Remembering Paul Morris, the voice of Maple Leaf Gardens

‘The Voice’ that resonated around Maple Leaf Gardens for four decades without missing a game has been silenced.

Paul Morris died Thursday at 86, the public address announcer almost as well known as the Gardens itself. A Durham Regional obituary posted in the past couple of days said he died peacefully Thursday at Lakeridge Health in Oshawa after a long illness with loving wife Marion by his side.

“His voice was synonymous with the Gardens,” former captain Darryl Sittler told the Sun on Monday. “It’s true that players thought they’d truly made the NHL when they heard him announce their name. He was such a nice man, too.”

While everyone knew the features of Gardens inside and out from being there or through television, Morris was heard and not seen by generations of fans and thousands of imitators.

“(Fans) didn’t live here like I did, but they did in their dreams,” an emotional Morris told the crowd when invited to speak on Feb. 13, 1999, the night the Gardens closed. “This was like home to many Canadians.”

Only four men ever held the position with the Leafs, Red Barber when the Gardens opened in 1931, Morris from 1961-99, with a brief stop at the Air Canada Centre, Andy Frost and Mike Ross.

“You heard Paul and knew exactly where you were,” said Toronto-based author and archivist Paul Patskou.

From a tiny office in the northwest corner Morris had a streak of more than1,500 games behind the mic between 1961-99, his timbre never going over the top for Toronto goals unlike anyone doing the job in a pro rink today. Morris stuck to a dusty NHL edict from the Original Six era that ‘announcers will refrain from personal comments’

“It’s just my natural voice,” Morris told the Sun in a 2018 feature. “I never really thought about how I sounded one way or the other. But as the years go by, you realize that, to many people, it was something special.”

Paul said he picked up tips about inflection from his father Doug, the first building supervisor of the newly erected Gardens in 1931, a choir singer in Lancaster, England and an opera buff. Paul noted his own voice carried “loudly and forcibly” around the Gardens when he went to work for his father in the late 1950s.

Before he signed off after Leaf games with a friendly reminder to “drive and walk home safely”, he’d usually put in a full day in Canada’s most famous multi-purpose arena. He held the position of sound engineer.

“There was always something for me to do,” he said. “The scoreclock, TV feeds, security cameras, the (junior) Marlies or other events. And of course, the Leafs. I’d be there seven days a week sometimes. The Gardens became my second home.

“My first Gardens memory is being five years old and dad taking me there on a quiet Sunday with my new skates. We went downstairs where the big diesel generators were (installed to conserve war-time power). They were noisy to start up, the same kind that moved trains in the rail yards.

“Dad put my skates on, went to the referees’ room to get me a chair and I pushed it around the ice while he worked.”

Paul attended Brown Public School at Avenue Rd. and St. Clair, then Northern Secondary, Thornhill and eventually Ryerson to study electrical engineering, Around 1956, Doug heard that Shea’s Hippodrome was closing – the giant theatre at Queen and Bay had to make way for a new city hall – and its giant Wurlitzer organ needed a new home.

He invited Paul to help Gardens sound technician Bob Wood dismantle it and move it to MLG as a summer job. Paul quit Ryerson to be Wood’s assistant. The big pipes were re-installed high in the south end bandshell, working so well in their time that Doug forbade organist Horace Lapp from practising for fear the constant vibrations were damaging the walls.

Paul would fight that career-long battle with the cavernous 15-storey Gardens, especially during the concert era.

“Dad had hung great big acoustic blankets in the ceiling to lessen the reverberation. Before that, sound took about six seconds to reach the top; after (the blankets) went up, it came down to around two

“But when the Beatles took the stage (five concerts in three visits between 1964-66) it didn’t much matter. You couldn’t hear anything with the (girls) screaming. We only had basic speakers in those days, nothing meant for a rock and roll show.”

After the first show, Morris had to hustle to get the same microphones the Fab Four used on stage to the Hot Stove Club for a press conference, speaking into each one as the bemused Beatles sat watching.

“One of them, I can’t remember who, said: ‘Here comes the big guy, Mr. Testing 1-2-3’.”

Morris and Wood hand built the digital ‘Dominion’ score clock, the backdrop for the Leafs last Stanley Cup in 1967, incorporating penalties and visiting team names. They had priced similar boards in Canada and the U.S. and decided they could do better.

