Marching On: The Ralph McCreath Story

"His presence was felt the moment he walked into a room. He had a way about him that made people take notice." - Jim McCreath, December 15, 2008, "Memoir For My Father"

The son of Bert and Margaret McCreath, Ralph Scott McCreath was born on April 27, 1919, in Toronto, Ontario. The McCreath's, a Presbyterian family, maintained a home in the affluent Moore Park district of Toronto and Ralph, his sisters June and Louise and younger brother Ross were doted on by their parents Bert and Margaret and a live-in Danish servant, growing up during the roaring twenties wanting for very little.

Sandy McKechnie, Dudley Reburn, James Bain, Ralph McCreath, Billy Brown and Gordon Gilchrist in the 1931 Toronto Skating Club carnival

As a teenager, Ralph attended the North Toronto Collegiate School where his excellence at athletics overshadowed his considerable scholastic skill. He participated in a wide range of high school sports, but the sports he showed the most passion for were hockey and figure skating.

Photo courtesy Archives Of Ontario, Herbert Nott fonds

One hockey coach had him jump over benches to practice leaping over fallen defencemen on his way to the net, a skill which aided him in his early lessons in free skating. Six-foot-tall Ralph's high-flying jumps soon caught the attention of the coaches at the Toronto Skating Club and in 1935, after he had won four medals in the junior men's and pairs events at the Canadian Championships, he gave up hockey entirely to focus on figure skating under coach Walter Arian.

Left: Ralph McCreath, Veronica Clarke, Constance and Bud Wilson. Photo courtesy "Skating" magazine. Right: Veronica Clarke and Ralph McCreath. Photo courtesy Hilary Bruun.

In the years that followed, Ralph's success in singles, pairs, fours and ice dancing was nothing short of remarkable. From 1936 to 1941, he won an incredible twenty-four medals at the Canadian and North American Championships, including gold medals in singles, pairs, the fourteenstep, tenstep and fours at the Canadian Championships.

Norah McCarthy and Ralph McCreath. Photos courtesy "Skating" magazine (left) and "Skating Through The Years" (right).

Ralph's skating pushed the athletic boundaries of the time. He and his partners performed particularly novel lifts and his winning free skating performance at the 1940 Canadian Championships in Ottawa included an Axel, double Salchow and double loop.

Top: Ralph McCreath, Bud Wilson and the Caley sisters, 1939 North American fours champions. Bottom: Mary Rose Thacker, Ralph McCreath and Eleanor O'Meara. Photos courtesy "Skating" magazine.

With partners Veronica Clarke, Norah McCarthy and Eleanor O'Meara, Ralph was one of the most in-demand skaters for carnivals throughout Ontario and the Eastern United States. He performed in a charity ice gala at Madison Square Garden, hitchhiked to Lake Placid every summer to train, competed in forty-below temperatures and even earned a much-coveted spot on the Canadian team set to attend the 1940 Winter Olympic Games that were ultimately cancelled after the outbreak of World War II.

Eleanor O'Meara and Ralph McCreath

In October of 1940, Ralph put his studies at the University Of Toronto on hold and bid adieu to his buddies at the Theta Delta Chi fraternity when he and his younger brother Ross enlisted in the 48th Highlanders Of Canada. Continuing to train and compete that winter despite his military obligations, the twenty-one-year-old Lance Corporal had perhaps his finest hour at the 1941 North American Championships in Philadelphia.

Left: Mary Rose Thacker, Ralph McCreath and Eleanor O'Meara. Photo courtesy "Skating" magazine. Right: Norah McCarthy and Ralph McCreath in act.

After defeating Donna Atwood and Eugene Turner to win the pairs event with Eleanor O'Meara, Ralph managed an incredible come-from-behind win in the men's event after being over thirty points behind Turner in the figures. His exciting free skating performance was set to music specially orchestrated by the Toronto Skating Club's musical director Jack Jardine that stopped when he jumped, adding to the dramatic effect of his performance. Even more dramatic was the judging of the competition. The six judges - three from Canada and three from America - split their votes down the middle, with only an eighth of a point ultimately determining the final result. Associated Press reporters called it "one of the most dramatic finishes in the history of the competition." In his book "Dick Button On Skates", Dick Button recalled, "Out of the six judges, the three Canadians voted first places to the Canadian McCreath and three American judges voted first to the American Turner. Each judge placed the skater from the other country second, thereby giving both of the skaters a total of ordinals... The decision was decided on the fact that the Canadian judges had marked the American slightly slower in second place than the Americans had marked the Canadian skater in second place." The results of this event were a textbook example of why having an even number of judges at the North American Championships was a terrible, terrible idea. Interestingly, his narrow win in Philadelphia was followed up by a narrow loss to sculler Theo DuBois in the quest for that year's Lou Marsh Trophy, one of Canada's top sporting honours.

