The other day I was traveling through New York Penn Station and wanted to see if there was still a Gerry Cosby store in the east entryway to Madison Square Garden. 

There isn’t.  And somebody will probably comment that it has been closed for 25 years or something like that.

Much of Mount Hermon’s hockey equipment came from Gerry Cosby, which also had a distribution center and store in Sheffield, Massachusetts.

The jerseys of 1970 still probably had some wool in them. 

And at some point during the 1970-71 season the hockey team became the first varsity team to wear a Northfield Mount Hermon uniform. The team photo shows the guys wearing “NMH” jerseys, though some of the game shots also show guys wearing jerseys with a Gothic “MH.”  (See photo above, top center-right.)

The socks would’ve also been wool or thick cotton, definitely not synthetic.  The pants were lightly padded by today’s standards. 

The skates would’ve been mainly CCM Tacks, with a  few Bauer Supreme 91s mixed in.  You needed stronger ankles back then. The lasts were crude, but the boot eventually molded well to your foot because it was all leather, every bit, even the sole.  There was no real footbed to speak of.

The struts of the blade were still metal tubing back then. 

The toes were leather, as well, and so, as you can see below, players who cared for their skates would apply shellac to the toe boxes in order to preserve them (see photo below).

The main stick brands back then were Northland, Koho, Sherwood, Victoriaville, CCM.

If you were on a budget, Woody Dumart sticks were a pretty good deal. 

If anyone young is reading this, the sticks were entirely made of wood, save for a thin sheet or coating of fiberglass on some blades.  The good sticks cost about 5 bucks. A Woody Dumart cost 3. 

The curved stick blade had been introduced only a few years before. The current limits on stick blade curvature weren’t in place—at least I don’t think so—and  some guys had real bananas. Which they usually couldn’t control very well.  It must’ve been a scary time to be a goalie. (When is it not a scary time to be a goalie?)

 Mount Hermon didn't have standard issue gloves at that point (I think they came along a year or two later).  The gloves were a mishmash of Cooper, Win-well, CCM and maybe a Gerry Cosby house brand. 

The helmets, as noted above, were made by Johnson and resembled the Jofa helmet some guys would wear in the 80s.  But the Johnson was really flimsy. It had no padding, just a webbing that suspended the super thin plastic above your noggin.  Some of Mount Hermon’s opponents wore the same helmet as well (as shown in The Gateway).

Johnson must’ve had a good sales rep in Western Mass.

Everybody’s underlying equipment—shin, elbow, shoulder pads—would’ve been the property of the players. The goalies brought their own pads to school as well.  As is maybe still the case today.  But it’s funny, nobody expected football players to supply their own shoulder, hip, thigh and knee pads. 

Skaters wore no face masks or cages back then.  Not all guys wore mouth guards.

The goalie wore face cages, but as you can see in the photo at the top of the page, the Deerfield goalie of 1970-71 looks practically naked to the modern hockey eye.  The shin pads were leather and wool stuffing. When they got wet, they weighed a ton.  Goalie catching mitts weren't always standard then. I remember playing with at least a few goalies who used first basemen or just ordinary baseball mitts as puck catching gloves. I’m not sure goalie skates were even a standard yet at the prep school level. 

Hockey equipment wasn't easy to buy back then.  Outside of Boston and Cosby's, there were very few hockey specialists. I bought hockey equipment in sporting goods stores, hardware stores, an office supply store (then called stationery stores).