THE US HALL OF FAME NEWCOMERS

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Longtime NHL stars Tony Amonte, Tom Barrasso and John LeClair, the 1998 women's Olympic team and the late Frank Zamboni are headed to the United States Hockey Hall of Fame.

Amonte scored the winner at 17:25 of the third period versus Canada in the deciding game of the inaugural World Cup of Hockey in 1996. In 1,174 games over 15 years in the NHL, he recorded 416 goals and 484 assists.


TONY AMONTE

Barrasso won back-to-back Stanley Cup championships with the Pittsburgh Penguins and won 369 games in the regular season and 61 more in the playoffs.

LeClair was the first American-born player to record three consecutive 50-goal seasons in the NHL and finished his career with 406 goals and 413 assists in 967 games.


JOHN LeCLAIR

The '98 women's hockey team won gold at the Nagano Olympics, beating Canada 3-1 in the gold-medal game.

Zamboni, who originally owned a plant for manufacturing block ice, patented the world's first self-propelled ice resurfacing machine in 1949. They have since become standard at rinks around the world.

Today we are introducing FRANK ZAMBONI


FRANK ZAMBONI

In 1949 Zamboni invented a device that completely revolutionized the entire ice resurfacing process. It took the 90-minute, three-man chore and reduced it to a 10-minute, one man job. That very same year he applied for a patent for the new machine and created Frank Zamboni & Company in Paramount in order to build and sell his new invention. He was granted the patent in 1953. Zamboni's ice resurfacing machines were first built on top of a Jeep CJ-3B. Then, between 1956 and 1964 they were built upon stripped Jeep chassis. As demand grew for the "Zambonis", a second factory was opened in Brantford, Ontario as well as a branch office in Switzerland. In the 1970's Zamboni created machines that could remove water from outdoor artificial turf fields, remove the painted stripes from those surfaces and rolling up/laying down artificial turf in stadiums. His last invention came in 1983an automatic edger that removes ice buildup from the edges of rinks. Two years after his wife died, Frank Zamboni lost his battle with lung caner in 1988 at the age of 87. His Zamboni company is still owned and operated by his son and grandson.



Frank Zamboni was born January 16, 1901 in Eureka, Utah the son of Italian immigrants. He grew up near the town of Pocatello, Idaho where is parents bought a farm when young Frank was just a year old. It is on this farm that he developed certain mechanical skills that would benefit him later in life. In 1920, he and his younger brother Lawrence relocated to the Los Angeles area where Frank's older brother George owned an auto repair business.

Zamboni never skated an NHL shift, but was instrumental on the game of hockey nevertheless. Born in 1901 in Eureka, Utah, Frank, along with brother Lawrence relocated to southern California in 1920 and immediately placed their footprint on the game. In 1923, Frank married and the couple went on to have three children. As the demand for their cooling devices grew into the produce industry, the Zamboni brothers built a plant that produced block ice that was used to transport the product across the country on rail cars. As the technology surrounding modern refrigeration improved, and demand for the block ice shrank, Frank and his brother Lawrence looked to other ways to make their expertise with ice pay off. After being in the industry for nine years, Zamboni got the patent for the world's first-ever self-propelled machine used to resurface ice.