[timun]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

By the mid 60's the rumblings were becoming earth quakes. Coffey Hall who owned the San Francisco Seals said "The time has come for the NHL to realize that Las Angeles and San Francisco can't wait. Our hockey fans are just as major league conscious as fans of baseball and football and feel they should be up there. An angry feeling is developing".

Coleman E. "Coley" Hall. He founded the Vancouver Canucks—originally of the Pacific Coast Hockey League—in 1945, and owned the team until selling to the Pacific National Exhibition (who owned the Forum, their home arena) in 1956. He stayed on as Canucks president until 1961.

The PCHL originally had teams along the coast all the way down to San Diego, but by 1951 teams in San Diego, Los Angeles, Hollywood, Oakland, San Francisco, Fresno, Portland and Vancouver, Washington had folded. They were down to the Canucks and teams in New Westminster, Victoria, Seattle and Tacoma. They added three teams from the former Western Canada Senior League—the Saskatoon Quakers, Edmonton Flyers and Calgary Stampeders—and in 1952 changed the league name to Western Hockey League: taking the exact same name as the former top-flight pro league that last competed with the NHL for the Stanley Cup until 1926.

The Tacoma Rockets only lasted the inaugural '52-'53 season, and the Seattle Bombers folded in 1954, leaving the WHL a six-team Canada-only league for the '54-'55 season. They re-added a team in Seattle in '55, plus Winnipeg and Regina (the latter of which moved to Brandon after only a few games), and eventually Spokane ('58) and back to Portland ('60). By the '60s they were openly talking about taking on the NHL because of the NHL's adamant refusal to expand west. The Victoria Cougars moved south to Los Angeles in 1961, becoming the Blades, while the Winnipeg Warriors folded and Coley Hall was awarded an expansion team in San Francisco. He named the team 'Seals' after the old Pacific Coast League baseball team, who had been in the PCL from 1903 until they folded when the New York Giants announced their move to San Francisco in 1958. (Likewise the PCL's LA Angels moved to Spokane and became the Indians when the Brooklyn Dodgers announced their move to LA that year too.)

Coley Hall sold the Seals to local interests headed by Mel Swig, son of hotelier Benjamin Swig (owner of the Fairmont chain), in 1964. Swig would go on to sell the Seals to a group headed by Barry Van Gerbig in 1966, and the Seals joined the NHL in the first expansion in 1967.

PNE sold a portion of the Canucks to a group headed by former Vancouver and New Westminster mayor Fred Hume, who sold his share to BC Tel president Cyrus McLean. Coley Hall would represent the Canucks' application to join the NHL in 1967, and after the failed bid, joined forces with a rival bid from Max Bell & Frank McMahon (yes, that Max Bell, and Frank McMahon as in McMahon Stadium). McMahon, Bell, McLean and Hall stayed on as minority shareholders but sold about 60% of the team to Minneapolis-based insurance company Medicor, owned by Tom Scallen, in 1969. Scallen financed the Canucks' successful expansion bid to the NHL, and Coley Hall stayed on as the club's president—again—through 1974, working to keep the team afloat as Scallen faced fraud charges for using the Canucks ownership stake to raise funds to pay of Medicor's debts. Scallen was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison (eventually pardoned in the 1980s), and Hall facilitated the sale of Scallen/Medicor's share of the Canucks to Frank Griffiths in 1974.