Fifty years ago, the Broad Street Bullies fell in love with Avalon. Some never left.

A truck rolled through Avalon 50 years ago and squirted oil onto some of the unpaved streets as a way to prevent dust clouds from blowing all over town. It was a different place in the 1970s, as the prestigious South Jersey Shore point that is “Cooler by a mile” was mostly old homes and cottages. A few roads were still dirt and sidewalks were rare.

“It was a small town,” said Jack Erkert, who moved to the island town from North Philadelphia as a boy in the 1940s.

For the Broad Street Bullies, Avalon was perfect. It was a slice of home, as many of the Flyers grew up in rural Canadian towns. A bungalow on a dirt road brought them back to Saskatchewan.

They arrived there in June 1974, just a few weeks after winning the Stanley Cup. Erkert invited the Flyers to play a charity softball game to benefit the Helen L. Diller Vacation Home for Blind Children, which had opened in Avalon two years earlier. The Flyers would not get paid, but Erkert guaranteed free beer afterward at Jack’s Place, his popular bar on 36th Street and Ocean Drive.

“That’s all we needed,” said Don Saleski, a winger on both Flyers Stanley Cup championship teams, in 1974 and ‘75.

The Flyers were in Avalon — “a sleepy little town,” Saleski said — shortly after an estimated 2 million people were on Broad Street for their championship parade. The Bullies made the region fall in love with hockey. They were a team made for the city as they stood nose-to-nose with the rest of the league, never shying away from a brawl. And here they were — at the height of their fame — playing softball on a small field in Avalon.

“People couldn’t wait to see them,” Erkert said. “They were like rock stars.”

The Bullies were the last Stanley Cup champion with an entire roster of Canadian players. They came to Philadelphia in the late 1960s and early 1970s as 20-somethings from towns like Flin Flon, Moose Jaw, and Smithers. Philadelphia felt like a different planet.

“My first time here, a cab picked me up from the airport,” said Saleski, who joined the Flyers in 1971 as a 22-year-old rookie. “It was a nasty, old cab. It was beat up and dirty. Horrible. Went across the Penrose bridge with all its potholes and everything. Then I see the car-eating machine on the right side. On the left side are all the oil refineries and black smoke billowing out into the air.”

Saleski survived the cab ride, checked into the Penn Center Hotel at 20th and Market, and went to take a look at his new home.

» READ MORE: ‘It was our watering hole’: How a South Jersey bar became the Broad Street Bullies’ favorite hangout

“I went out walking around and all there was on Market Street was peep joints, strip clubs, and adult bookstores,” Saleski said. “This is the absolute truth, I went up to my room and called my dad in Canada, collect. I said, ‘Dad, I don’t know what I’m going to do the rest of my life, but it will not be in Philadelphia.’”

Fred Shero, the team’s coach, urged his players to give the town a chance. He asked them to spend their summers in Philly and integrate themselves into the community instead of returning to Canada.

“We were in town for a reason,” Bill Barber said. “No one was running off after the season. We all kind of stayed in the area. This was our home. Philly was our home and it still is to this day.”

So they formed a softball team. They wore orange shirts and black shorts and played games for charity. Everyone — from Bobby Clarke to Orest Kindrachuk — was on the team. They played a B’nai B’rith team in the Northeast, a group of nurses in Conshohocken, teachers in Delaware County, and high school kids in Cherry Hill.

The crowd in Avalon was so big that the $1 admission tickets Erkert printed were useless. There were too many people to check tickets. So they passed a hat around, raised a few thousand dollars for the Diller Home, and then brought everyone back to the bar to raise more money. Erkert gave Clarke a trophy after the Flyers beat a team of bartenders. They survived the Boston Bruins and then edged Jack’s Place. They had a trophy to prove it.

» READ MORE: Where are the Broad Street Bullies now?

A year later, the Flyers played a charity game at Veterans Stadium with 18,000 fans. It didn’t take long to outgrow their field in Avalon. The Flyers usually won their softball games — “We had some ballplayers,” Saleski said — and always stayed to toast their performance.

“Typically there would be a big barbecue afterwards with a bunch of beer and we’d end up hanging out. It was a lot of fun,” said Saleski, who grew up playing baseball in Canada. “A lot of us came from farm communities or mining towns. The environments we grew up with, that’s what you did. You hung out and were a part of the community. It was just our upbringing. It was the way we were raised. We didn’t know any better. We were just kids from Canada that happened to win the Cup. It didn’t change us that much.”

