from Stan Fischler at The Hockey News,
James Norris was not fooling around that April morning in 1935.
The 56-year-old Montreal commerce czar had just bought Detroit’s NHL club – then called the Falcons – and phoned Jack ‘Jolly Jawn’ Adams, the coach-manager he had acquired in the franchise purchase. “I’ll give you a year on the job,” Norris warned him. “You’re now on probation.”
Those who knew Norris best translated the “probation” part to mean win a Stanley Cup, pronto, or else. If that wasn’t intimidating enough, there was the new owner’s physical presence: very scary. “I remember the afternoon we met,” said Adams during an interview in 1961 when he was 67. “Norris was bald and he had heavy black eyebrows and a round face. His nose was broad and flat, like somebody had hit it.”
While he was at it, the new boss laid a few other things on the line with his new employee. “We’ll call the team the Wings. In fact, we’ll call it Red Wings. Our emblem will be a winged wheel which ought to sit good with Henry Ford and the car people,” Adams recalled.
The habitually argumentative Adams instantly realized he should never quarrel with his new boss – just do what the millionaire said and quickly go about the business of making him happy. The results were amazing, to say the least. He gifted Norris with back-to-back championships, while earning a second nickname, ‘Trader Jack.’
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