The Rise & Fall of the Salomons

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The Rise & Fall of the Salomons

Post by cprice12 »

This is a GREAT read...written back in 2009. Found it on St. Louis Game Time when I was Googling around for Blues stuff.
If you don't know the story surrounding the Blues original ownership group, this is a nice informative series about the roller coaster ride of the early years of our Blues.

Part I:
http://www.stlouisgametime.com/2009/3/1 ... l-of-the-s

Part II:
http://www.stlouisgametime.com/2009/3/1 ... l-of-the-s

Part III:
http://www.stlouisgametime.com/2009/3/2 ... l-of-the-s

In it's entirety:
The Rise and Fall of the Salomons (Part I)
Sidney Salomon Jr. and his son, Sid Salomon III were the largest shareholders in a 10-person syndicate that brought hockey to St. Louis. As the Blues' first owners from 1966-1977, they presided over a franchise that quickly became a winner, making the Stanley Cup Finals in its first three years of existence, from 1968-70. Much has been written and spoken about those early glorious Blues years under the Salomon's.

What is less known however is how and why this luster was lost by the mid -1970s. In fact, by 1977, the team was running away from creditors, was on the brink of financial insolvency, and only weeks away from being disbanded all together by the NHL Board of Governors. When all seemed lost, St. Louis-based Ralston Purina Co. arrived in the 11th hour as the financial "white knight" that would rescue the Salomons and keep the Blues in St. Louis.

In February 1966, five of the six NHL expansion franchises were awarded by the NHL Board of Governors, while St. Louis was awarded a "conditional franchise," pending the emergence of suitable ownership. Two months later, on April 5 1966, Sidney Salomon Jr. and his son "Sid the Third" were notified that their ownership syndicate had been awarded the sixth and final NHL expansion team that would start play in 1967-68, a club that would become known as the St. Louis Blues. The city wound up with this last club, thanks to an unlikely ally: the influential owner of the Chicago Blackhawks, Arthur W. Wirtz.

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It's hard to believe, but the man who spawned 'Dollar' Bill Wirtz, one of the worst people in hockey, also helped give birth to the St. Louis Blues.

Wirtz had lobbied the other five NHL owners to accept St. Louis' bid over Baltimore's application for a reason. Since 1947, Wirtz and James Norris had owned the St. Louis Arena, which had been built in 1929 for the annual National Dairy Show. Sensing an opportunity to unload the neglected and run-down 37 year-old structure, Wirtz agreed to sponsor Salomon's St. Louis bid in exchange for their purchase of the Arena as the hockey team's home, for $4 million. In addition, Salomon's syndicate needed to post a $10,000 application fee and a $2 million expansion franchise fee to the NHL that entitled the Blues to 20 players.

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Shockingly, The Arena needed some work to get her up to NHL speed.

Fifty-five year old Sid Salomon Jr. was a top-producing executive for a life insurance firm in Clayton that bore his name, Sidney Salomon Jr. and Associates, Inc. Since 1946, Salomon's firm had served as a general agent in the St. Louis area for Crown Life Insurance Co. of Regina, Saskatchewan. Salomon was also an avid supporter of the Democratic Party, serving as Treasurer of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the 1950s, chairman of President John Kennedy's campaign in 1960, and Missouri's DNC-man for years. At one time, he had also been a part owner of both the St. Louis Browns and Cardinals.

Salomon commented that his 28 year-old son, Sid the III, was the one who pushed him to bid for the franchise, stating: "[My son] started thinking about it three or four years ago, and he finally got me interested in the project a couple of months back. At first, I hoped some other group in St. Louis would take the lead, and we could go in as minority owners - say 10%. But no other group stepped forward, so we...formed our syndicate and made our bid."

Much work needed to be done in the 18 months before the Blues first game in October, 1967. To handle the on-ice tasks, Salomon hired Lynn Patrick, formerly of the Boston Bruins organization, to serve as coach and general manager. Patrick in turn hired Scotty Bowman and Cliff Fletcher from the Montreal Canadiens to serve as his assistants and to scout every player who might be available in the NHL expansion draft on June 6, 1967.

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Scotty Bowman, seen here with seated player Dickie Moore, first made a name forhimself in the NHL with the St. Louis Blues.

