Sunday, July 12, 2009

Hockey 101 with HftL (Stanley Cup Edition)

This week, HftL takes a look at the engraving on the Stanley Cup.

A lot of the interesting facts we'll take a look at this summer for the "Stanley Cup Edition" of Hockey 101 with HftL will be the engraving itself -- from facts to the errors and corrections.

There is an official engraver of the Stanley Cup and there have been only four of them since it's creation. Currently, the official engraver is Louise St. Jacques who has maintained the name of the engraving business she took over, Boffey's Silversmiths of Montreal (the original owner, Doug Boffey, was the third official engraver). The first two engravers were two generations of the Peterson family (who were assisted by Fred Light, Sr.).
"I started working at Boffey Promotions part-time. I was getting trained while I was going to university," explains the delightful engraver [Louise St. Jacques], who laughs and continues, "I got so good, they had to hire me!"
Every September, St. Jacques takes the Stanley Cup to her studio at Boffey Promotions to begin engraving the names of that year's Champions. It is disassembled from the top down and the "band being engraved is clamped onto a homemade circular jig that creates a steel background for stamping. Special hammers with different head-weights are used to strike against a letter-punch to sink each letter into the silver."

The first team with their names engraved on the Stanley Cup was the Montreal Wanderers (1906-1907). They had a total of 20 names engraved inside the bowl of the Cup.

2 comments:

Aubrey said...

You don't often hear about the official engraver of the Stanley Cup, thanks for sharing. If it were me I'd have a huge sign outside my business to say so! (I'm just tacky like that :)

Stephanie said...

@Aubrey - I'm glad you enjoyed the post; I try to find different things to talk about and it's usually stuff I find interesting so I'm glad there are others who find it interesting too! ; )