Roller Skate
How skating felt like home...until it didn't
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If you were a kid growing up in 1980s America, you knew how to rollerskate.
The kids in the 60s started it all, but kids in the 70s pioneered looking supremely cool while doing it. Us kids in the 80s kept it going and became the kids in the 90s who pioneered roller blades (back when those were very cool).
This is not an exhaustive history of roller skating, nor am I even going to try to make my story more interesting than that of a young Black man named Ledger Smith, who skated 685 miles to witness Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall wearing a sash that read “Freedom” the whole way.
But as someone who was born in 1979, 70s kids walked so 80s kids could run, and 80s kids ran, so 90s kids could skate. And skate we did.
Red Wing Rollerway in Columbia, South Carolina was where the magic happened for me and for hundreds of other kids in the Midlands. It was a long, white, warehouse-looking building surrounded by a huge parking lot, rather nondescript and utterly mundane. But possibility lay inside. Pulling up to the building, walking that ramp to the front door—my heart starts beating faster in anticipation just thinking about it.
In my world, there were really only two reasons to go to the skating rink. The first was birthday parties; mine, a few times, and friends’, too. Around age seven or eight, as us kids got too old and wise to be wooed by Showbiz Pizza Place’s Rock-a-Fire Explosion™ (the anthropomorphic, animatronic band bringing all the fun and cheesiness—not to mention nightmares—to childhood), the next step up for birthday parties was Red Wing.
The other reason to go skating was perhaps even more socially important: Brennen Skate Night.
One half of Brennen Elementary School’s two best party nights of the year (the other being the Halloween Carnival—peeled grapes under a black light, anyone?), Skate Night was a big deal. Everyone was there, your classmates, your little brother, even Mr. Moore, the principal. A chance to do something fun, see your friends from school at night, and look cool as hell doing it? Yes, please!
Well, maybe not everyone looked cool as hell. But there’s something about gliding around on skates that’s just a shade removed from actual take off, flight just on the cusp of possibility. That, in itself, will always be cool.
The rental skates were a tannish brown, with dark brown laces and orange wheels, and were made of some kind of cardboard or something that never fully conformed to your feet. Strapping these things on raised your height by two inches, which was scary enough on the carpet, much less on the actual rink, cement painted a powdery blue.
Most kids used the rentals, which was all fine and good, but there was a special category of “coolness” for the kids who owned their own. Like two boys in my class, David and Kevin. I remember David, taller than everyone else, zipping around the rink, his long legs effortlessly carrying him, doing loops around us. And Kevin could do that thing where you’re crouching close to the floor, skating on one foot while the other is stretched out in front of you.
Were they cool? (Was anything related to this era of skating cool?) Doesn’t matter; my admiration remains. They blew the rest of us away.
And Skate Night would not have been complete without a visit to the snack bar, home to “The Suicide,” which was just a mix of all the soft drinks together, and if you were cool (there’s that word again!), that’s what you ordered. No kid or adult questioned why the drink was called that, because it was the eighties, people.
I was never a top tier skater, but by the end of the night at Red Wing, every time, I felt confident enough to go fast, I hardly ever fell, and I was pretty good at the limbo.
Good enough for me.
Things I learned from skating at Red Wing:
Skating backwards is a myth, a trick of the eyes. No one can actually do it!
You are bound by law to participate in the Hokey Pokey.
Don’t stare too hard at that disco ball; it might take you to another place, like being sprawled out on the floor.
Bad skaters are like bad dancers; hard to watch, tough to look away from!
Question: What is the best music to skate to? Answer: Anything by Michael Jackson, and the “Ghostbusters” theme song. Any other responses are patently wrong.
Red Wing flowed through my blood; we were loyal to that building on Decker Boulevard. It never occurred to me that there were other skating rinks in other towns that might be…better.
One Saturday in middle school, I went with my friend Patricia to Skate Station USA in Lexington, the next town over. They had a real wood floor. Classy! (Basically everything else was the same). The rumble of my skates over the planks caught me off guard at first. Wood isn’t as smooth, but is softer for falling than cement (this is important information for later).
That day sticks out in memory because my elusive, next-town-over crush was there! He was tearing up the rink in his own pair of black skates, donning a blue, teal, and pink tracksuit, the kind with matching windbreaker and pants. Very impressive!
I vowed to go back the next weekend.
I didn’t! Fifteen years would go by before I went back to Skate Station USA, or any rink, for that matter. Skating rinks in the nineties and two-thousands were no longer cool places for teenagers and young adults in my orbit; roller blades and street hockey took over the rollerskating scene, becoming their own kind of cool and then not cool. Skating outside was in, skating inside, out.
(And despite my love for The Mighty Ducks, I was never good at blades).
But finally, in 2006 at 26, in the summer, with different friends, at a different time in my life, I went back to Skate Station, “The United Skates of America”. We dressed the part and had a blast, goofy young adults, not married, not kids but not not kids, no kids of our own just yet, either.
I remember that day so vividly. It was beautiful.
Fast forward nine years to 2015. Another rink, another state: Skateland, in Essex Junction, Vermont.