Off the ice, Salomon became president of the franchise, and set up the Missouri Arena Corporation (MAC) to own the Arena, the 16.3 acres on which it sat, and the hockey team. He then empowered his son, Sid the Third, with the responsibility of restoring the Arena. Bob Burnes of the St. Louis Globe Democrat mentioned that Sid "found newspapers from the 1930's lying on the floor - that was an indication of the ground-up renovation he had to do. He spared no expense. His father had an open checkbook on it." Actual renovations cost $2 million to convert ‘the Old Barn' into an NHL arena suitable for seating 14,200 spectators for the Blues' inaugural 1967-68 season.

At first, St. Louis was slow to embrace the Blues. Their first year, they drew only 8,900 fans per game. But after the Blues advanced to the Stanley Cup Finals in 1968, the fans turned out in droves. Expanding from 14,200 to 18,000 seats, the Arena averaged at least 100% capacity for seven straight seasons, from 1968-69 to 1974-75. In five straight seasons beginning in 1970-71, the Blues had the highest attendance of any team in the entire NHL, despite a regular season record of just 155-169-68, and a post-season record of 7-17 over that period.

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At first, the Blues had a hard time getting people to embrace Blue Note. After a Cup finals appearnace, however, things changed.

During this era, the Blues were the hottest ticket in town. Fans loved the team and the team loved its owners, who spent lavishly on its players. In addition to enticing the players with large contracts for the time, the Salomon's treated the players like royalty. An April 7, 1969 article in Sports Illustrated highlighted this relationship: "The Salomon's tender loving care notoriously extends to the Blues players. Any man who does something to enhance the team's name - scores three goals in a game, makes the All-Star team, plays a major role in a key victory - gets a gold wristwatch. Not any gold wristwatch, mind you, but a $750 Patek Philippe."

After Red Berenson scored six goals in a game November 7, 1968, "the Salomon's presented him with a 1969 Chevrolet station wagon with a canoe on top and a Browning 20-gauge shotgun inside. "In New York or Montreal," said Berenson, who had played in both cities, "all you'd get would be a handshake." There were also highly publicized trips to Florida after the season, players and wives, for ten days, all expenses paid.

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Red Berenson's efforts on ice, highlighted by his record six goals against Philadelphia, inspired a generation of Blues fans.

Such treatment invited much disdain from other NHL clubs: "I think the Salomon's are on very thin ice with that kind of stuff," said Punch Implach, coach and GM of the Toronto Maple Leafs, "From a management point of view, its bad. It puts every other club in the league in an impossible competitive position." Everyone in St. Louis of course, loved the Salomon's renegade ways, especially when they issued retorts like,"I think Mr. Imlach owes us an apology. We're not trying to tell or show anyone else how to run their clubs. We paid $2 million for this franchise, and we're entitled to run it the way we please."

Scotty Bowman expounded upon the Salomon's generosity, "Whenever we're on the coast, Mr. Salomon wants me to take the players out to dinner at some real nice restaurant. The players still get their meal money - the dinner is on Mr. Salomon." Goalie Jacque Plante captured how the players felt about playing for Salomon's St. Louis Blues, "Today I make $35,000, which is $15,000 more than I ever earned in my best year in Montreal - to tell you the truth, I never dreamed of getting a salary like this...I still cannot believe this is really happening to me...with other teams, there is a wall between the owners and players. That is not true here...they are interested in us not just as hockey players, but as human beings. So we put out extra for them."

Everything seemed to be going perfectly. The Blues were having success on the ice, players loved the Salomon's ownership, and the team had led the entire NHL in attendance for years. And yet, unbeknownst to nearly everyone, storm clouds were gathering over the NHL's most successful expansion franchise. Over the course of only a few short years, the Blues went from being a new hockey Mecca to a franchise on the brink of collapse and contraction.

The second installment of The Rise and Fall of the Salomons, chronicling the reasons for their financial descent, will appear tomorrow on St. Louis Game Time.
-------------------

The Rise and Fall of the Salomons (Part II)
Storm clouds began to gather as early as May 18, 1970, for the Salomons when in an article in Sports Illustrated Sid III struck an ominous tone. "They say we got [the franchise] for $2 million, a bargain. But remember this, we spent another $8 million for our building and improvements. That's a big investment. We don't know if we'll be able to compete well enough in the future to make it pay off."

