Letting the good times roll - new surge in popularity for roller skating
Saturday Evening Post, April, 1988 by Grant Pick
 

The Elm Skating Club, a roller rink in the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst, is situated virtually at the cross hairs of two main thoroughfares. Passersby know the place by the big brown sign out front depicting a roller-skate shoe; the building's brick exterior is otherwise rather plain.

Not so the Elm's innards. The floor is composed of 20,000 square feet of hard rock maple, the end pieces bent so skaters never encounter a seam. Underneath lie two subfloors of yellow pine, followed by a vapor barrier, an insulating layer of Homasote, a coating of tar, a slab of concrete, and finally, several inches of sand. If you can't gain support on the Elm floor, there is probably nowhere in America for you to stand.

It took the best parts of five old theater pipe organs to create the 28-rank instrument that swells the Elm with music. The organ, played via a keyboard accented by Italian lights, is centered in two lofts rambling across the Elm's second level. The organ can imitate 20 instruments, from a tuba to tinkling bells. When a march is called for, the Elm organ complies with a sound duplicating a full band. Mostly, though, the two rink organists stick to standards from the 1920s to the '40s: "Chattanooga Choo Choo" and Tommy Dorsey's "Boogie Woogie" are ever popular.

They are popular, that is, three nights a week, when the Elm Regulars congregate at the club. The Regulars are 200 or so rink devotees who love not only the floor and the pipe organ but also the chance to skate-dance. The men wear chinos, the women tights and frilly short skirts, and, holding hands, they whirl around the floor with the spots of fight sprayed by a mirror ball hung from the ceiling. As the organist on duty progresses through a never-changing repertoire, the Regulars execute the steps they know so well-the conga, the fox trot, the siesta tango, the Denver shuffle, and the "romp," a swing-swing-swing motion with three steps backward and a crisp turnaround.

"These are skaters' skaters," remarks the Elm's owner, Bill Fuchs. "Can you think of anything more entertaining than coming to a rink like this and being proficient?" Annabelle Hough, a photographer in her 5Os, returned to skating six years ago after being widowed. "This is good exercise," coos Hough, 40 pounds lighter from dancing, "but besides that it's good clean fun. No smoking, no drinking. And nice people." Common wisdom is that the wholesome pastime of roller skating is dead and gone in this age of video games and R-rated movies. Skating has been on the decline, at least since the late 1970s.

Still, there remain 24 million skaters in the United States, according to the Roller Skating Rink Operators Association (RSROA). Some industry cognoscenti smell a return to popularity in the wind, if only because of the success of Starlight Express, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical with an entire cast on roller skates.

Roller skating is thought to have had anonymous beginnings in Holland around 1700, but it took a Belgian-born inventor named Joseph Merlin to popularize the diversion in London sometime after 1760. The sport became a craze again in the 1860s, next in the 1880s, and finally as the 20th century cleared its teens. Charlie Chaplin bowed on wheels in the silent film "The Rink" in 1916. There were vaudeville acts on rollers, and for a time speed skating turned into quite the rage. The top racers, with such rococo names as Rollie Birkhimer and Howarth Beaumont, hotfooted it around rinks in Madison Square Garden in New York and at White City, a glitzy amusement park on Chicago's South Side.

Then there was the Sonja Henie of rollers-Gloria Nord. Nord, a short, blonde pistol of a girl, emerged as the star of a road show called "Skating Vanities" in 1942. And what a show it was. In 1947, one of its bigger seasons, "Skating Vanities" toured 28 cities in the United States and Canada with a supporting cast of 140. By the time "Vanities" folded in 1951, Gloria had performed every feat on skates, from a hula to a Chopin ballet.

The image of roller skating propagated by "Skating Vanities"-grand and fancifully romantic-was undercut by the Roller Derby. The Derby, which played at various arenas beginning in 1935, was patterned by its founder, Leo Seltzer, after a dance marathon, but its key attractions were "jams," or mad-scrambling tie ups heavy with roughhousing. In 1948 the Derby went on television,
which pleased and enriched Seltzer (now dead) but has always rankled those who favor a more refined posture for roller skating. "The Derby is terrible," sniffs Gloria Nord, still galled at how the public used to confuse "Skating Vanities" with Seltzer's fisticuffs-laden events.

Whatever- with the exception of the Derby, roller skating did decline in the years following World War II. The great urban rinks were already dead or dying. "People moved to the suburbs," relates Gordon Ware, president of the Chicago Roller Skate Company, "and they didn't have any side-walks out there. The young sidewalk skater, who had been a big base of the business, started to disappear." Soon, so did the teenage skater, lured away by "the dirty movie and the age of permissiveness," Ware says.