By: Ron "Scoreboard" Johnston - On January 13, 1986, five businessmen - Jack Nicolle, Ted Knight, Morley Gusway, Billy Hicke and "Huddy" Bell bought the Regina Pats franshise from Herb Pinder Jr.
HERBERT (HUDDY) BELL, 83 -
ATHLETE, BUSINESSMAN
Developer built a reputation for a fair deal 'He wanted both parties in a transaction to come away successful. It was a rather unusual approach.'
DANNY GALLAGHER - Special to The Globe and Mail - September 9, 2009
Huddy Bell's was a true rags-to-riches story. A school dropout, he rose to prominence as a two-sport pro athlete and then as an astute businessman in Regina and Arizona.
The story goes that Mr. Bell, a dashing man suffering from severe arthritis in his 40s, was taken off a three-hour flight to Phoenix from Regina on a stretcher in the 1960s and sent to a Phoenix hospital for help. The health care and dry heat helped do wonders for him.
"He was really, really hurting when he went to Phoenix that first time," his brother Dick said. "The air down there made his life so different."
Mr. Bell didn't stay permanently in Arizona that first trip but eventually he did, making a name for himself in construction and development with the help of land deals with the U.S. government and its Bureau of Land Management.
"Huddy had a very interesting background and his life would make a great movie," said Will Klein, who moved from Regina to Phoenix and purchased a house there from Mr. Bell in 1988. "He overcame very humble beginnings in the Depression years."
Mr. Bell's entrepreneurial spirit began at an early age in Regina when he sold chocolate bars and delivered the Regina Leader-Post newspaper. He would jump the fence at Max Goldman's auto-parts shop, grab a few items and then sell them back to him. The kid would later confess to Mr. Goldman what he had been doing and helped Mr. Goldman out financially.
Huddy quit school at the age of 13 and hopped a freight train that took him two provinces away to the Sault Ste. Marie area, where he laboured in the bush as a welder and truck driver. The move at such a delicate age puzzled his parents Tom and Nellie and they were happy to see him return home within a few months.
As an older teenager, he raced cars and played competitive baseball when he wasn't buying and selling automobiles to make a living. At 16, he saw the bright lights of New York City for the first time when he accompanied a Regina hockey team to play in a tournament. At 18, the defenceman was a member of the Regina Industries Commandos, who participated in the 1944 Memorial Cup playdowns before they were eliminated by B.C.'s Trail Smoke Eaters.
Within a few years, Mr. Bell was playing two pro sports in one year: hockey, as well as football with the CFL's Saskatchewan Roughriders. In the summer he would play on the gridiron, in the fall and winter he was on the ice. He was scouted and signed to a contract by the NHL's New York Rangers but he played only one game in the big show - in March 1947 against the Chicago Black Hawks after playing most of the 1946-47 season with the AHL's New York Ramblers.
The same year he was signed by the Rangers, Mr. Bell would begin a two-year stint as a lineman with the Roughriders. Somehow, Mr. Bell survived in this rough and tumble game in the trenches with a mere figure of 5-foot-10, 180 pounds.
Mr. Bell would play close to 375 games in hockey's minor-league outposts, including stints in St. Paul, Minn., and Tacoma, Wash. After his hockey and football careers ended, he returned east to run a horsemeat business in Toronto and Hamilton but it petered out so he returned to Regina and started his own car-lot operation, Stampede Motors.
In 1959, Mr. Bell and his brother Dick built the Bell City Motel, which they operated until 1975. He also owned the Georgia Hotel in Regina for many years. His business empire took off when he began constructing and developing buildings and apartment blocks in Regina and Saskatoon with the help of Dick, a double amputee.
By 1978 at the age of 53, he had shifted the focus of his business to Phoenix to continue his career as a developer and to keep his arthritis in line.
It turns out Mr. Bell had established a reputation of being fair in deals he conducted. "His way of doing business was that it was better to get something that's profitable than try and hang on for the last dollar," Mr. Will Klein said. "He wanted both parties in a transaction to come away successful. It was a rather unusual approach."
Acquiring and trading land in Arizona for development was his forte. He was self-described as a "horse trader" and loved making the deal.
To make up for his lack of formal education, he used street smarts to cut many deals on a handshake and with a welcoming demeanour. His reputation prompted author Peter C. Newman to mention him in his book The Acquisitors. Even the famous Hunt brothers in Dallas heard about his exploits and wanted to hire him away but he turned them down.
"I've never met a guy like him before or since," said his friend and long-time Royal Bank finance man Boyd Robertson. "I first met him in 1980. The Royal Bank had land down in the Phoenix area that we were trying to sell but we couldn't move it. Dick suggested Huddy might be able to do it and he did it for a fee."
Over the years, the bank would do about 100 deals with Mr. Bell. "He was probably the largest land assembler in the entire Phoenix area," Mr. Robertston said. "There was nobody bigger than him in that area. He put together land packages for corporations and individuals. He would transfer the land to himself and then sell it to other buyers." His relationship with the U.S. government and its Bureau of Land Management was especially gratifying.
"In Arizona, for someone like Huddy to become so favoured by land-management authorities in transactions is not an easy thing to do," Mr. Klein said. "They had faith in Huddy because they saw him as a fair kind of guy."
For example, the Lake Pleasant area north of Phoenix near Peoria was once raw land that the Bureau of Land Management couldn't develop for some reason or another. But with intervention by Mr. Bell, the area soon comprised houses and shopping centres. Ditto for the White Tank National park district in relatively the same area. Mr. Robertson would also say that 80 per cent of the west side of Phoenix was developed by Mr. Bell.
Despite his accomplished work and life as a benefactor, Mr. Bell detested attention. He didn't like microphones, didn't do interviews. When he donated a chunk of land to Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, the institution responded by granting him an honorary doctorate. A local TV station heard about it and showed up unannounced at his residence. In shorts and workclothes while labouring in the backyard, the caught-off-guard Mr. Bell asked the reporter and cameramen what they wanted.
"We're looking to interview Mr. Bell," he was told. "Mr. Bell is not home. I'm the gardener," he replied.
Mr. Bell's death stemmed from a fall while he was on business in Regina. He was about to check out of the Hotel Saskatchewan when he fell down a staircase and hit his head, an arm and a hip that had been replaced earlier in the summer. He agreed to go to the emergency ward at Regina's Pasqua Hospital.
After waiting for about 90 minutes, he got impatient and decided to leave because he wanted to return to Phoenix. Dick Bell's wife Betty was with him and said he signed off with the medical staff at Pasqua, returned to Phoenix and immediately went to the Mayo Clinic for a CAT scan, which indicated everything was fine.
After feeling no ill affects for a week, he suddenly went unconscious with a blood clot to the brain and died at the Mayo Clinic shortly afterward.
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