Salomon's quote was disturbing because it was made on the heels of the Blues' third consecutive Stanley Cup Finals appearance, and after the team had averaged at least 100 percent attendance the previous two seasons. With such success both on and off the ice, how could the Salomons be in potential trouble?

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It wasn't long after Noel Picard made Bobby Orr's Cup-winning celebration an iconic image that the Blues started to have financial problems.

It is difficult to say with total certainty, since the Missouri Arena Corporation (MAC), the corporate entity set up by the Salomons to own the St. Louis Arena and the St. Louis Blues hockey club, was a private company whose financial information and records weren't subject to public disclosure. However, various articles from the period, particularly from the St. Louis Post Dispatch, paint a telling picture.

It seems Sid Jr.'s financial troubles may have started back on August 9, 1972. That was the day that Crown Life Insurance, for whom he had been a general agent for in St. Louis since 1946, terminated its relationship with his life insurance agency. Salomon had been a top producer for Crown and had amassed his personal wealth through his 26-year association with the insurance giant. He later filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against Crown for $1.6 million, but ultimately lost the case after the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against him on June 23, 1976. Although this development didn't conclusively cause the Salomons' financial decline, it is conceivable that his separation from Crown was a major factor in his deteriorating fiscal situation.

The first widespread public disclosure that all was not well occurred in July 1975. For months, the Salomons had been lobbying St. Louis politicians for the right to build a 1,000-car parking lot in Forest Park, across from the Arena. After much public criticism over the proposal, chiefly from environmentalists that decried that more than seven of Forest Park's 1,400 acres would be taken for the project, Sid Jr. withdrew his plan.

In a lengthy letter to St. Louis Mayor John Poelker on July 14, 1975, later published in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Salomon not only explained why he was withdrawing his proposal, but a number of "the difficulties he had encountered in presenting major league hockey in St. Louis." These issues would be brought up repeatedly by the Salomons over the next several years:

-- 1. Arena Costs and Maintenance: When they purchased the Arena in 1966, the 37-year old structure was run down and had been neglected for decades. It held only 14,200 fans in the Blues' first year and that was after the Salomons had poured $2 million in improvements into the building, on top of their initial $4 million purchase price.

Over the next several years, from 1968 to 1975, MAC spent $5 million more for further improvements to the Arena. Seating capacity was expanded to 18,000, amenities such as the Arena Club were added and deferred maintenance was addressed.

Salomon emphasized that while MAC had invested $11 million in private funds, on-going maintenance costs for the Arena were still extremely high. Moreover, since the Arena was not air-conditioned the structure could only be used for seven months of the year, even though fixed expenses continued year-round.

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The St. Louis Arena was beloved, but upkeep on the old barn was high, contributing to the Salomons' problems.

-- 2. High Taxes: Sid Jr. mentioned that the average NHL team paid 4.5 percent in city and state taxes while the Blues paid 9.5 percent, which was the highest in the league. Salomon wanted the city to reduce this tax burden on the club, which had cost him about $5 million since 1967.

-- 3. Unfair Competition: At the time, the city of St. Louis owned and operated the Kiel Auditorium, which competed against the Arena for shows. For these events, Kiel charged rents substantially below what the market could command, which resulted in large annual operating losses that were in effect subsidized by city tax payers. These artificially low rents also made it impossible for the Arena to compete with the Kiel. Therefore, Salomon wanted the city to remove the Kiel as a competitor to the Arena for various events.

-- 4. Lack of Government Support: Sid Jr. explained that other cities encouraged the presence of professional sports teams by building new municipal sports arenas and providing them to their teams at a nominal rent. Salomon sought a similar arrangement from St. Louis politicians, but was rebuffed, first when he tried to get a new arena built directly south of Busch Stadium, and second, when he lobbied for a new arena to be part of the new Cervantes Convention Center.

The city of St. Louis was also adamant that they didn't have the money to purchase the existing Arena from the Salomon's at fair market value, and were therefore unable to lease the building back to the Blues.

Finally, Salomon allowed that, "it was increasingly difficult for the Blues to operate competitively in St. Louis, and future planning for our operation might well be affected...MAC has not shown an operating profit since it had begun operation in 1967...and in the most recent year ending June 30 1975, our cash flow loss was very substantial." Although Sid Jr. refused to supply figures publicly, he added, "you can be sure what I state is true."

