The Phone Call in June

In June 2022, Bernice Carnegie and her nephew Rane were getting ready for a Carnegie Initiative Zoom call. Then another call came in, from Lanny McDonald, chair of the Hockey Hall of Fame.

He told them that Herb Carnegie, her father and his grandfather, would be inducted with the Class of 2022, as a builder.

Rane had made it his mission to get him there: his petition gathered more than 10,000 signatures. The news even led to a family reunion in Toronto.

To understand that call, we have to go back to 1948.

Herb Carnegie was born in Toronto, in 1919. Through the 1940s and 1950s, he starred in senior hockey, in Ontario and Quebec. In September 1948, the New York Rangers invited him to their training camp.

He went, but turned down three contract offers. The last would have sent him to New Haven, their farm team. He was told he would be the first. Yet the pay was less than what he already earned in Quebec.

His daughter recalls his words:

He would never play in the National Hockey League. He retired as a player in 1954. And he kept building.

He developed the Carnegie System, a patented magnetic hockey instruction board used by some NHL teams. In 1987, with his wife Audrey and his daughter Bernice, he founded the Future Aces Foundation, to inspire young people to believe in themselves and pursue excellence in school.

He died in 2012. Ten years later, the Hall of Fame welcomed him.

He never saw that day.

His daughter took up the torch: she co-founded the Carnegie Initiative in 2021. This year, for the 30th anniversary of Black History Month in Canada, Library and Archives Canada is spotlighting the family line. It features Herb, his sister Bernice Isobel Carnegie Redmon, the first Black woman appointed to the Victorian Order of Nurses in Canada, and his daughter Bernice.

What one person could not finish, his family carries on. We are also what others began for us.