The way a hockey or figure skate blade is sharpened can make all the difference in athletic performance – and Zwickers on North Road has become a local hockey institution because of the edge they give skaters.
“It’s the service after the sales that matters, taking the time to make sure the fit is right and fixing any problems that come up later,” said Wayne Zwicker, who runs the business his father, Homer, and his uncle, Robert, started in Arlington during the Great Depression.
“I was blessed, my father was a great guy who knew how to sharpen skates and was a very hard worker,” Zwicker said.
He passed both his knowledge and his work ethic on to his son, who has worked in hockey equipment rooms in 1998 and again in 2002, because there isn’t anything he can’t fix.
He works not just on skate blades, but can stitch a skate so that it fits better, as well as work on gloves and hockey pants.
And he learned those skills from the business, which his dad and uncle started during the Great Depression, when they helped support the family by mowing lawns.
“They would do any job to make a living, besides cutting lawns they also did handyman jobs and landscaping,” Zwicker said.
Because they kept their lawnmower blades sharp, people began to come to the two young men for repairs and lawnmower blade sharpening, and then began thinking that if they could come up with a winter business, they’d be all set.
“They started sharpening skates, and then they began working on making their own machines to sharpen skates, and developed their own clamps that hold the skates so you can sharpen them,” Zwicker said.
In 1936, they were sharpening skates for the Boston Bruins, Boston University, Boston College, Harvard University, Northeastern University, and many high school hockey teams, out of their Arlington store.
“If you were serious about hockey, you went to 19 Mill St. in Arlington,” he said. “Zwickers was known by visiting teams as a place you should go get your skates sharpened when you were in town.”
They sharpened Boston Bruins skates for 25 cents a pair, and his father or uncle would have to go pick up all the skates, sharpen them and then get them back for the team members to play the next day.
Eventually, the cost of sharpening the skates needed to go up to cover the actual cost of doing the work, but the Bruins refused to the price increase, and the Zwickers and the Bruins parted ways.
Robert and Homer Zwicker also chose to part ways, although not until 1968, when Robert’s son wanted to join the business after college. Zwicker’s father was uncomfortable with his nephew’s business ideas and started the store in Bedford that year. Zwicker said the Arlington store closed four years later.
“The building here had been a coffee shop and a gas station, and when we first moved out here the pumps were still here,” he said. Another uncle was contractor and redid the building, which has been added onto twice now to make enough room to showcase the skates, sticks, gloves and other equipment and still have room to work on skates.
Wayne Zwicker honed skills, and was asked to work at in the hockey equipment room at the Olympics in 1998 and 2000, an experience he enjoyed but one he no longer has the time to do. But he enjoyed working with many of the hockey players that came through, including goalie Dominik Hasek, a Czech player. Hasek was having problems with his skates, and when Zwicker and other equipment people took a look, his skates were sharpened in a way that prevented him from skating properly.
Zwicker fixed them, and the Czechs won the gold in 1998, and Hasek signed one of the hockey sticks used in the game, which is now kept over the count at Zwickers.
Zwicker brought computerization to the business, as well as new ideas after studying business in college, which has allowed him to make the store more profitable. There are six full-time workers, including himself, and a number of part-time employees.
Customers continue to flock to the store, particularly on Fridays and Saturdays during hockey season.
“We pick up a lot of customers who have had problems with equipment from big box stores or through buying on the Internet, and we fix them up,” he said. “Again, it’s the service, taking the time with each customer, figuring out what they need and taking care of it.”
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