Short biography of Ray Friese

Short biography of Ray Friese

Written by David Barth
February 2010.

This is a short biography of Ray Friese who passed away around 1999 in his 80's.

When I moved to Denver from Ohio in March 1967, I noticed the outdoor ice rink at Zechindorf Plaza on 16th Street, in front of the May-D&F department store, where a large hotel now sits. Skating looked like an interesting sport, and it appeared that the number of girls was much greater than that of the guys. This looked like a great place to pick up ladies.

I walked into May-D&F, bought a pair of ice skates for $14, and went to the rink to skate. After work, I often ice skated. I enjoyed the music and moving smoothly on the ice. Every once in awhile, I would see a man in a black beret zoom around the ice at high speed. I decided he might be able to give me a few pointers on style, but there was no way I could skate fast enough to ask him some questions. I saw him several times until the rink closed in late April.

I decided to keep skating, so I went to the rink at Denver University, but skating at DU wasn't very interesting to me. It seemed to be quite mundane. I read in a magazine that the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs had a rink where Peggy Fleming trained, and that sounded like a really great place to skate. Maybe I could meet Peggy! Because the Broadmoor had Carlo Fassi, the world-renown skating coach, and Peggy, the skaters on public sessions might be incredibly well-accomplished.

So, I drove my 1965 Corvette to the Broadmoor and found that the skaters on the public sessions were no better than skaters at other rinks . . . except for that guy who skated at high speed – the one who wore the black beret. Eventually, he slowed down, and I was able to speak to him. I introduced myself and asked him if he could give me a few pointers on my form. I knew I didn't skate like competitors, and I wanted to be able to skate faster with more poise.

His name was Ray Friese, and he told me to skate once around the rink and he would look at my style. When I had skated around the rink, he simply shook his head and said that I needed a lot of work to improve.

That began a "training program" that lasted several years. He didn't teach jumps, but only the basics which included edges, three turns, and Mohawks. Then, near the end of the public session, he'd say, "Ok, forget everything and just skate like hell!" So, I'd skate as fast as I could. He had no problem keeping up with me. In the early days, he was just coasting along while I was struggling mightily to go fast.

The most important thing he taught was correct stroking. Most skaters, including me, in the beginning, use the picks on the front of the blade to propel them selves along the ice. He told me never to use the picks except for certain jumps that required them. The technique is to push the blade to the side, away from the body instead of pushing backward the way a person does when walking. That movement used different muscles on the inside of the legs, and it took a few weeks before I was comfortable skating that way. But I found that I could go much, much faster. Instead of locking the toe picks into the ice, stopping the blade, by pushing to the side, the blade continued to move forward with the skater, and great speed could be achieved.

Many of Ray's skating friends often gathered to skate at the Broadmoor, and it was great to have a group of guys and gals who enjoyed skating, sort of like a party on ice.

Ray learned to ice skate on the rivers around Chicago, where there were great expanses of ice, which promoted fast skating. He moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1957 where he wanted to go to work for the University of Colorado. There were no jobs at the time he arrived, so every day he ate his lunch in the personnel office. He got to know the personnel hiring manager very well, and his magnetic personality and ability to schmooze worked in his favor, and he got a typing job in the office of Contracts and Grants. This was long before office computers or even electric typewriters, and until he retired at the age of 65, around 1985, he still used a manual typewriter.

His job was to communicate with government and military agencies to acquire property that the CU might be able to use in its research facilities. His gift of gab served him well, and he was very successful in his job, although his education never went beyond high school.

Ray lived in a very small apartment on 7th Street in Boulder, near twelfth, I believe. His was one of the four one-story apartments in the complex. He liked music and had brought a pump organ with him from Chicago which he enjoyed playing, especially during the holidays. He often had to have it tuned, and the old reeds required careful adjustment. Fortunately, there was an accomplished tuner in Boulder.

He was forever writing letters to the local paper, and many of them were printed. He had a fascination with the Titanic, and he often made speaking engagements at primary schools to tell children about the huge, "unsinkable" boat that sank. He knew a lot of historic details and enjoyed passing his knowledge to the kids.

In the autumn of 1967, the mountain lakes began to freeze. A group of my coworkers at the American National Bank of Denver invited me to go ice skating at Lake Pactolus, and because of my interest in that sport, I went along. It was on a Friday after work, and it was cold and dark on the ice. But the lake had a nice warming house, and the ice was good.

