Fifty years ago, Dominion made hockey sticks near Hershey, Pa.

We incorporated a vintage Dominion wooden stick into a photo shoot featuring our ‘Hockey Night in Hershey’ tee.

In 1970-71, a Canadian TV comedy, “The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour,” featured a nine-minute mockumentary called “The Puck Crisis” (3:38 mark).

Co-host Lorne Michaels, later of “Saturday Night Live” fame, appeared as a news anchor introducing a story about the potential devastation to Canada’s puck industry. The video showed shriveled tree-grown pucks succumbing to a plight known as Dutch Puck Disease, brought to the Great White North by a Dutch hockey team.

Wait around long enough, and life is sure to imitate art. Today, the world is faced with the coronavirus, which began in China and has, as of this writing, claimed more than 2,000 lives.

On a less serious note, coronavirus could lead to a shortage of Chinese-made hockey sticks. The National Hockey League, with teams only in Canada and the United States, relies upon China for some 75 percent of the customized sticks that its players use.

It’s a sad state of affairs, this outsourcing of products and jobs by a North American league worth more than $5 billion. And it helps to explain why my real passion for hockey lies in its rich history.

Instead of lamenting Chinese economic domination, let’s travel back to the early 1970s when a little hockey stick maker called Dominion operated in our back yard, near Hershey, Pa.

‘A locally operated enterprise’

A couple of years ago, I was thumbing through old Hershey Bears game programs at the Hershey-Derry Township Historical Society when I stumbled upon an ad for Dominion Manufacturing Corp.

Dominion’s ad from a Hershey Bears game program

“Win with Dominion, the Pro’s Choice,” the ad read, noting that it made custom hockey sticks for American Hockey League stars and for all age groups.

The ad described Dominion as a “locally operated enterprise” and listed a Hershey post office box.

Even as a long-time hockey fan and short-time hockey magazine publisher, I had never heard of Dominion. However, Nikki Soliday, executive director of the historical society and a big hockey fan, noted that the historical society archives included several Dominion sticks.

Ever since, piecing together the company’s history has been a minor obsession of mine.

My journey began on a Facebook page I operated for Pennsylvania Puck, my one-time online hockey magazine. I asked whether any of our followers remembered Dominion. One man said he had worked there, and that it was located in the alley behind the southwest corner of the square in Hummelstown, a borough next to Hershey.

He remembered the owner’s first name, Dominic, whom he described as “a disgruntled former Northland Pro employee whose goal was to put them out of business.”

Northland, founded in Minnesota in 1917 as a ski maker, entered the hockey stick business in the 1930s, according to a New York Times article. In the 1960s, Northland controlled half of the U.S. hockey stick market.

Dominion sticks, the former employee said, “were very lightweight but didn’t last long. (Dominic) was always behind on orders. Teams and players were continually bugging him about their sticks. I remember making thousands of mini sticks that were handed out at a Hershey Bears game.”

Mitchell & Ness

He recalled delivering sticks to members of the old Baltimore Clippers, like the Bears a member of the American Hockey League.

“I only stayed there a couple months because I never got paid and never even got a stick,” he said. “Besides that, working with fiberglass and resin was nasty and dangerous.”

I followed the Clippers angle to eBay, where I sifted through old team photos. In one from the 1969 season, a goalie clearly was holding a Dominion stick. In another, featuring four players, I spotted AHL legend Willie Marshall holding a Dominion stick in his gloved right hand.

Through the historical society, I obtained my own Dominion stick. Stamped on the shaft was “Mitchell & Ness,” the famous Philadelphia sporting goods store. On Facebook, I asked Peter Capolino, Mitchell & Ness’ former owner, whether he remembered Dominion.

“Yes!” he replied. “We sold them! Big curves!”

Capolino, too, remembered the owner by his first name only.

Native of Queens, New York

This February, in the wake of the NHL stick scare, I, as Stay, posted the original Dominion program ad on the Friends of Hershey Facebook group, asking members whether they knew anything about the company.

One person commented that his father knew Dominion’s owner through the VFW and that he and his father often visited the Hummelstown garage where the sticks were made. He said he used Dominion sticks during his youth hockey-playing days, and that many Hershey Bears used Dominion sticks. (I returned to eBay, finding goalie Andre Gill posed with a Dominion stick in the Bears’ 1970-71 team photo).

Another person sent me a direct message in which he identified the Dominion founder as Dom Dadiego.

With a last name, and the wonders of the Internet, I was able to piece together that Dominick (with a K) Vasco Dadiego was born in 1926 in Queens, New York City. He enlisted in the Army in 1944 at age 18, his registration card (on which he’s identified as Domenico ) describing him as 5-foot-8, 150 pounds.

He died in 2010 and is buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in Harrisburg. His gravestone is engraved with an Army logo. I have been unable to locate his obituary.

‘Very humble’

Willie Marshall is a member of the American Hockey League Hall of Fame. Although he hasn’t laced up his skates professionally for nearly five decades, Marshall still holds the AHL records for goals, assists, points and games played. Each year, the league’s goal-scoring leader is presented with the Willie Marshall Award.

I called Marshall at his Lebanon, Pa., home. He said he only met Dadiego once, but twice in our conversation, Marshall referred to Dadiego as “very humble.”

Perhaps after a practice, Marshall said, Dadiego approached him with the news that he was starting a hockey stick operation.

“He said he’d make a few for me,” Marshall recalled, noting that Dominion accommodated his preference for sticks with a less common “lie 4,” referring to the angle between the blade of a stick and the shaft.

“It didn’t stop my production at all,” Marshall said of using Dominion sticks.

As for Dominion’s own production, it’s unclear when that ceased.

Northland, the company Dadiego was said to have wanted to eclipse, was done in by a number of factors, including Finnish competitor Koho with its laminated plywood handles that were lighter than Northland’s solid ash sticks, according to a March 1982 New York Times article. High interest rates, rising lumber prices and changing production techniques also contributed to Northland’s bankruptcy in the 1980s.

Today, Northland sticks exist only as a novelty product — made in Canada.

As for Dominion, it’s making a comeback of sorts.

Stay featured a Dominion stick during a photo shoot for our “Hockey Night in Hershey” tee (see photo at top of post). Don’t be surprised if the Dominion logo itself makes its way onto a Stay tee.