prompted chocolate-maker and amusement park operator Milton Hershey and his long-time entertainment and amusements chief, John B. Sollenberger, to bring pro hockey to Hershey by sponsoring a permanent team. To that end, Mr. Hershey established the Hershey Hockey Club (now called the Hershey Bears Hockey Club) in 1932, which is now the oldest such continuously operating professional ice hockey management organization (the players themselves were ostensibly amateurs during the first few years) in North America outside of those operating the "Original Six" clubs of the National Hockey League in Montreal, Toronto, Boston, New York, Chicago, and Detroit, which were all established in or before 1926. The first hockey team the organization iced was the amateur Hershey B'ars in the newly formed Tri-State Hockey League which included three other teams from Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Atlantic City. After a single season in 1932–33, that circuit reformed itself into a larger, seven-club Eastern Amateur Hockey League in which Hershey played first as the "Chocolate B'ars" (1933–1934), then again as the "B'ars" (1934–1936), and finally from 1936 to 1938 as the "Hershey Bears", a name adopted in response to criticism levied by New York sportswriters and the league that the "B'ars" moniker was too commercial. (These writers had already informally dubbed the club as the "Bears from Penn's Woods" when they visited Madison Square Garden to play the New York Rovers.) On December 19, 1936, the newly renamed EAHL Bears also moved from the confines of the Ice Palace (where they had to play on a small, 60x170-foot rink) into the newly constructed 7,286-seat Hersheypark Arena (then known as the "Hershey Sports Arena") built immediately adjacent to the older venue. Over the next 66 seasons, Bears' teams played a total of 2,280 EAHL and AHL regular season and playoff games at the Hersheypark Arena, which served as the home to hockey in Hershey from 1936 to 2002. Since 2002 the AHL Bears have used Hersheypark Arena as their practice arena only. The Bears won the 1937 EAHL championship, then played in an international tournament arranged by the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (CAHA) to determine a world's amateur champion, in direct conflict with the actual 1937 Ice Hockey World Championships. The CAHA tournament was hosted at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, and invited the champions of the 1937 Allan Cup (Sudbury Tigers), the 1937 Memorial Cup (Winnipeg Monarchs), the EAHL (Hershey Bears) and the English