy in the introduction to Mellanby’s chatty 2007 memoir, “Walking With Legends.”
Mellanby started out in TV as a part-time prop boy at a local station in Windsor, Ont., and went on to produce Olympics telecasts and win Emmys and introduce the animated Peter Puck to American audiences on NBC hockey games in the 1970s.
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He was born in Hamilton, Ont., and spent summers as a boy in Fort Erie, at a cottage on the lake, when his father was an editor at the Hamilton Spectator. Mellanby told me Crescent Beach was so wide then that you could play softball on the sand.
I had called him at his home in St. David’s, near Niagara-on-the-Lake, after the 2020 death of "Jeopardy!" host Alex Trebek. We talked about the time Mellanby nearly hired Trebek as a host for "Hockey Night" – and ended up hiring Dave Hodge from the Sabres instead. (You can read that column here.)
Having lived on Ontario’s Niagara peninsula as a boy, Mellanby came to live there again as a retiree. When his first wife died, in 2001, they were living in Atlanta, where he had a television consulting business. Some years later, while dating the woman who would become his second wife, she asked him to go back to Canada.
“I said, ‘Why would I do that?’ And she said, ‘That’s where you’re famous.’ ”
He didn’t want to live in Toronto, where she was from: “I’m a country boy, and I didn’t want to be in a big city anymore. We found a lovely place in St. David’s. We’re 15 minutes from my golf club and 15 minutes from my tennis club and 15 minutes from the Falls.”
That put him maybe 45 minutes from downtown Buffalo, where he made history as the producer of the first seasons of Sabres television broadcasts at the same time he was producing "Hockey Night in Canada." And therein lies our tale.
“My boss had a good relationship with the Knoxes, who owned the Sabres, and they didn’t have a mobile truck, so we got the job,” Mellanby said. “I wanted to produce the first game myself to make sure everything went right.
“Anyway, that day I went to the john in the old Aud, and I was sitting down having a poop” – he paused for dramatic effect – “when a ... rat fell on my head.”
Mellanby paused again, this time to laugh uproariously.
“So I walked out and I see my old friend Punch Imlach walking down the stairs. And I said, ‘Punch, you won’t believe what just happened to me. I was in the john and a rat fell on my head.’ And Punch said, ‘Welcome to the Aud in Buffalo.’ ”
A generation later, Mellanby was back to the Aud to see his son, Scott, play for the Philadelphia Flyers. Before the game, Ralph ran into Ted Darling, then the TV voice of the Sabres, who had worked for him as the Montreal host of "Hockey Night in Canada" in the years before Darling came to Buffalo.
“I didn’t know Ted was going to do this, but he went to the Knoxes, who had a VIP room in the Aud for sponsors and themselves,” Mellanby said. “So I was watching the game and Scott had the first goal. We were the only people in the building who cheered. Then, near the end of the first period, this handsome man comes up and says, ‘Mr. Mellanby, I’m Seymour Knox IV. My father and uncle would like you to come up to the VIP room to say hello.’ And I said, ‘Are you sure? Tonight I’m the enemy.’ ”
Mellanby was never the enemy, of course. He was a raconteur who made friends across the globe, including here on the Niagara Frontier.
His obituary ran in newspapers across Canada, though they left out one small detail that delighted him to note: When he was getting his start in the news business, Mellanby wrote obituaries for the Essex (Ont.) Free Press. He enjoyed the obits, he would say, because they are stories with a beginning, middle and end.
And so the end has come for one of North America’s great storytellers. Tip a cold Molson in his name tonight. And maybe have one for that rat, too. Something tells me Ralph Mellanby would approve.
