Bill Gadsby was 12 years old and crossing the Atlantic with his mother on the British ocean liner Athenia at the outset of World War II when it was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine. They spent several hours in a lifeboat before being rescued.
At 14, he was walking in his native Calgary, Alberta, when a large piece of concrete fell from the facing of a four-story building and grazed his shirt.
When he was 25, he contracted polio.
He was, in short, a survivor — and so he remained as a star defenseman in the rough and tough Original Six era of the National Hockey League, when skaters went without helmets and goalies shunned masks.