Left: Ralph's brother Ross. Photo courtesy Toronto Public Library, from Toronto Star Photographic Archive. Reproduced for educational purposes under license permission. Right: Ralph in uniform. Photo courtesy "Skating" magazine.

That summer, Ralph sailed for Europe. During the War, he served in England, France and North Africa and rose to the rank of Major in the Royal Canadian Ordnance Corps. While in London, he did some skating and went to visit an injured friend in the hospital. He found Stewart Reburn in the next bed.
In 2008, his son Jim recalled, "As a curious youngster I would often ask him questions about his time in the army. He would always talk about the wonderful people he had met and the amazing places he had seen, but there was a different look in his eyes when he spoke of these things. He would try to change the subject as quickly as possible. I am sure he must have felt that after living through those hellish times, some memories are best left untold."

Ralph and Myrtle McCreath on their wedding day. Photo courtesy Toronto Public Library, from Toronto Star Photographic Archive. Reproduced for educational purposes under license permission.

Returning to Canada, Ralph won his third and final Canadian senior men's title in 1946 ahead of Norris Bowden and Roger Wickson. He wore his military uniform for his free skating performance. He later teamed up with Gloria Lillico to perform a pair in carnivals.

Eleanor O'Meara and Ralph McCreath. Photo courtesy Archives of Ontario. 

After obtaining his law degree at Osgoode Law School in 1949, Ralph settled on Kingsway Crescent in Toronto with his wife Myrtle [Franceschini] and raised three sons and a daughter. He practiced corporate law and served as a CFSA judge, referee and team leader. He judged at three Olympic Games and several World Championships, notably voting for Petra Burka when she won the 1965 World title and for Frances Dafoe and Norris Bowden when they settled for silver in 1956. Even though Ralph had voted for him and Dafoe at the 1956 World Championships, Bowden was vocal about his former competitor's appointment as Canada's judge and team leader that season before the team even left for Europe to participate in the Winter Olympics in Cortina d'Ampezzo. In Bowden's famous letter to the CFSA that got him banned, he questioned "whether the best interests of the team were considered in selecting a judge who, by his own admission, had not been too interested in skating as of late as witnessed by not having seen the Canadian world champion pair skate for three years though they were members of the same club and gave numerous exhibitions."

Barbara Ann Scott and Ralph McCreath. Photo courtesy "Skating" magazine.

Despite serving as a member of the CFSA's executive, a founding member of the Olympic Trust and a trustee of the Canadian Olympic Endowment Fund, the perception that Ralph was a lawyer first and a judge second led some to question where his loyalties lay at a time when North American skaters were frequently at the mercy of panels heavily stacked with European judges. Ralph was also criticized for being a tough cookie. Kenny Moir recalled, "I remember being a demonstrator at a judges seminar being presented by Ralph McCreath back in the late sixties in Vancouver. He was one of Canada's top judges so there was a huge turnout of notable judges which was scary in itself. But he was terrifying. He'd whisper the figure error to make in your ear which is tough to pull off and if you were to do it correctly and you made errors he'd go to town on you in front of the crowd. I did have one high note though, when he asked me to do a series jump combination and no one could break it down, I made his day so he could yell at them!"

Ralph McCreath, Charles Rathgab and Imre Szabo

Ralph may have been a tough judge, but he was also a benevolent one. He accepted Bruce Hyland's invitation to come take a look at the training sessions of his students. In those days, skaters and coaches were very much in one camp and judges in another. Monitoring sessions simply weren't a thing yet, and there was always the worry on both sides that a judge offering constructive feedback to a skater might be perceived as untoward. Debbi Wilkes recalled, "You could never talk about it and you never admitted it because it was totally inappropriate as things were defined in those days."

Photo courtesy Toronto Public Library, from Toronto Star Photographic Archive. Reproduced for educational purposes under license permission.

Tragically, Ralph's wife Myrtle passed away at the age of forty-six in 1968. Many years later he remarried. He devoted much of his free time to his farm and travel and was a lifelong fan of football and hockey. Later in life, he played the piano in a musical trio with two of his good friends, performing at special events and parties. In 1994, he was inducted into the CFSA (Skate Canada) Hall Of Fame. After suffering a stroke only months before, Ralph passed away at his Toronto home on May 2, 1997, at the age of seventy-eight. In the "Toronto Star" that year, his son Jim recalled, "He never wanted to admit he was slowing down. He was in great shape until the time of his stroke... The funny thing about him throughout his life, he would never brag about what he could do. He just knew what he could do... and [would] go out and do it."

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