lit a candle 8h agoMy dad kept a scrapbook clipping about the 1968 team and Jack Dale's name was in it, he'd point to it every Olympics. Eighty years old. Never met him, never even been to Minnesota, but that little clipping made hockey feel like something our family had a piece of.
Their story
John Byron Dale, known as Jack Dale, was an American ice hockey player who represented the United States at the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble. He died at his home in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on 16 September 2026, at the age of 80, surrounded by family. Dale was born in…
John Byron Dale, known as Jack Dale, was an American ice hockey player who represented the United States at the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble. He died at his home in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on 16 September 2026, at the age of 80, surrounded by family.
Dale was born in Saint Paul on 19 December 1945 and grew up in the city's Como neighborhood. At Cretin High School he starred in football, hockey and baseball before joining the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers. A left wing who stood five feet nine inches, he played for the Johnstown Jets of the Eastern Hockey League and later for the Seattle Totems. His international peak came in 1968, when he skated for Team USA at the Grenoble Olympics.
A significant knee injury ended his playing career around 1971 and sent him into a varied working life. His funeral home obituary describes a true jack of all trades: construction work, hospital laboratory technology, substitute teaching, and a print brokering business he owned before retiring to paint full time. Collectors across the United States held his landscapes and abstracts. He loved fishing at Park Lake and Cass Lake, spent quiet mornings on Lake Byllesby during eighteen years in Cannon Falls, and took up the trumpet in his mid-sixties, sometimes performing at his own art openings.
Dale was married for fifty-four years to Olga. They had five children, among them the actor Ian Anthony Dale, and nine grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his parents, Landis and Lois Dale, and by his brother Jim. Memorials were suggested to the Autism Society of Minnesota, the Parkinson's Foundation and Cretin-Derham Hall. A prayer service was arranged for 9 October 2026 at O'Halloran and Murphy in Saint Paul.
For Minnesota hockey and Olympic history, Dale remains one of the local boys who made the 1968 United States squad. For his family and the St. Paul circles that knew him as a painter, fisherman and father, the longer story was the life he built after the rink.
Biography adapted from O'Halloran and Murphy Funeral Home obituary, Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), Olympedia. Wikipedia ↗
Photos
1Jack Dale in later life
by People Forever
That's a lovely thing to hold onto.