A Flying Officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross as a navigator during World War II, and a member of the RCAF Flyers ice hockey team, Bernard Francis “Frank” Dunster was a member of Canada’s gold medal-winning ice hockey squad at the 1948 Winter Olympics. A forward, he played in eight games in the tournament, but only managed to score one goal. Prior to being recruited for the RCAF team, he had been active in the sport both before and after the war. He had reached the junior Canadian championship playoffs for the Memorial Cup in the 1938-1939 season with the Ottawa St. Pats of the Ontario Junior Hockey League and split the 1941-1942 season between the Ottawa Senior Hockey League’s Ottawa Canadiens and the Eastern Amateur Hockey League’s Rivervale Skeeters. His first affiliation after the war was the Ottawa District Depot of the Ottawa National Defense Hockey League, followed by a season with the Upper Ottawa Valley Hockey League’s incarnation of the Ottawa Senators. At the time of his recruitment to the RCAF team he was playing with the New Edinburgh Burghs of the now-defunct Ottawa Senior League and had also been working for the Ottawa Fire Department. He retired from the RCAF team after two more seasons, and the RCAF itself in the mid-1960s, and began working for the sales department of an Ottawa moving company. In 1987 he carried the Olympic torch part of the way through Ottawa as it headed towards Calgary for the 1988 Winter Olympics. He died in 1995, after a host of medical problems, and in 2001 a street in West Carleton Township, just outside of Ottawa, Ontario, was named in his honor. As a member of his gold medal-winning Olympic team, he was inducted into the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame in 2008.
Canada