Jack’s Place was dark, smelled like beer, and was filled with patrons in their young 20s. For the Bullies, it was just as perfect as the Shore town it was in.

“It was a bar,” Saleski said. “It was not a classy place. It was blue collar, let’s put it that way. We wanted a bar. Back then, all we did was drink beer. We needed a bar with cold beer.”

The softball game was their introduction to Jack’s Place, which became a summer home in the 1970s for many of the Flyers. They drank during the season after games at Rexy’s on the Black Horse Pike in West Collingswood Heights. In the summer, they were at Jack’s. On the ice, they were icons. At Jack’s, they were guys at the bar.

“We were all working-class people from Canada who came down here because we had an ability to play hockey,” Clarke said. “We would go out and play our level of slow-pitch softball. Then we’d go to people’s homes and have barbecues and beers in the backyard with them. We weren’t any different than anyone else in the community who supported us and loved us. We were the same as them. Nobody had big egos. Nobody thought they were special. We were just normal people who happened to play hockey.”

» READ MORE: The Broad Street Bullies had iconic Stanley Cup banners. The Flyers say they’ll look into hanging them again.

Erkert opened the bar in 1973, a year before he invited the Flyers to town. It was a sports bar before sports bars were a thing. He had TVs and sports paraphernalia on the wood-paneled walls. Erkert tried to keep things fresh. He had live music, good food, and a softball team that could challenge the Flyers.

He said he hired the first female bartender in Cape May County. The bar had catchy slogans — “When it rains, we pour,” they said — and flooded the town with free T-shirts. Jack’s Place was a spot. Erkert sold the bar in 1993 and it was leveled in 2019 to make room for more luxury beach homes.

“I was up there two years ago for the first time since the late ‘90s and I was shocked with how beautiful the town turned out to be,” said the 86-year-old Erkert, who retired to Florida. “They did a really nice job. I can’t believe the prices. I saw a house for $24 million. You could’ve bought the whole island for $24 million in 1974. It was very small-townish. In the winter, you knew everyone and then the population exploded in the summer.”

Saleski told his father he was leaving Philly but then made it home. He even learned how to take public transportation after his wife, who grew up in Ridley Park, told Saleski and Joe Watson about a train that could whisk them from their Delaware County apartment to the team’s practice rink at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Bill Flett, Barry Ashbee, Ed Van Impe, Jimmy Watson all lived out there, too,” Saleski said. “We told them, ‘You have to take the train. This is good stuff.’”

They caught the morning train to practice, hung around University City for a beer at Cavanaugh’s, and headed home. The Stanley Cup champs rode the train with people headed to Center City offices.

“We would just bury our heads in the newspaper, but the people were really nice if they recognized us,” Saleski said. “They’d always say nice things. They were headed to work, too.”

Saleski played nine seasons in the NHL and followed his hockey career as a successful — and still active — businessman in Philadelphia. He lives in Media with his wife, Mary Ann, more than 50 years after he was spooked on Market Street. Those summer nights in Avalon helped Philly feel like home.

Saleski, 74, has owned a home in Avalon since the late ‘90s. Bernie Parent is there, too. Tim Kerr and Paul Holmgren — Flyers stalwarts of a different era — are on the island, too. Brian Boucher, the former goalie, is nearby in Stone Harbor. The Flyers have made Seven Mile Island their home. It all started with a game of softball and some free beer in a sleepy Shore town.

“I came to regret Jack’s Place,” Saleski said. “When we bought here, we bought like 2½ blocks from there. Every 21-year-old kid in Philadelphia rented on our street. I said, ‘Where the hell did we buy?’ The drunks and the parties. ‘What did I do?’ ”

Those 21-year-olds were soon a memory as rental prices eventually increased and the Shore town became more pristine. There are no more dirt roads in Avalon, the oil trucks don’t come anymore, and every street has a sidewalk. But those sleepless nights were a reminder for Saleski of the nights he spent partying with the Bullies in a sleepy Shore town.

“I got my payback,” he said. “It was so laid-back and relaxed. It really wasn’t built up. It was quaint. It was a lot of the old, original houses. There weren’t the three-story mega-houses that there are now. It’s still a great town, but the complexion has changed.”