Shortly after that, Ray told me that most of our friends enjoyed skating at Lake Pactolus on Saturdays or Sundays. For the next couple of years, we skated at the Broadmoor in the summer and at Pactolus in the winter. From time to time I invited my girlfriends up to the lake, but none were very enthralled with skating except for one shockingly beautiful girl from Sweden who was a student at CU. She was an outstanding skater, who was serious about skating, but not about me. So our friendship never progressed very far. She graduated and I never saw or heard from her again.

Lake skating in good weather was glorious. When the sun set behind the Continental Divide, it cast a golden color on the ice that we called "Alpine Glow." The lake was man-made to harvest ice in the winter to be sent by rail car to the ice houses in Denver. The warming house was built on the side of a huge ice house that had thirty foot ceilings. The ice was cut from the lake during the winter and stored in the ice house where it was shipped by rail to Denver, as needed, during the summer months. The walls and the roof of the ice house were three feet thick with sawdust in them for insulation.

The ice house was empty, but the guy who operated the lake flooded the floor so that in very bad weather we could skate in the ice house. Skating inside was very cold, and we had to be careful not to crash in to the tall, wooden posts that supported the roof.

Out on the lake, when the California Zephyr passed, we all skated like hell, as fast as we could go, doing tricks and intentional falls to show off to the passengers. We even showed off for the freight trains.

Ray drove a yellow 1965 Plymouth Satellite with a black, vinyl top. He kept it in top condition, even having rust spots replaced by metal instead of Bondo. He was always trying to get more power out of his engine, which was somewhere around a 380, as I recall. Anyway, he went through a period of using moth balls to increase horse power, and later he added a water injection system. He liked to point out the water injection was used in the engines of military planes during World War II to increase their power for takeoff or in emergencies.

By this time I was flying small planes, and he had the misconception that aviation fuel was much more powerful than ordinary gasoline. I tried to tell him that it was just more carefully refined and kept clear of particulates, but he dreamed of running his car on avgas.

One problem he had was fighting the road film that got on his windshield. After much experimentation, he found that a combination of Windex and Ajax cleanser removed it.

Ray was inventive, and he lightened his skating boots by cutting them down so that they only went up just above his ankles. He had a machinist cut his skate blades narrower to the thickness of that used by speed skaters. He believed in speed, speed, speed, and he taught me to go fast, although I didn't modify my boots or blades. A couple of years before he died, I visited him at his apartment and, knowing that he had given up skating, I asked if I could have his old boots. He frowned and said that ice skating had just brought sadness and pain to his life, and he had tossed his boots in the trash.

My assessment is that he had, at no fault of his own, failed to establish a solid, long-lasting bond with another person. He always had many friends, but never had a life-long, close relationship, as many of us in his "Flying Circus" skating club had achieved.

He often complained of stomach pains for which the doctors had no prognosis or cause. He had to be careful of his back which could go out very easily if he lifted some object improperly. He related a story of a piece of paper that had fallen from his small table a few years prior. He put his left hand on the top of the table and bent over, swinging his right hand down to grab the paper, and whammo, his back went out, just from that simple move. It took weeks for him to recover, so he was always very careful.

Ray said when he was a youngster, he and his six sisters enjoyed roller skating on the street in front of their big home in a Chicago suburb. His father was a partner in a steel firm that had made him very wealthy. Ray noticed that the asphalt on the road in front of his house was always very smooth tar which made for great roller skating. He always suspected that his father had pulled some strings with the road company to make his street extra smooth.

Ray said the relationships in the household were often tumultuous with his six female siblings often fighting over clothes and other things. Ray's paternal grandmother lived on the second floor of the house, and he remembered being saddened when his mother and his grandmother fought. He said his mother would stand at the bottom of the stairs and yell up at his grandmother who would respond by yelling back.

The most traumatic event in Ray's life was when his best friend went off to World War II and was killed shortly thereafter. It crushed Ray, and he would often sadly relate the story and say that this was the most hurtful thing he ever endured.

Shortly after Ray arrived in Boulder in 1957, he decided to find a quiet place to live. He discovered the small town of Wall Street in the mountains west of Boulder. At that time he owned a two-door Plymouth. I don't remember the year of the car, but it was not new. Still, it was able to negotiate the steep gravel road up to Wall Street. The few people who lived in Wall Street endured long, cold winters and short summers. Ray rented a small, one-room cabin and made it his home. He had his organ there, and he said when he played it with the doors and windows of the cabin open, the music echoed around the hills.

