Gilles "Bad News" Bilodeau famously delivered some bad news on Nov. 24, 1977, in what was coined The Thanksgiving Night Massacre in the next day's newspaper.
It took Bilodeau and four other Birmingham Bulls starters exactly 24 seconds to start a free-swinging, 15-minute brawl against their opponents. Players racked up 78 penalty minutes in the first 30 seconds of play.
"Bulls make a big Thanksgiving kill," The Birmingham News headline read.
Bilodeau, a Quebec native, earned his middle moniker for battles on the ice as a left wing for the Bulls, a short-lived World Hockey Association team notorious for rough play. The guy known as the enforcer in the rink played a different position away from it.
"Off the ice, he was a teddy bear," said Debbie "Good News" Bilodeau, the Birmingham belle who caught his eye after practice one day in 1977.
Bilodeau died at his Huffman home earlier this month at age 53, likely of undetected pancreatic cancer, his wife said.
He started out skating on a pond in St. Prime, Quebec. The handsome boy with the big smile came third in a line of nine children born to dairy farmers. He dreamed of playing professional hockey.
He was drafted by the Toronto Toros in 1975 and moved
south when the team did, entering a climate where ice lasted
as long as it took to down a glass of tea and no longer.
Birmingham welcomed him and his brawling ways with savage
adoration. The 6-foot-1, 220-pound Bilodeau enforced the
unspoken law: Mess with my teammates and I mess with you.
"He was protecting us," said Jean-Guy Lagace, who played for the Bulls in 1976 and 1977. "When the other team was sending their goons after us, then Gilles would get on the ice."
Bilodeau left Birmingham in 1977 and played briefly in the National Hockey League, with the Quebec Nordiques, before finishing his career in Richmond with the American Hockey League. That year, he turned 26 and assumed his most important position - Dad.
The formerly fearsome Bilodeau refused to let his two sons play football until they were older. It was too rough. His children's friends would beg him for hockey stories, and Bilodeau accommodated them, sharing tales in a French accent complicated by a Southern drawl.
Brent thought his dad was Wayne Gretzky. He and Brian adored him beyond his athletic acclaim. They accompanied him into the woods on hunting trips beginning around ages 3 and 4, a tradition that continued when the Bilodeau boys grew to be men.
Fun-loving, kindhearted and jarringly frank, Bilodeau loved to joke around. And even later in life, he was still prone to fight, sort of.
It was around 1992. The place? The cafeteria at St. Barnabas Catholic School.
"We had peas that day," Brent recalls, "and out of nowhere, Dad starts putting them on spoons and flicking them at people."
The schoolchildren fired back. It rained peas.
"I'll never forget that teacher coming up and sending my dad to the office," said Brent, now 24. "I remember my dad just laughing the whole way.
Later he easily fell into the role of "Pop" when his first grandson was born. The two would squeeze into Bilodeau's armchair for SpongeBob SquarePants. And the boy, now 4, would help Bilodeau with various fix-it projects. Bilodeau ran a construction company and as a contractor would volunteer his skills at St. Barnabas Catholic Church and to elderly friends, his wife said.
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