Béliveau's fast hat changed face of NHL

The photo of a joyful Béliveau after his 1955 history-changing four-goal effort is a story in itself.

The image appeared in the Montreal Star on Feb. 12, 1959 with Béliveau holding three pucks - two in his left hand, one in his right - above a caption describing his three goals and one assist in a 5-2 Canadiens win over Toronto the night before.

But both image and caption were misleading, at the very least. The photo had been taken three years and three months earlier, and in the unretouched image Béliveau is holding four pucks - two in each hand - to celebrate his output of Nov. 5, 1955.

The three-puck Béliveau of 1959 was a convenient fib to illustrate his seventh career hat-trick, his second of that season. And more than an octagonal-crested puck was cropped from the '59 reproduction, the print heavily retouched to accommodate crude newspaper photo-engraving of the day.

Erased by an artist's thick airbrush on the now brittle, half-century-old 8x10 glossy was fellow future Hall of Famer Bert Olmstead, in longjohns and flimsy shoulder pads, and the detail of the dressing-room wall, a white shirt and dark suit jacket hung casually behind the teammates.

A stripping yesterday of the opaque airbrushing with water, tissue and cotton swabs, and then a higher- tech digital cleansing, reveals the wonderful scene as late Canadiens photographer David Bier would have seen it more than 53 years ago.

Jean Béliveau with four pucks from his remarkable 1955 game, teammate Bert Olmstead at left, in a photo manually and digitally restored from what appeared in the Montreal Star.
David Bier, Gazette files