In December 1975, Salomon implied that if he couldn't get a better financial arrangement with the city, he might have to take the Blues somewhere else. Following through on his threat, he gave Blues fans and the city of St. Louis a jolt when they learned that in January 1976 that the team had sought and been given permission by the other NHL owners to move or sell the St. Louis Blues.

Blues attorney Jim Cullen reiterated that, "if we had our choice, we'd prefer to stay in St. Louis. The hockey team itself is making a profit, but we're losing money on the building and we're losing more on the building than we're making on the team....We are trying to make it clear that we cannot continue to operate under the present conditions."

Things remained relatively quiet for the next 12 months until "Black Monday" on January 31, 1977. On that day, numerous Blues employees were fired so that the team could meet its Feb. 1 payroll. Among those let go was Senior Vice-President Lynn Patrick, the Salomon's loyal lieutenant and the first employee ever hired by the Blues in 1966. A gracious Patrick said he held no ill feelings about the move saying, "I could see this coming. The team was short of money and something had to be done. I know the situation and I know it isn't good."

The only statement released by the team said, "the financial burden of the Arena forced the Blues to consolidate efforts of various departments, necessitating reduction of various office personnel."

In addition to being victimized by the high costs of the Arena, the Blues also began to suffer at the gate. After leading the entire NHL in attendance for five years in a row from 1970-71 to 1974-75, and reaching seating capacity of 100 percent or greater for seven straight seasons, Blues attendance started declining, accelerating dramatically during the 1976-77 season. One anonymous source close to the Blues said, "that season ticket sales [in January, 1977] actually were down 5,000 from a year ago."

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Not even a roster featuring Gary Unger, Derek Sanderson, Bob Gassoff and Bobby Plager could keep the attendance up in 1976-1977.

Most disgruntled fans felt this drop-off was occurring due to "bad management," and cited two specific culprits. First, was the Salomons' threat to leave St. Louis, first uttered in January 1976. As one former season ticket holder noted, "it was as simple as this: when they threatened to move out, I quit." Another former holder echoed this sentiment: "the Salomons alienated a lot of people when they thought the city owed them something...and then they threatened to move and they made everything sound like the fans' fault."

The second most prominent reason was fan disgust over all the players and coaches that had been turned over by Salomon's son, Sid III. Yet another former season ticket holder said, "you hear so much disenchantment. I think it started with Sid the Third. His trades, his canning of coaches - I think people have never forgiven him for firing Scotty Bowman and Al Arbour."

Although Sid III was never a coach or general manager, he was notorious for his interference with his hockey staff over players, on-ice strategy and trades. Most fans felt that Sid III was actually pulling the club's strings behind-the-scenes, dictating to others what he wanted done.

One of the biggest problems with this approach was that he could never stick with a plan. In what can only be described as a schizophrenic reign of error by the Salomons, lasting from when Bowman left in April, 1971, until Ralston-Purina closed on the purchase of the club from the Salomon's in September 1977, the Blues had six different GMs and made eleven coaching changes. It also made team continuity and planning impossible.

Arbour and Bowman were both exasperated by Sid III, as was Jimmy Devellano, who was originally employed by the Salomons as a Blues scout. After this trio left St. Louis, they all became NHL legends over the next four decades, winning 20 Stanley Cup championships with the Canadiens, Islanders and Red Wings.

Echoing previous sentiments, Devellano said, "the owner's son, Sid Salomon III, was an awful meddler. He couldn't keep good managers and coaches because of his constant meddling. Sid was a good person, but he just didn't know hockey. His interference caused a lot of turmoil in St. Louis, and it cost the Salomons dearly."

An anonymous former employee that was part of the "Black Monday" purge spoke to the St. Louis Post Dispatch on February 2, 1977 about how MAC reached its current financial crisis, "The Arena was over-improved. A lot of money was wasted... the Arena was also overstaffed; there were just a lot of people out there who had no jobs...I could see where they could have saved $200,000 by cutting them off."

This individual also added that, "too much money was tied up in deferred contracts to early Blues stars, that too much money was lost in paying off all the various coaches who had been fired and that the Blues took their customers for granted after reaching the sell-out point."

