04/26/2024
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Frank Zamboni was born in 1901, in Eureka, UT, to Italian immigrant parents. In 1920, the family moved to the harbor district of Los Angeles, CA, where Frank and his younger brother, Lawrence later opened an ice-making plant in nearby Paramount. By 1940, with household ownership of refrigerators and freezers on the rise, the Zamboni brothers decided to use their remaining refrigeration equipment to open Iceland, a skating rink in Paramount, which is today a charitable enterprise of the NHL's Los Angeles Kings, the "L.A. Kings Iceland in Paramount".
It was at the Iceland rink that Frank Zamboni created a machine that could resurface ice to a completely smooth and shimmering state. A task that used to take five men ninety minutes to perform could now be done by one man in just fifteen minutes. The machines are known today simply as Zambonis. It took nine years to develop the Zamboni and Frank’s son, Richard has said that "One of the reasons he stuck with it was that everyone told him he was crazy.” After seeing the machine, figure skating legend Sonja Henie ordered two, as did the Chicago Blackhawks of the NHL.
Zamboni applied for a patent in 1949 and obtained it in 1953, thus Frank J. Zamboni & Co. was opened in Paramount. In 2012, Zamboni sold their 10,000th unit to the NHL's Montreal Canadiens. Frank Zamboni passed away in Long Beach, CA, in 1988 at the age of eighty-seven but his name lives on.
