My experience is roughly parallel. I'm pretty sure my father took me to my first Ranger game in '53 or so. (I was seven years old.) We would go to four or five games a year. I even had a couple of my birthday parties at the Garden. Once I was old enough to go into the city (from LI) by myself (11 or 12 years old) I started going to games with my friends too. Sometimes we would use our G.O. cards to get fifty cent admission to the upstairs side arena (where you could only see from the first row - behind that you only could see about two thirds of the ice).
I figured out when tickets would go on sale, and would go into NYC when sales would open up so I could virtually select my seats: usually Side Promenade, Section S, Row A, Seats 1 & 2, right up against the glass next to the visitors bench. Sometimes Bill Cullen beat me to those seats! And they were really next to the visitor's bench. There was no separation at all. I loved the old Garden. I can still see everything about it in my mind's eye.
When I was in college, and almost commuting between Troy, NY, and NYC, the "new" Garden opened. My father got season tickets, first in 305 in the green, and then 101 in the orange, to entice me to come back to NYC even more often. (By then my parents had moved to Manhattan.) I continued to attend about 30 games a year from Troy, and then from Hartford where I landed my first job out of college.
But then things went south. I don't know if it was Vic Hadfield laughing in the penalty box as the Rangers were losing the Stanley Cup Finals or Brad Park tripping over the blue line on a regular basis, but I started to realize that I was watching other people work, and paying to do it too. Brad Park never came to watch me write computer programs. I cared more about the games than the players did. It was just stupid.
So I stopped going.
I still love hockey. I think it's a great game, and it's great to watch when the players play with the enthusiasm of eight year-olds. College games are like that. Maybe the last two rounds of the Stanley Cup Playoffs are like that too, Vic Hadfield notwithstanding. And for some reason the outdoor New Year's game is too. I see this year the Rangers will be playing the Flyers down in Philly on January 2nd. Maybe I'll go.
ML/NJ
For Sunday night games, we arrived at the Garden at 3PM for the 50 cents tickets. One guy would wait by the doors on 49th ST. and the other would be by the ticket window. Tickets went on sale 1/2 hour before they opened the doors. Once they opened we would race up the escalators and either grab front row, second row (you could sit on the railing between rows and see the whole ice) or shoot up to the corners. We took turns doing this as there was usually 5 or 6 of us at the games. Got in MANY fights saving those seats for the late comers. LOL
Remember playing foot hockey on the stair well landings with crushed beer cans for pucks? How about the black guy who used to come around with the "scoring pool" or the fellow with the gold jacket and trombone?
One of our crew had a relative that used to get good seats occassionally in the same box as the organ. Gladys Gooding gave me "one up side the head" with her cane when she caught me lighting up a cigarette. LOL!!!
Another fond memory, this from the new Garden.
Our seats were in 421, next to last row in the blue, behind the Flag. Monteal is in town and Canada had JUST made “Oh, Canada” its national anthem. One of our guys (we had a whole row) had Xeroxed up enough copies of the lyrics to pass out to the whole section. The Garden only had a recording of the music...no words. Well once the music started we started singing. The Monteal players were craning their necks trying to see who it was singing the song. Whole Garden gave us a standing O.