Word was that the Montreal Canadiens were going to demote Vachon, my first hockey hero, to the minors in 1967. This 10-year-old, a huge fan following the rookie goalie’s impressive Stanley Cup Playoff run the previous spring, was having none of it. So I wrote the first fan letter of my life, telling “Mr. Vachon” not to let the Canadiens return him to the Houston Apollos. A week later, in the mail, was Rogie’s team-issued picture postcard — “Don’t worry, I’ll never let them send me down,” he wrote in a paragraph-long reassuring reply. The postcard went straight into my scrapbook, long before our friendship began to develop in the years that followed. For my Montreal newspaper for more than a decade from the early 1990s, I championed Rogie’s case for long-overdue Hockey Hall of Fame induction; in 2016, upon his election, we flew together from Montreal to Toronto for his enshrinement and I harvested more of his stories. I wrote that feature for NHL.com in what would be my second fan letter to a boyhood hero, this one written nearly a half-century after the first. — Dave Stubbs, columnist
