Tale of the tee: Kenny Smith Sport Shop

It was a winter weeknight in the early 1990s when I first visited Kenny Smith’s Sharp Edge, in the company of a work colleague who was just taking up ice hockey.

There was no better place to buy hockey equipment in those pre-Internet days, prior to the peak of big-box retail, than Kenny Smith’s shop, which operated from a converted home in Mount Joy in western Lancaster County, Pa.

“People come from 150 miles away,” Smith said in a 1988 profile in the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal newspaper. “We have a mail order business that goes all over the world. We advertise only in the Hockey News, just a little ad and we ship Hershey Bears jerseys and NHL jerseys all over the world.”

It was in that shop, soon after the first visit, that I purchased my first hockey jersey, a size 52 authentic Philadelphia Flyers air-knit sweater complete with fight strap. It was the beginning of an obsession that I carry with me to this day.

But that’s only a small part of the story behind our new design, the Kenny Smith’s Sport Shop Tee.

It joins our Hockey Night in Hershey, Flying Puck and, also new this year, Dominion Hockey Sticks designs to form our Mount Rushmore of Hershey-area hockey history tees.

Moose Jaw to Mount Joy

Before Mount Joy, there was Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in western Canada, where young Kenny Smith began his climb to the heights of hockey.

After a spectacular junior career in Canada (he once scored nine goals in a game), Smith signed with the National Hockey League’s Boston Bruins in 1944. He scored 20 goals and was the runner-up as the league’s rookie of the year.

The next season, he split time between Boston and its farm team in Hershey, before four full seasons in Boston.

Smith played 331 games with the Bruins, including another 20-goal season while gaining recognition for his forechecking prowess. A newspaper article from 1953 said Montreal Canadiens legend Maurice “The Rocket” Richard cited Smith as the toughest checker he faced.

This despite Smith’s diminutive stature. At 5-foot-8, 140 pounds early in his career, Smith was said to have been the smallest player in the NHL. “The Small One,” he was called.

Writing in the Lancaster Sunday News in 1972, columnist George Crudden referred to Smith as a “slight towhead” without a hint of denegration.

“He was not big,” Crudden recalled of Smith’s playing days. “But he was rugged. And would check the east-bound Chicago Limited if he got the assignment. He was a strong favorite of Chocolate Town [that is, Hershey] fans and although he was winding it up there he played in his same style to the very end.”

The remainder of Smith’s playing career, from 1950 to 1957, found him in the AHL, with stops in Pittsburgh, Providence, R.I., and, the final three seasons, in Hershey.

It was during a Bruins training camp in Hershey that Smith, on a blind date, met Dottie Hutter of Elizabethtown. They married in 1946.

From the Intelligencer-Journal, January 1955

Beginning during his playing days and continuing until 1970, Kenny and Dottie operated Smith’s Distributing of Mount Joy, which offered home delivery of beer brands including Horlacher of Allentown, Ballantine of New Jersey and Gunther of Baltimore.

In 1972, Kenny Smith’s Sport Shop opened at 65 E. Market St., Mount Joy. It later moved to a former theater at 103 E. Main St. before settling at 20 E. Main St., where I found it as the renamed Kenny Smith’s Sharp Edge. (The final address is now home to YAH Brew taproom and restaraunt.)

Ad for Kenny Smith’s Sport Shop from the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal in 1979.

Besides running his business, Smith was a successful coach, including for the Franklin & Marshall College club team, Boyd’s Bugs in Lebanon and the Icers, a junior team based out of Hersheypark Arena that he founded with a $20,000 investment of his own money.

Smith stopped coaching after suffering a heart attack in 1982.

He eventually turned over operations to his son, Kenny Jr., who clearly was in charge when I visited the first time. Kenny Sr., appearing frail, and Dottie were there, too.

Kenny Smith died in 2000 at age 76; Dottie died in 2016 at 95.

By the time my son started playing hockey, Kenny Smith’s store was gone. A newspaper ad in November 1996 announced a public auction of the store’s sports supplies, office equipment and display cases.

At our September 2025 makers market, we celebrated the opening of hockey season. One way was by welcoming the mascot and representatives of the Hershey Cubs junior team to our event.

When I told the group about our plans for the Kenny Smith tee, one person stood up: Gary Baylor, a retired Lebanon City police officer with a long history of playing and coaching in local hockey circles.

He had played for Kenny Smith on the Icers.

A few weeks later, Gary came to our store with a batch of pucks, most of them bearing various team logos. He showed me the pucks one at a time, saving the best for last.

It was a promotional puck from Kenny Smith’s Sharp Edge, bearing a design that I had seen in the store’s print ads. It’s a drawing of a forlorn player, soaking his feet in a bucket of water. “Next time I’ll get my skates from Kenny Smith’s Sharp Edge,” it reads.

The puck now proudly hangs on a wall in our store, above a set of three floor seats from Hersheypark Arena.

You’ll also find the Kenny Smith’s Sport Store Tee stacked on one of those seats. It’s printed in metallic gold on black, echoing the colors of the Boston Bruins, Smith’s first connection to Hershey.