The first winter, Ray discovered that starting his Plymouth in very cold weather was tricky because he didn't have a garage, so he thought of a solution. Before going to bed at night, he started the car, lifted the hood, and turned the idle down so that the engine ran very slowly, just sipping gas. He turned on the car's heater, and when he went out in the morning to go to work, the car was toasty warm inside and he drove away. The other residents of Wall Street were amazed at how he was able to get his car going in the coldest weather which was often more than 40 degrees below zero.

Ray loved telling jokes although most of them were pretty lame. The winds in Wall Street were legend for their ferocity. He said he saw a chicken that was facing downwind lay the same egg twice. I must have heard that joke a hundred times, but I chuckled each time to humor him.

Each Thanksgiving Ray would take a week vacation and travel by train to Chicago. He never flew in a plane. I guess he was fearful of flying. He would pay extra to get a roomette on the train where he could relax, read, and enjoy the scenery fly by in solitude. But being a "people person," Ray always enjoyed taking meals in the dining car where he would chat with other passengers and tell them stories. In Chicago, he would visit his parents and sisters. I always envied his train trips in a roomette, but had I taken such a trip, I'd have shared the roomette with a babe instead of going solo as he did.

When Ray drove down I25 to the Broadmoor, he knew just the right speed to go to get there in the shortest amount of time without being picked up by the cops. I think the speed he settled on was 68 miles per hour in the 65 mph speed limit of the highway. He lamented that Vascar took all the fun out of driving because the cops could catch you without using radar or pacing you. They could measure your speed without being seen. To my knowledge, he never had a radar receiver in his car.

Ray never officially "came out of the closet" because those were the dark days when many people didn't understand, and he was fearful of losing his job. But his friends all knew or at least suspected. In the late 1960's he confided to me that he had found an attractive seventeen year old boy, KJ, who was willing to become his partner. At that time, Ray was in his mid-forties. KJ joined our skating group, and became an accomplished skater. He was blonde and handsome. At the Broadmoor, I noticed young girls around the age of twelve admiring him with furtive glances. I wished I was as good-looking as he was. But when we guys went out for Pizza after the public session, I told him that the young girls were checking him out, and he became very upset, so I let the subject drop. Still, I wished that God, in his infinite wisdom, had bestowed upon me good looks like his.

Eventually, KJ found a younger partner and split with Ray. Ray was devastated. When I asked him about KJ, he told me never to mention that name again. He was extremely heart-broken. He always told me that I was so lucky to have Carol. I agreed with him. I suggested that he make his environment nicer by getting out of the one-room apartment and getting a nice house which might improve his chances, but he was too monetarily conservative to spend that kind of money, so he stayed in the little, ten by twelve foot apartment to the very end.

It had one room with the bed on one side and the television in the opposite corner, beside the organ, so that he could watch TV from his bed. In the other corner he had a hot plate on a small table, beside a chest of drawers. He could warm up food on the hot plate when he elected not to go out to eat. At the back of the apartment were a closet, a small pantry, and a bathroom. He kept food in the pantry and said he had enough to last more than a month. But he preferred to eat out because he enjoyed talking with people. In later years he often ate breakfast at a McDonalds where several of his friends congregated.

Sometimes Ray would get into a sad mood and tell me about a close friend of his who had joined the Army right out of high school. His friend was killed, and the loss was deeply felt by Ray. Thirty years after his loss, Ray talked very sadly, as though it had been yesterday. He never got over heartaches.

One time he said that it must have been great to be on the submarine with all those young boys. I told him to imagine himself on a submarine where he was the only male, and the rest of the crewmembers were women. That made him realize how it really was. Nothing exciting at all.

After he retired, around the mid-1980s, he must have decided that his Plymouth Satellite was showing its age, and he traded it for a maroon Buick.

When I visited him a couple of years before he died, as I mentioned above, he was discouraged with life. By this time he had found a partner, whom I never met, but I sensed that it was a relationship of convenience. I believe by this time Ray had amassed more than a million dollars. No one in the skating group was ever notified of his death or invited to his funeral.

I found out about his passing from another skating couple who were friends of his in Boulder. They read his obituary in the Daily Camera. I wish I could have gotten his ice skates as a remembrance.