Not too many knife grinders in the streets of New York anymore, but the Times does a great profile of one of the last of the breed.

Mr. Pallotta grew up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and Maspeth, Queens, in a milieu where knife grinders were anything but unfamiliar. Both his grandfathers immigrated in the 1920’s from a scissors-producing village in the south-central Italian region of Abruzzi, and both made their living as knife grinders, roving Manhattan and Brooklyn with their equipment on pushcarts. By the 1950’s and 60’s, more than 20 of Mr. Pallotta’s uncles, brothers and cousins were sharpening cutlery in New York out of their own trucks. “Whenever I seen a scissor-grinding truck,” Mr. Pallotta recalled, “I knew that was a paisan of mine.”

But in the 50’s and early 60’s, most grinders shifted from sharpening knives to renting sharpened sets to customers, and the cutlery-grinding trucks began to disappear. “When most of the companies went into the rental end, some of the guys said, ‘No, I’ll keep doing it out of my truck,’ ” said Mark Polla, a third-generation grinder who is president of Nella Brothers, a cutlery rental company. “But the times really passed them by.”

Bells Clanging, a Tradesman Comes Home [NY Times - Free Registration Required]