The Ice Skating Influence

ICE SKATING HISTORY

Written by Dave Barh in 1998.

Ice skating appealed to me in an abstract way since my first exposure to it at an ice show that my mother took me to when I was about four years old. That would have been around 1946, and we lived in Denver, Colorado at the time. I vaguely remember two men in a tiger outfit and a woman skater who was very accomplished in my estimation at that young age. There was a live band to accompany the skaters. My next experiences were in high school. Once Mother took my brother and sister and me to an outdoor rink on the Olentangy River Road. We met friends of ours who had a boy my age and another my brother's age. The rink was temporary, created by flooding an area beneath a tent on a vacant lot.

The only other recollection of me ice skating was one cold winter in Columbus when the Olentangy River froze, and we three kids went down to the river, at the bottom of our street, with neighbors who owned hockey skates. Since there weren't enough skates for all of us, we took turns using them. It was cold, and we didn't stay on the ice very long before retreating home.

I had more experience roller skating. We always went to one rink, the closest one, which was about twenty miles from home. I went there about four or five times, once on a high school trip where I was good enough to navigate to two or three girls I admired and talk to them for a short time while we shakily skated.

In the Navy, I talked to a guy on our submarine about ice skating. He and his wife were into ice dancing. For some reason, skating sounded appealing to me. Following my discharge from the Navy, and subsequent move from Columbus, Ohio to Denver, where the winter skies were much sunnier, I took up ice skating. I probably would have never gotten interested in it if there hadn't been a small outdoor rink in downtown Denver at Zechindorf Plaza on 16th Street.

In 1967 I lived in a buffet apartment at 17th and Sherman, and on weekends I sometimes ate lunch at the Walgreens across from the rink, about three blocks from my apartment. One Saturday, in the Fall of 1967, the rink at Zechindorf had recently opened for the winter. While eating lunch at Walgreens, I was seated at a window that gave me a good view of the rink on the plaza. Since the rink was sunken, I could only see the upper bodies of the skaters, and they appeared to be gliding smoothly as they went around the rink. I decided to give skating a try, so after finishing lunch, I went over to the May D&F department store on the plaza and purchased a pair of cheap skates for $14. Not realizing that skaters had to go down stairs below the rink to pay 50 cents for the privilege to skate, I simply put on my new boots and went skating. It was a couple of weeks before they caught me, and from then on I paid.

I enjoyed the experience, so I began skating several times a week, after work on weekdays and sometimes during the day on weekends. It was at Zechindorf that I first saw Ray Friese, a high-speed skater. Phil Beazley was usually there, too, but I didn't meet them until the following Spring.

A couple of skaters I admired, George Jensen and Pam, often skated together. They were very accomplished compared to me, and usually drew a crowd to the rink when they performed. Pam later became a skating instructor.

When Zechindorf Plaza's rink was closed in the Spring of 1968, I skated a few times at the only indoor rink in Denver, the University of Denver Arena. Skating there wasn't inspiring at the time, but I recall taking a beginner lesson which didn't teach much more than the most basic things like forward and backward sculling. I read an advertisement in Colorado Magazine about a skating program at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. This was the rink where Peggy Fleming and other champions trained, and I figured that even though I had been skating a whole six months, even though I thought I was fairly accomplished on the ice, I would be outclassed on the public session. One Saturday I drove down I25 to Colorado Springs, exiting onto Nevada Street where I stopped at a Conoco gas station to ask where the Broadmoor was.

As I drove west on Lake Avenue toward the majestic Broadmoor Hotel, I decided this was a very nice place to spend some leisure time. The rink was very old, but it exuded old opulence and had the imposing name of "World Arena."