By the spring of 1977, the franchise was careening out of control. The club was hemoraging money, fans stayed away by the thousands and a bankruptcy filing seemed imminent.

As bad as things were, they would only get worse. The third and final installment of The Rise and Fall of the Salomons, detailing those events from the summer of 1977, will appear Saturday on St. Louis Game Time.
---------------------

The Rise and Fall of the Salomons (Part III)
By 1977, the Missouri Arena Corporation (MAC), the corporate entity set up by the Salomons in 1966 that owned the Arena and the hockey team, was hemorrhaging money. Fans stayed away by the thousands, disenchanted by the Salomons' threat to move the team, and Sid III's constant meddling in the team's on-ice affairs. As St. Louis Post Dispatch columnist Jeff Meyers put it, "what began as a noble adventure into professional hockey by the Salomons has turned into a disaster."

The rapid off-ice decline of the franchise mirrored the physical deterioration of the Salomons as well. In January 1977, Sid Jr. suffered two heart attacks in one month, the second of which was severe enough to put him into a temporary coma. Sid III, who battled against cancer most of his adult life, was back in the hospital again, getting treatment for a relapse of his Hodgkin's disease.

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With the franchise and its owners in critical condition, much of the day-to-day operations as well as tending to the future of the franchise fell to general manager Emile Francis.

Critically ill, financially strapped and far removed from the day-to-day operations of the team, the Salomons indicated that they would not operate the team for the 1977-78 season. In order to keep the franchise alive, a new ownership group would need to step forward to buy the Arena and the Blues.

The bad news continued. In late April, 16 MAC employees were fired, which stripped it to nothing but security personnel. At the NHL's Board of Governor's meeting in May 1977, rumors swirled that the Blues were about to declare bankruptcy.

Not addressing this gossip, Blues Vice-President and General Manager Emile Francis insisted that negotiations with several different ownership groups to sell the team were going well. The most likely suitor seemed to be Fred Kummer, president of HBE Corp., a hospital and medical design/construction company headquartered in St. Louis. In his negotiations, Kummer stressed the need for the Blues to clear up their list of creditors.

The largest single creditor to which Kummer was referring was Cousins Mortgage & Equity Insurance Co. of Atlanta. Cousins held the $5.4 million first mortgage on the Arena, which reportedly required about $70,000 in amortization payments per month.

When MAC became unable to pay this debt service, the Salomons, Kummer and other potential ownership groups sought to settle this debt with Cousins at a heavily discounted price, believed to be between $2 to $3 million. But each time, no agreement could be reached because Cousins refused to modify these loan terms.

During Kummer's negotiations, word leaked out that MAC and the Salomons were facing an increasing number of unpaid creditors beyond Cousins. On June 5, The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported that St. Louis City Counselor Jack Koehr was preparing to sue the Blues to recover $265,283 in delinquent amusement taxes that the club hadn't paid since March 1976. William Combs, comptroller of the Blues, said, "the club intended to pay the tax but had been unable to do so because of financial problems."

Two days later, the Post Dispatch reported that former Blues player Jim McCrimmon had sued the Blues in U.S. District Court to recover $90,000 in unpaid wages. It was also reported that three weeks earlier another former Blues player, Bruce Cowick, filed a similar suit seeking unpaid wages. In addition, other unfulfilled obligations included extended payment deals on contracts with several early Blues stars such as Red Berenson, Jacques Plante and Glenn Hall, that reached into the 1980s. A frustrated Fred Kummer allowed that "the Blues are in default on many things. We're trying to decide how ugly to make the whole thing. It could be ugly. That's what bankruptcy is all about."

However, on June 24, 1977, after months of negotiations, Kummer ended talks with the Blues stating, "HBE tried everything that was realistically possible, but negotiations with major creditors of the Blues failed to produce a viable purchase plan."

The unfortunate reality was that the purchase of the Arena and the Blues was an unattractive proposition for the same reasons the Salomons were looking to sell in the first place, high city and state taxes, unfair competition from the city-owned Kiel Auditorium, a lack of government support for building a new facility and high maintenance costs on the St. Louis Arena.

