You're An Old Smoothie

"We're playing Clarkson University at home, and it's about 10 degrees in the rink," Harvard coach Bill Cleary recalls. "The band starts playing that 'Noxzema' song about the stripper. Some kid starts taking off his clothes. He throws his shirt on the ice. The shirt gets stuck in the Zamboni. The Zamboni stops dead. Forty-five minutes later, everything is fixed, but we're frozen to death. Clarkson scores three or four goals, and it's all over for us."

Merely driving the machine confers a certain celebrity. The local newspaper will likely do a story on the town's Zamboni chauffeur. The local PM Magazine show will call. What other operator of a machine receives an ovation when he has finished his work?

"You'll see little kids waving at you," says Bruce Tharaldson, the Zamboni driver at the Met Center in Blooming-ton, Minn. "I try to make them feel good by waving back, but the first couple of times around the rink it's hard. You're doing a lot of things. You're regulating the flow of water, you're controlling the level of the blade as well as the speed of the machine, all with your right hand. It's tricky. Don't do it right and you'll have a swamp. Or you'll dig in the surface and you'll have the officials down on their hands and knees trying to fix a hole. That's a Zamboni driver's nightmare."

A new standard-sized Zamboni costs about $36,000. A small, tractor-pulled model can be bought for $5,000. A giant machine, a third larger than the normal Zamboni—and almost a third more expensive—is being readied to handle the speed skating oval at the 1988 Olympics. Specialty machines have been developed to remove water from artificial turf. Used Zambonis are also in demand. Because they never go faster than nine miles per hour and never travel more than a few very careful miles a day, Zambonis can last a long time.

"The oldest one still in working order is No. 11 at the University of Denver, built in 1952 or '53," says Richard. "We do our best to keep these old machines going. Our biggest problem isn't finding parts for the machines; it's finding parts for the Jeeps that were used for the chassis and engine on the early models."

An Ice Capades company brought the first Zamboni to the Soviet Union in 1961. When the show left Moscow, the Zamboni stayed behind. Since 1968, 20 have been exported to the U.S.S.R. "We're doing very well in China, too," says Richard. "We have 11 machines there now and have orders for more. We have three machines in Hong Kong and 196 in Japan."

What other maintenance machine has its own line of novelties? You can buy one of two Zamboni hats to go with one of three Zamboni shirts. You can get two Zamboni buttons to be worn next to two Zamboni pins, which are not to be confused with the embroidered Zamboni patch. Your car keys can dangle from a Zamboni key chain, and your rear license plate can be framed with the words MY OTHER CAR IS A ZAMBONI. The sides and top of the machine are routinely sold for advertising space, producing as much as $25,000 a year for an arena operator.

No other U.S. manufacturer competes with the Zamboni family, but two companies in Canada and five in Europe do. Are these people making Zambonis, or are they merely making ice-resurfacing machines? "Ice-resurfacing machines," Richard says crisply. "I once heard a man say that his company made a better zamboni than Zamboni. I said, 'Sir, only Zamboni can make a Zamboni.' We think the word always should be capitalized, and we think it should be an adjective, not a noun—a Zamboni machine."

The chassis from the first Zamboni sits in the back of the Iceland rink, still no more than 20 feet from the spot where Zamboni found all the answers. The metal is dark and rusted and looks as if it were left over from a scene in The Road Warrior. A sign describes the exhibit as THE WORLD'S FIRST ICE RESURFACER, and a chain keeps the curious at bay.

New machines are brought to the rink for inspection fresh from the production line. They are driven for several blocks on fat, studded tires down the streets of Paramount, and then they lumber onto the oversized ice surface. They make a few trips around old Iceland, after which they are ready for shipping.