The recent death of one of my Oconto Falls High School classmates, Janet Valenta Haffeman, sent my mind racing back in time to our high school days and even a few years before that. Janet was one of my favorite roller-skating partners back in the ’50s. We were never “boy friend-girl friend” friends; we just skated together a lot at the old Holiday Inn roller rink at Kelly Lake.
Janet was a really good skater, much better than I was, but she’d skate with me if I beat the rush to get to her. She was a really popular partner.
I tried to get her for at least a couple of skates every Friday night, and we got to be pretty good friends at the rink and at school. Cool girl!
My condolences to Mel.
I have many good memories of those days when roller-skating was a big part of my social life. I suppose it was sort of natural for me to like to skate; both of my parents had been good skaters when they were high school age, too.
In fact, my mom was sort of famous for her skating. Here’s an excerpt from a Green Bay Press Gazette story from December 1933, showing a picture of my mom as a pretty 18-year-old dressed in a fancy costume, wearing roller skates, and holding a jump-rope: “Oconto Falls - Oconto County’s premier girl roller skater, Miss Gladys Thompson of Morgan, Wisconsin, was crowned ‘World Girls’ Roller Rope Skip Champion’ at Billy Kurten’s Pine Grove Roller Rink here Monday evening, after chalking up a mark of 794 skips in the competition finals held that evening. This establishes a new world’s record for girls, the former record - held by Miss Catherine Hopper of Cincinnati - being 499. Miss Thompson registered marks of 665 and 783 in previous practice sessions.
“Skipping a rope 794 times without a miss is considered a feat in itself, but when done with the added handicap of two-pound skates dangling from each foot, as well as overcoming the resultant difficulty of holding one’s balance as spinning wheels meet the slippery rink floor, the feat stamps the performer as a person of exceptional athletic ability. Miss Thompson is an all-around athlete, as well as an exhibition skater of note.
“Approximately 10 minutes of steady skipping is required to skip this number of times, and the stunt is a combination of skating ability, rope-skipping technique, endurance, and concentration, it being estimated five times harder than ordinary rope-skipping.”
The same information appeared in Billboard magazine, and Mom was featured in the popular “Ripley’s Believe it or Not.”
Dad didn’t do the fancy stuff, he just did the regular skating, but after the rink closed for the night, Bill Kurten, the owner, would let some of the guys play roller hockey. And Dad always told of the time he got checked so hard, his feet went right through the end wall of the rink, and his friends had to go outside and remove his skates so he could get his feet back inside the building.
My own skating adventures were pretty mundane compared to my parents’. I was not one of Oconto County’s premier skaters, but the times I spent at the rink were happy times. My cousin Doug Curran (another deceased classmate) and I went to Kelly Lake at least once a week for a couple of years. At first we rented skates from Bill Kurten (Yup, the same Bill Kurten who owned the rink in Oconto Falls when my folks were kids!) for 25 cents, but as soon as we’d saved up enough money, we bought our own skates. My skates were Chicago brand, “composition” wheels, white with red laces and cost about $30 in 1954, equivalent to about $259 today.
Once we became a little more proficient, we’d loosen up the trucks on our skates so we had more flexibility. A truck is the piece of metal that the axle passes through. The looser the truck, the more easily you could turn. Turning on roller skates is done by one of or a combination of two methods. The first is by picking your skate up off the floor while you’re rolling and putting it down pointing in another direction. The second is by leaning your weight to the inside or outside of your foot. If the trucks were loose, they would flex and allow the axles and wheels to tilt so you could make turns or spins.
We had some great times at Kelly Lake!
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