Blues attorney Jim Cullen called Kummer's announcement "the darkest day in the history of the team. What we need now to save the team and the franchise for St. Louis is a prayer, a minor miracle, some emergence of civic pride of some potential buyer."

After HBE's negotiations with MAC and the Salomons ended, it was revealed that Mercantile Bank & Trust Co. was reportedly owed $1 million on outstanding loans to the franchise. In addition, the concession company Sports Service, a subsidiary of Emprise Corporation, was also reportedly owed $800,000, stemming from a $1.5 million loan Emprise gave the Salomons back in 1967, in exchange for a long-term contract to provide food and beverages at the Arena.

Brian O'Neill, the NHL's executive vice-president and the man responsible for drawing up the NHL's schedule said in early July, "No deadline for the sale of the St. Louis Blues has been established. I would assume however, that something would need to be done by Aug. 23 when we will have our semi-annual meeting in Toronto."

Even if the Blues found a new owner with deep pockets in the next 30 days, the Blues uncertain future meant that no 1977-78 ticket selling campaign had been conducted since the previous season ended back in April. The Blues future was also damaged when their No.1 draft pick, defenseman Scott Campbell, decided to sign with the Houston Aeros of the World Hockey Association. Campbell indicated that the Blues' financial problems and uncertain future were the main reasons behind his decision.

With only a month until O'Neill's deadline, unconfirmed reports surfaced that Ralston-Purina Co., the pet food company headquartered in downtown St. Louis, might be interested in purchasing the Blues. Throughout July, these whispers became louder until rumor became reality. On July 27, 1977 Ralston announced a tentative agreement to buy the St. Louis Blues.

R. Hal Dean, Ralston's chairman, cited "civic duty" as the reason for the company's purchase of the team. The Post Dispatch reported that "the Blues apparently would have been forced to cease operation if the St. Louis-based pet food giant had not stepped in." Dean stated that "Ralston Purina wouldn't have entered the hockey business if we weren't convinced that, unless we bought the team, the Blues would have left St. Louis. We stepped in only as a last-ditch, last-resort effort."

The only detail of the purchase made public was that "the transaction will represent a cash commitment by Ralston of some $4 million." Dean also added that "all secured debts will be honored, but the issue is too complex to go into all the details at this time." This commitment only included the purchase of the hockey team. At the time, Ralston didn't plan on purchasing the St. Louis Arena, only renting it for Blues home games from a new "joint venture" that was leasing the building from Cousins Corp.

But when the newspapers announced Ralston's official closing on the purchase of the St. Louis Blues hockey team on Sept. 29, 1977, the modified deal included acquisition of the St. Louis Arena as well. Two months of due diligence convinced Dean that this was a better arrangement for his company. Ralston agreed to buy the hockey team, the Arena (renamed the Checkerdome) and the 20 acres of land on which it sat, as well as the stock of the Missouri Arena Corporation. Dean said the transaction cost Ralston about $8.8 million (or $30 million in 2007 dollars,) and the "satisfaction and assumption of MAC's financial obligations, most of which were discounted." This included previously mentioned debts to Cousins Mortgage & Equity Insurance Co., the City of St. Louis, Mercantile Bank & Trust Co., Sports Service Co., and former Blues players, staff and personnel.

Dean also mentioned that the Checkerdome would focus on attracting a wide variety of activities and functions year-round. This meant leasing the building to an experienced management firm, Dome Associates Inc., as well as installing air-conditioning in April 1979. Under the Salomons, it was determined that the installation of air conditioning was cost-prohibitive, allowing the Arena to only be used about seven months of the year, from October to April.

Moreover, during the Salomons' reign, Sid the Third stubbornly insisted that his Blues got the first call on all dates at the Arena, even for daily practices. He refused to alter the Blues schedule to accommodate circuses, concerts and other would-be renters, who would have brought in more money to help MAC's bottom line. The result, as Post Dispatch columnist Bob Broeg stated, "was that the Arena was dark too many nights and plenty of non-hockey events never came off. Common sense became nonsense, and turned the Arena into a minus, rather than a plus."

Here's a telling example of how this hurt the Salomon's bottom line: During the 1976-77 season, the Arena had barely more than 100 dates filled for the year, compared to 175 in Chicago, 200 in Atlanta, 275 in Washington and 350 in Philadelphia. Quite simply, to make a 40-year-old, 18,000-seat venue with high operating costs profitable, one must have income-generating events for more than half a month, each month, for seven months a year. Either the Salomons never realized this certainty, or became aware of it far too late.

