Donna Hanna became a hockey fan by default: One of her sons had two tickets to a Stars game but no date, so he took his mom.
It was love at first sight.
Next thing you know, she bought a few tickets, then a 10-game package, then she went whole hog. She still didn’t know much about hockey. Just liked the speed and skill. Growing up in Clinton, Okla., in the ’50s, the youngest child of Bulgarian immigrants, she’d experienced little that would predispose her to becoming a hockey fan. Unless you believe in foreshadowing. Her parents ran a small hotel and smaller café. Ten stools, three tables. They lived in the hotel. Making friends downtown was hard. Most days, she’d go to the movies or strap on her roller skates. Round and round Clinton she’d go, faster and faster, a lonely little girl in charge of entertaining herself while her mother worked day and night after her father died.
Once out of high school, she did what a lot of small-town girls do. Got married and had two kids. The four of them traced his Air Force career across the map until one day he asked for a divorce.
“And that,” she said, “was the nicest thing that man ever did for me.”
Donna, who’d gone back to school to earn her degree, soon packed up the boys and moved to Dallas. Got a job with E-Systems, which was bought out by Raytheon not long after the Stars moved to Dallas.
Once smitten, she didn’t just go to home games. She went on a couple of hockey road trips. Stood in long lines at autograph sessions. Attended skates. Wrote letters to players. Read books recommended by Terry Egan, The Dallas Morning News’ hockey writer.
Her favorite Star was Joe Nieuwendyk. She was waiting at a team event to get his autograph on a picture of the ’99 Stanley Cup champs when another Star, Mike Keane, told her he wasn’t coming. Just leave it, he said, and he’d see that Nieuwendyk signed it.
Weeks passed, and she heard nothing. Finally she called her season ticket rep, who found out the picture had been lost. Donna was devastated. A couple weeks later, she got a call from the club with a request.
Could she come out and pick up something?
The Stars had replaced her 8-by-10 team picture with one more than three times its size, framed and autographed by every last player and coach. She hung it with pride on a wall across from the fireplace in her Rowlett home.
Fast forward to 2015, the day after Christmas. It’s unseasonably warm. Donna’s in the living room working on a puzzle. She hears an alarm and the instructions to move immediately to a safe place. She’s from Oklahoma. Oklahomans take tornado warnings seriously, if not personally. Grabbing her phone and a book and a chair, she retreats to her kitchen pantry to wait it out. Pretty soon she gets a panicked call from her oldest son, Steve, who wants to know her whereabouts. He tells her a tornado is aiming straight for her.
As if on cue, he hears a series of loud crashes over the phone. He tells his mother he’s hanging up, but he doesn’t tell her why.
He doesn’t want to hear her die.
The noise doesn’t last long, maybe only a couple of minutes. Donna peeks out the pantry door. It’s hard to see in the dark. So much debris is piled up, she can’t get from one room to the next. Eventually she realizes the roof is gone. The front porch, too. Her living room wall is in the front yard. All but two of the windows are blown out.
What EF4 winds of up to 200 miles per hour didn’t do that night — claiming the lives of 13 people in the most violent and deadly December tornado in North Texas history — a steady rain finished. Donna’s house and almost all of her belongings were a total loss.
Over the next few weeks, they moved gently through the rubble, sifting for memories. Christmas ornaments. Souvenirs. Stuff made by Donna’s granddaughter.
Three pictures hung over the fireplace before the storm. The tornado picked them clean.
But across from the fireplace, underneath a two-story wall that had collapsed on itself, they found the team picture. Glass cracked. Frame bent. A small water stain.
Otherwise, practically perfect.
Sixteen months later, Donna moved back into her rebuilt home. The team photo, reframed, resumed its place of prominence, where it remains one of the few reminders of her life before the tornado.
Now 73 and retired, Donna said the picture “represents a lot of things to me now. A lot of very enjoyable years watching hockey, living and dying with the team. Special memories of specific players. The whole incident of how I acquired the picture! Such a funny/interesting story.
“The fact that it survived the tornado.”
Of course, it also memorializes the greatest on-ice season in Dallas history, not to mention a crazy night in Buffalo that ran into the wee, wee hours. Donna stayed up for every minute. It was the least she could do. She still thinks Eddie Belfour could have played all night.
As the Stars resume play Monday, their slender Stanley Cup hopes a faint echo of the glory days, Donna hardly knows them anymore. She didn’t renew her season tickets after the 2004-05 lockout. Doesn’t watch them on TV, either. The thrill is gone, and has been for years, though she leaves the impression it might not be too late to make it work again.
Or as she put it, “I understand their goalie is pretty good.”
The crazy thing, Donna, is now there’s two of them.