I thought I was a fairly good skater, but I felt I needed a few pointers to achieve perfection. I saw Ray Friese, the fast skater I had seen at Zechindorf Plaza and the Denver University Arena. I introduced myself and asked him for some tips. The assistance I asked for I envisioned would take a few minutes. Actually, it took two years of concentrated effort. Not that I became a very accomplished skater, but it took me a long time to perfect the basics such as edges, three turns, and mohawks. Since I had no girl friends to tie me down in 1968 and 1969, I drove to the Broadmoor on weekends to perfect my skating technique and enjoy the ambiance of that resort area. Ray usually drove down from Boulder, and we were allowed to stay at the skater's lodge, Beatty Hall, where skaters could stay for $4.00 a night and get breakfast. This lifestyle was really great because it was like a vacation each weekend, and I looked forward to it.

Sometimes I drove down on Friday after work to catch the 9PM to 10PM session. If I stayed for the Sunday evening session, the weekend amounted to seven two-hour sessions! Most of the time, however, I drove down Saturday morning and came back Sunday afternoon, after the mid-day session.

As I recall, the session times for Saturday and Sunday were 7AM to 9AM, 11:30 to 1:30PM, and 9PM to 10PM. Skating these sessions was quite a workout, and I got into pretty good shape. Ray and I would often go out for pizza, mexican food, or italian fare, and we didn't have to worry about counting calories. Ray's approach to teaching skating is to concentrate on the basics such as edges, three turns, mohawks, and of great importance, speed. The speed helps smooth skating and increases its excitement. Along the way, I taught myself some jumps. At one time, I could do most of the single revolution jumps, and I even had the axel for a month, around 1978. I lost it because I didn't work on it often enough. I found it to be difficult, requiring raw guts to hold the rotation for the one and a half turns.

OBSERVATIONS ABOUT SKATING
Skating can be good exercise if you expend the energy to go fast. Speed is just about the only way to really use calories and generate heat. To his credit, Ray's skating philosophy was to teach speed. Along with the three basics mentioned above: edges, threes, and mohawks, speed is paramount.

Speed results in enhanced smoothness, better balance, and higher jumps. Also, speed requires more energy, making it good exercise. However, speed requires good technique, and as that technique is developed, it is refined so that the skater becomes efficient, allowing for even more speed or a relaxing, medium-speed cruise. Ice skating is a pleasing pastime because one can slow down and chat with other skaters or blast off and do his or her own thing, working on moves, exercising, and skating to the music.

Girl-watching is sometimes good on a rink. If a girl's backside looks good, you can pass her and turn around to skate backwards to check out her face. The worst time to skate is when you are tired. I have taken some bad falls when I was fatigued. The three worst falls I have taken were at the Denver University Arena. The first was around 1970, when I stepped onto the ice wearing my skate guards. I went down fast, but I wasn't hurt. The next one was about 1975 when I stumbled and fell on my left arm which broke a rib. I had to stop skating for a few weeks until I could breathe heavily without pain. The most recent fall occurred in 1993 when I was tired and tripped over one of my own feet, going down on my left shoulder so hard that the impact forced a grunt out of me and broke my watch band. As I got up off the ice, the guy behind me told the girl he was skating with that if he had fallen that hard, he wouldn't have gotten up as fast as I.

ICE PREPARATION
I went to an ice show in 1967, held at the Denver Coliseum. To clean the ice, the maintenance men were still using old barrels on wheels, dragging a wet floor mop to smooth the surface.

At that same time, the University of Denver used a jeep outfitted with the helical cutter that modern Zambonis use. It may have been an early Zamboni model. To re-surface Lake Pactolus, Dick Ferrell drilled a hole in the ice, placed a pump over it, and flooded the surface. If the conditions were right, the water froze to the existing ice, but sometimes there were rough areas and bubbles. More than once, Dick stopped the pump for too long, and the water inside it froze solid so that he would have to move it inside to thaw before he could continue pumping.

Unfortunately, Dick never obtained a Zamboni. Had he gotten one and kept Pactolus open, the lake might have survived as a good skating lake today. Once Pactolus closed, however, it was eclipsed by Keystone Lake that did have a Zamboni, was in a more densely populated area, was on a more heavily traveled route, and was near the Keystone Lodge and many shops and restaurants.

