Sixty-nine years on Route 46

There is a photograph on the office wall of three men standing behind this counter. The counter is in a different spot now and the wall behind them holds different bows, but it is unmistakably this room.

That picture is most of the story.

1957

A bow shop opened on Route 46 in Saddle Brook. Archery in New Jersey then was a smaller world than it is now, and a shop that could actually work on equipment was a rarer thing than a shop that could sell it.

What got built here was the second kind. Not a counter with boxes behind it. A bench, and somebody at it who knew what a badly flying arrow was trying to tell him.

The handover

Rob Cerone Jr. bought the business from his father in the 1990s. He had already been in archery for twenty-odd years by then; 2020 marked his fiftieth year in the trade.

Buying a business from your father is not the same transaction as buying one from a stranger. The inventory changes hands and the standards do not. The rule that no bow leaves this shop without being looked over twice was not something Rob invented. He inherited it, the way you inherit a way of holding a tool.

What changed

Almost all of the equipment. Cams that did not exist. Carbon where there was aluminum. Crossbows becoming a serious part of the season rather than a curiosity. Sights, releases, stabilizers, arrow builds. A bow off our wall today would be barely recognizable to the men in that photograph.

The range changed too: eleven lanes, indoors, air conditioned, out to twenty-seven yards. In 1957 “air conditioned” was not a feature anybody in archery was advertising.

What did not

The bench. Somebody standing at it, listening to a customer describe a problem in the wrong words and figuring out what they actually mean.

And the thing that is harder to put in a sentence: that the shot matters more than the sale. Rob’s father taught him that in the same room where he now teaches it to everybody who works here. It is why nobody in this shop will talk you into a bow that is wrong for you, and why we will happily tune a bow you bought somewhere else.

Three generations, and the ones after

Along the way there have been Hoyt Top 50 Dealer awards, Mathews Top 100 Dealer awards, and East Coast Dealer of the Year from Archery Business Magazine. Those are on the wall too.

But the thing that actually measures sixty-nine years is smaller. It is the man who came in for a lesson at nine and now brings his daughter on Friday nights. It is a hundred and thirty kids a summer through camp, some of whose parents also came through camp.

You can walk into a lot of archery shops in New Jersey. You cannot walk into many where the person tuning your bow learned to do it from the person in the photograph on the wall.

Read the whole family story, or come see the room it happened in.