Even though the Cominco smelters in downtown Trail at one time routinely generated great clouds of smoke, thats not how the hockey club got its unique name.
In fact, "Smoke Eaters" was coined during a Savage Cup playoff series against Vancouver in 1929 when the Trail Seniors, as they were then called, took a bad penalty and the fans littered the ice with debris. One item tossed at the Trail bench was a pipe, still blowing smoke. Trail's star center, Carroll Kendall, picked it up and skated onto the ice for his next shift with the pipe jauntily clenched between his teeth.
A cartoon by Jack Booth in the next days edition of the Vancouver Province showed Kendall puffing on the pipe, and an accompanying story by sportswriter A.R. Dingman dubbed the Trail team "a bunch of smoke-eaters". The moniker gained world-wide fame when Trail won the world amateur championship in both 1939 and 1961, and survives to this day with the city's entry in the British Columbia Hockey League.