LAKE PACTOLUS
My first trip to Pactolus was with a group of fellow employees of American National Bank. It was an informal arrangement where we car-pooled after work one Friday evening. Pactolus was lighted with spotlights placed on the warming house. As you skated westward, away from the building, you could see fairly well at night, but returning, you were blinded by the bright spotlights, and you couldn't identify skaters except by their profile.

The warming house was a large barn-like edifice that once was used to store ice blocks cut form the lake. The blocks were loaded aboard railroad cars and taken to Denver to cool the meat lockers in the days before mechanical refrigeration was available.

When I skated there in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the California Zephyr was still running between Chicago and Los Angeles, and it used the tracks that went by the lake. Whenever, a train came by, whether it was the "Zeph," as we called it, or a freight, every showoff on the lake (that included nearly all of us) put on our best show for the passengers and trainmen. The passing of a train was exciting, especially when the silver cars of the Zephyr glided by.

The weather varied from cold and snow to clear and mild, but most days were clear. Skating in the sunshine was skating at its best. Pactolus had a feature that was all its own. Ray dubbed it "Aspen Glow." It was the golden color of the sky and the lake that occurred on a clear evening just after the sun dropped behind the mountains of the Continental Divide. It was, apparently, caused by the yellowish sky light reflected on the surface of the ice. It gave the lake a beautiful color, and it was the "grand finale" prior to quickly dropping temperatures and darkness.

In bad weather, we could skate in the ice house which Dick flooded for that purpose. It helped him keep revenue coming in even when skating outdoors was miserable. However, the ice house was a weird place to skate. It was dimly lighted by a few incandescent light bulbs and it had a dozen posts that held up the roof which was at least forty feet high, by my recollection. The condition of the slowly deteriorating structure was always of concern to us because the roof contained three feet of sawdust insulation which was heavy, and we dreaded its collapse.

The wooden walls rested on a concrete foundation that was a couple of feet above the surface of the ice, and more than once a skater's blade scraped along the concrete, producing a shower of sparks.

The ice house shut out the wind and snow, but it was always cold. We wouldn't skate there too long before finding an excuse to retreat to the warming house. The warming house was actually a one-story addition to the west side of the ice house. It was heated and always cozy. There was a snack bar where we ate lunch and discussed the ice, weather conditions, our technical achievements, and skaters of previous years. I heard stories about the skater who was a sailor, as I had been; of the skaters from Germany; and of the girl skater who was also an aspiring artist. She had painted water color pictures of scenes on Lake Pactolus, and they adorned the walls all the years I skated there.

MUSIC
Music has been very important to me since the Broadmoor days. Back then, they played reel-to-reel tapes. Later, 8-track tapes came along, followed by cassette tapes. Skaters who enjoyed music often offered their own favorite skating tapes to the rink to play.

This was before the advent of the personal music player, the Walkman.

As a result, there were sometimes "Music Wars" in which skaters would compete with each other in an attempt to woo or cajole the rink management to get their music played. Some‚times skaters would request the management to play a certain rink-owned tape. In any case, good skating music was not consistent for a skater because his favorite music wouldn't be played much of the time.

One of the greatest inventions for the skating public was the Walkman that played cassette tapes. I purchased mine around 1978, shortly after they were introduced. It was smaller than a cigarette pack and cost $95.00.

After that, a skater could control the skating music and get a lot more out of a session. Since music is important to most skaters, and music that inspires them encourages them to skate energetically, skaters can work harder with the personal music machines.

Each skater has a different idea of the optimum music for skating. For one person it is classical. For another it might be country/western. Popular, jazz, new age, blues, polkas, pipe organ, zither, and all sorts of other types are examples of music that individuals prefer. As a result, it is rare for two skaters to prefer the same music selections. Those who are very serious about their music make cassette tape that have their favorite selections.