When not at ice level, that clock was reached via a three-minute elevator ride up inside its maze of wires and 4,000 bulbs. Paul also completed Doug’s concept of the module that dropped down with blowing Canada/U.S. flags for anthems.

Morris was also in charge of the bulletin board at both ends of the Gardens up to the early 1980s.

“It was a neon sign and if it needed work, I’d be up on an aluminum ladder, sticking my hand in among about 5,000 volts,” he said, shaking his head. “Thankfully, I never got a shock.”

His public address duties began in 1958 by accident, the junior Marlies host developed asthma and Paul offered to fill in, having helped Foster Hewitt’s son Bill with Junior A radio broadcasts on CKFH.

His streak with the Leafs began three years later, when the aging Barber mis-pronounced Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson’s name with executives Stafford Smythe and Harold Ballard in earshot and retired at the end of the year.

But as the ‘61-62 season opener approached, no full-time replacement had been hired.

“It came down to a week before the season that I went into dad’s office and he said: ‘Do you want to do it?,” Paul said. His first game was a 3-2 Leaf win over Boston, his first call a Dick Duff penalty, the first Toronto goal, Allan Stanley.

Just a small window separated Morris from fans the upper tier of fans. A goal or penalty meant scramble mode on a shared phone line with the timekeeper and official scorer, usually ‘Banana Joe’ Lamantia and Peter Smeaton, respectively.

Patskou has heard hundreds of those Morris moments as he assembled Hockey Night in Canada specials, movie clips, Leafs TV bits and other in-arena features. Gord Stellick, the one-time Leaf general manager and brother Bob, the media relations boss, recalled going to a wedding where four guests asked them to judge a Morris sound-a-like contest.

“There was a mystique about him,” Patskou said. “No one knew what he looked like, yet everyone seemed to know him. He also told you about the Marlies, wrestling, track meets and all other events at the Gardens. If you ever did a documentary on the Leafs or the Gardens, you’d want his voice on it.

“He was impartial, very (conservative) like the city in that way, never off-script. He’d announce a big playoff goal or Darryl Sittler’s 10th point (in a 1976 game against Boston, a league record that still stands) the same as a regular game. He was no cheerleader.”

Morris listened politely to the many attempts by admirers to emulate: “Toronto goal, scored by number 14 Keon, assists No. 10 Armstrong and No. 7, Horton … the time fourteen-twenty-eight” or “last minute of play in this period”, which Scotiabank Arena still uses on its ‘throwback’ nights to the delight of older patrons.

He was recognized in public, certainly by cadence and gets the celebrity treatment.

“I’m always more embarrassed about that than anything else. “(Near his retirement date) I still had a cottage in Muskoka and one day I went out with a friend to an open market. People were coming up to me saying: ‘We’re going to miss you’. My friend, whom I’d known 60 years, said: ‘I keep forgetting you’re famous. To me, you’re just Paul’.”

The most difficult player names to handle? Long before the NHL’s European invasion, Timmins-raised Walt Tkachuk caused Morris grief, requesting constant changes to his pronunciation.

“Tuh-chuk, Tay-chuk, Tooshook,” Morris sighed. “Every time he came into the building, he had a different name.

“The toughest were Russians when they first came over. Three different pronunciations from three different people. Eventually you just thought of them as three letters with three different sounds.”

Morris recalled one very busy night when a line brawl broke out near the end of a period, with about 10 names and a long rap sheet of penalties to get through.

“I began announcing them with one eye on the clock. I’d just started when I had to pause to get in ‘last minute of play’, then right back to the penalties. I could hear everybody in the building laughing.”

He can’t settle on his most memorable Gardens moment – other than one he couldn’t announce.

“The ’67 playoffs, Keon had the puck, killing a penalty, and the Canadiens couldn’t touch him. He didn’t have it the whole two minutes, but it seemed like it and the crowd couldn’t stop cheering.”

The longevity was a point of pride, but Morris wouldn’t stay on at the ACC just for its sake. Paul and his Marion, a former Gardens usherette were married 52 years and watched the Leafs on TV, but Paul said he never perked up for the announcement of goals and assists.

“I hear them,” Morris says of his successors, “but it’s hard to compare us. They do it their way, I did it mine and never the twain shall meet.”

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Remembering Paul Morris, the voice of Maple Leaf Gardens

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