It was our spring Teen Retreat for the kids in DREAM, the organization where I worked. Kids came from all over the state, thirty or so of them, for an overnight and lots of fun activities. I was in charge of running the whole thing. It was our first time taking them here; the rink had just opened a few months before.
For me, same awesome outfit, same badass attitude! I was so ready.
You could rent roller blades or quads (how had I not ever known that’s what they were called?), and I pulled on those quads and was ready to roll. It felt like dancing again after so many years.
Per usual, it got easier. I got faster.
At every rink, there’s always that one guy, better than everyone else, some dude not from our group who was just there to skate. I didn’t have to be as good as he was; after an hour of skating, watching our teens try quads, admit defeat, and trade out for blades, my skating confidence was through the roof.
I thought, Maybe I’ll take this up again. I thought, What does a monthly membership cost? I thought, I am the second-best skater in this whole place!
Green Mountain Roller Derby, here I come!
These thoughts still skating through my head, I was standing still on the rink next to some kids, stick-straight, and a kid came up behind me and poked me with a cheerful “Boo!” Being the easily surprised person I am, I jumped, my feet fell out from below me, and I crashed straight down onto the concrete floor, both hands behind me to brace my fall.
My left wrist took the brunt of my weight. It felt…weird.
Everyone was around me then, kids and coworkers, and I was stunned and certainly embarrassed, and they helped me skate over to a table in the snack bar, where the owner of the rink claimed that my wrist was fine and “it’s probably just a bad sprain.”
It was already swelling.
I’d never broken a bone in my life. It would hurt a lot more if it was, right? Wasn’t I supposed to be in tears and excruciating pain?
Then I was making last minute plans of who could drive me back to get my stuff (thanks, Matt) and who could now be in charge of this whole event (thanks, Kylie, who told me “I can’t look at your wrist, I might throw up”) and then David came and took me to the hospital, where they pronounced that my wrist was, indeed, broken.
So much for looking cool.
Breaking a bone as an adult is about as fun and humbling as you’d imagine. Six weeks of a cast (the blink of an eye in retrospect; slow as molasses at the time), which meant showering with a rubber cast cover, wearing glasses (I couldn’t twist my left arm to fit my left contact lens in), dropping out of a half-marathon (I was determined not to get my contained arm sweaty; I’d heard the horror stories), and feeling mildly sorry for myself.
All told, it was not that bad. Spring was a fine time to convalesce. David got me some coloring books, I watched the entirety of the show “Big Love”, and I went on plenty of walks around my office building; not breaking a sweat, mind you, but enjoying the birds gathering under the fruit trees dotting Industrial Park. Hope was slowly returning.
When the cast came off, instead of a normal-looking forearm, there was this chicken bone-looking thing attached to my elbow. Physical therapy at University of Vermont Medical Center helped get my muscles working again.
Around the water cooler at my office, this guy told me, “I broke my leg a few years ago. It’s never been the same.” Not the encouraging words I wanted to hear, but nine years later, I know what he meant. I can do almost everything I could before, even rock climb, which I thought might not be possible again.
But my left wrist doesn’t feel as strong as my right, and probably never will. That’s okay. I now know what the old folks mean about how they can feel the weather in their bones.
A couple years later, I flew to Denver for Maureen’s wedding. She and her new hubby, J, had a lovely ceremony at the Smith Lake Pavilion in Washington Park. After tying the knot, we all changed out of our wedding attire and into groovy outfits (I wore a green vintage mini-dress that had belonged to my mom in the sixties) and convened at Skate City for a retro skate party and one of the most fun wedding receptions I’ve ever attended. The party was catered by J’s mom, a fabulous cook, complete with all sorts of incredible Filipino delicacies.
Looking cool in my cute dress, I was still a conservative skater, and never built up to going quite as fast as I would have before. But taking the leap back onto the rink was an important step in building my confidence and reminding me that I am still a pretty darn good skater. (Just don’t ask if I wore wrist guards. They would have clashed with my outfit)!
Skating was in my bones as a kid. And skating broke one of my bones as an adult! The lesson in all of this is simple: Relax and have fun! Take calculated risks. Wear costumes. The world needs more playfulness, and it can start with strapping on a pair of skates.
Reflection questions:
What are your memories of your favorite childhood activities? What made these activities feel like “home” to you?
Did you ever get injured doing something you enjoyed? What happened next?
Red Wing and Skate Station USA were located in present day Richland and Lexington Counties, South Carolina, on the land of the Tsalaguwetiyi (Cherokee, East) and Congaree nations. Skateland was located in present day Chittenden County, Vermont, on the land of the Wabanaki and N’dakina (Abenaki) nations.
Image: Red Wing Rollerway, 2008. Photo by Ted at ColumbiaClosings.com. For those who want to walk down memory lane, here are a ton of pictures of Red Wing Rollerway right before the building was sold. (The ones of the birthday party room and fallen disco ball are particularly striking).
This is a great entry.
There was a Brennen skate night *every* month. And, you could win prizes if you were good enough -- like, free Suicides!
That stunt you're referring to is called "shooting the duck."
Skating is making a comeback in the 2020s! But there was nothing quite like one more All-Skate in the Regular Direction.