If you’ve owned a pair of skates in Winnipeg, chances are this man has sharpened them

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/09/2016 (3273 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Skating in Winnipeg just got a lot duller.

In August, Gord Hymers, owner of the cheekily-named By the Hand of Gord, a mobile, hand-sharpening biz specializing in knives, hair-cutting equipment and ice-fishing augers, announced on his Facebook page that after 35 years, his skate-sharpening career was grinding to a halt. Within minutes, one of Hymers’s sons posted a four-word comment underneath his father’s blurb, writing: “End of an era.”

“Somebody else told me basically the same thing, so I guess if two people feel that way, it must be true,” says Hymers, 70, seated in the living room of his tidy St. James bungalow, which he proudly mentions was also his childhood home.

(“I was born in ’46, left here to get married in ’68, then came back in ’96,” he explains, noting a “Quebec heater” — we think he means wood stove — used to be situated in one corner of the room where a floor lamp now stands.)

“Am I going to miss skate-sharpening?” Hymers says, repeating a scribe’s query back to him, as he glances through the window to see if an approaching postal carrier is delivering “a bill, a cheque or the usual shit.”

“Not a chance. I’m having more fun in that thing than a man deserves to have,” the grandfather of three finally replies, pointing outside to his modified Dodge Ram van, which is equipped to sharpen up to 500 knives and/or pairs of scissors a day.

“I go all over the place with that thing, from Brandon to Morden to Kenora. That’s my new bestie.”

Hymers’s chosen profession was data processing, a field he worked in for close to 15 years after graduating from a downtown business college in the mid-1960s. He enjoyed his days as a computer operator, but by the time he was put in charge of “a big-ass computer centre,” he had begun sharpening knives in the evenings and on weekends as a way to relieve stress, he says.

He turned out to be a quick study — to the extent friends and family members began dropping off their worn-out blades, too.

By 1980, Hymers had had enough of computers. He left his job and took 12 months off to catch his breath. In the fall of 1981, right around when he was telling himself it was probably time to rejoin the workforce, he was standing in line at an indoor hockey rink, waiting to get his two sons’ skates sharpened.

As Hymers observed the worker running one pair of blades after another across his grinding wheel, he compared the act to knife-sharpening. By the time his boys’ skates were done he had made up his mind what his new career was going to be.

After making a few phone calls, Hymers purchased a skate-sharpening machine from a company in Toronto. He flew east in September 1981 to learn how to operate the unit.

“The guy I’d been dealing with handed me a pair of skates and said, ‘Here, let’s see what you can do.’ After I gave them back to him, he took one look and said, ‘That’s terrible.’ I said, ‘I know, that’s why I came to you.’ “

The sales associate asked Hymers what experience he had, sharpening-wise. Hymers told him about his familiarity with knives. The fellow suggested he apply that same know-how to skates.

“So I adjusted what I was doing and after seeing the results I was like ‘Holy cow, is that ever better.’ At first, I was just trying to do what I’d seen other guys doing, because there wasn’t really a benchmark. But when I got back to Winnipeg, it was like, ‘OK, the benchmark has arrived.’”

Between 1981 and 2016, Hymers bounced around from rink to rink, including Vimy Arena, Eric Coy Arena and the St. Norbert Community Centre. It didn’t matter where he was located, it seemed; customers from as far away as Ontario and North Dakota were always able to track him down.

“There was a figure skating coach from Grand Forks who would drive (to Winnipeg) once a month in a station wagon full of her students’ skates. Another guy owned a charter air service in Swan River. He used to pack the front of one of his planes up with skates and ship them in, a few times every winter.

“Things were good; I was working seven months of the year and had five months off. At one point, I had three skate shops on the go and 10 people on the payroll.”

Although Hymers sold all of his skate-sharpening gear and maintains that chapter of his life is closed, he isn’t ready to divulge his secrets just yet.

“I simply did it the way it should be done,” he says reticently when asked how, as he puts it, he “set skate sharpening on its ear.”

“It was more a feel than anything else, but people told me they could tell the difference as soon as they stepped on the ice. Players would come up to me after a game and credit me, if they scored the winning goal.”

(When he was at the top of his game, Hymers, who, funnily enough, can’t skate a lick, could sharpen a pair of skates in 30 seconds. Kids used to show up with stopwatches, he says, to keep track of how many pairs he could put through in an hour.)

Hymers began thinking about transitioning from skate-sharpening to knives and scissors in 2012. He had inhaled more than his share of dust through the years, an unavoidable byproduct of standing inches away from a grinding wheel for hours on end. He had also contracted numerous flu-like diseases, which, after reading a Winnipeg Free Press article in 2004, he realized were the result of handling “stinky skates that were a cesspool of bacteria” day after day.

After catching wind of a fellow in San Francisco who travelled around in a small truck, offering on-the-spot sharpening to restaurants, cooking schools and salons, Hymers, who had never stopped sharpening knives in his spare time, spent a week in California picking that person’s brain. He readily admits that most of what you see in his own vehicle is a carbon copy of what he witnessed, south of the border.

“I used to do a lot of cold calls, showing up at a company’s door, telling them if they needed anything sharpened, I could do it for them right away,” he says, noting it cost him close to $100,000 to convert his van for business purposes.

“But now that I’ve built up a steady clientele, I’ve stopped knocking on doors, for the most part.”

During the summer, Hymers was a fixture at farmers’ markets in and around Winnipeg. This weekend you can catch him at the Bronx Park Farmers Market, which goes today, or the East St. Paul Farmers Market on Sunday. He will also be at the final River Heights Farmers Market of the season, which takes place at 1370 Grosvenor Ave. on Sept. 30.

As for his business name, yes, there have been occasions when people read the sign on his van too quickly and missed the pun, altogether, mistaking “Gord” for “God.”

Hymers has a standard response when that occurs.

“With or without the R, it’s about the same,” he deadpans.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca