Frank Zamboni

Zamboni was born in 1901 in Eureka, Utah, to Italian immigrants. His parents soon bought a farm in Lava Hot Springs, Idaho near Pocatello, Idaho, where he grew up. At age 15, he dropped out of ninth grade to assist on the farm and work as a mechanic. In 1920, the family moved to the harbor district of Los Angeles, where Frank's older brother George operated an auto repair shop. Frank attended a trade school in Chicago for one year, he and his younger brother Lawrence opened an electrical supply business in 1922 in the Los Angeles suburb of Hynes (now part of Paramount, California). The following year he married and eventually had three children, a son and two daughters. In 1927, he and Lawrence added an ice-making plant and entered the block ice business.