After Ralston Purina rescued the Salomons in 1977, they moved down to Florida permanently. In May 1986, Sid Jr. died of another heart attack, at the age of 76. Less than three years later, in December 1988, Sid III finally succumbed to the cancer he had battled all his life. He was just 51 years old.

Post Dispatch columnist Jeff Meyers said, "if the Salomons had a fault, it was that they tried too hard to please everybody. They were obsessed with making the Arena a comfortable, visually exciting place to watch a hockey game, and obsessed with putting a winning team on the ice...the Salomons cared."

Former Blues broadcaster Dan Kelly intoned, "[St. Louis] had such great early success, that I think the Salomons thought it would be easy...when Sid Jr. moved to Florida, I think he was most sad to leave the hockey team that he gave so much to build. He really did love the Blues, and I think he died of a broken heart."
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Re: The Rise & Fall of the Salomons

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Too long. F-.
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Re: The Rise & Fall of the Salomons

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ComradeT wrote:Too long. F-.
Normally I would agree with you. But it's all good stuff. Very interesting.
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Re: The Rise & Fall of the Salomons

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WOW! The Blues owe their existence to the HAWKS! :aaaa: :lol:

Cprice, it's a long read but well worth it!

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Re: The Rise & Fall of the Salomons

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cprice12 wrote:
ComradeT wrote:Too long. F-.
Normally I would agree with you. But it's all good stuff. Very interesting.
Too tired to read today. Maybe tomorrow. F- to myself for being a pansy.
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Re: The Rise & Fall of the Salomons

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The book written by Jeremy Rutherford does a great job explaining it too. 100 Things Blues fans should know and do before they die" I haven't been able to put it down. Good stuff and pretty cheap on Amazon.
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Re: The Rise & Fall of the Salomons

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TSUCookieMonster wrote:The book written by Jeremy Rutherford does a great job explaining it too. 100 Things Blues fans should know and do before they die" I haven't been able to put it down. Good stuff and pretty cheap on Amazon.
Yup, I got that for xmas. It really is a good book. Lots of good stuff in there.
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Re: The Rise & Fall of the Salomons

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cprice12 wrote:
TSUCookieMonster wrote:The book written by Jeremy Rutherford does a great job explaining it too. 100 Things Blues fans should know and do before they die" I haven't been able to put it down. Good stuff and pretty cheap on Amazon.
Yup, I got that for xmas. It really is a good book. Lots of good stuff in there.
I got it for my birthday. I tore through it in a week. Each story is about 3-4 pages, It's a really fast read.
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Re: The Rise & Fall of the Salomons

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JesusNEVERexisted wrote:WOW! The Blues owe their existence to the HAWKS! :aaaa: :lol: !
I'm not even from the STL and I've known this for decades and have commented on this quite a few times. Ain't you from there?
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Re: The Rise & Fall of the Salomons

Post by STLADOGG »

Oaklandblue wrote:
JesusNEVERexisted wrote:WOW! The Blues owe their existence to the HAWKS! :aaaa: :lol: !
I'm not even from the STL and I've known this for decades and have commented on this quite a few times. Ain't you from there?
That's what I was thinking, I've known this for a long time too. I guess his 101 things to know about the Blues for dummies book didn't cover that.
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Re: The Rise & Fall of the Salomons

Post by cprice12 »

STLADOGG wrote:
Oaklandblue wrote:
JesusNEVERexisted wrote:WOW! The Blues owe their existence to the HAWKS! :aaaa: :lol: !
I'm not even from the STL and I've known this for decades and have commented on this quite a few times. Ain't you from there?
That's what I was thinking, I've known this for a long time too. I guess his 101 things to know about the Blues for dummies book didn't cover that.
Yeah, I thought that was common knowledge for die hard Blues fans.
I can see the casual fan not knowing that though...actually, I'd be money that vast majority of casual Blues fans wouldn't know that. You have to put forth an effort to read about the team's history (which is really pretty fascinating) to know that.
If anyone hasn't read up on their Blues history, read up...we have an extremely interesting history.
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