Roller Skating: Fun and Cool

through education. They're a great organization, they do great work and we learned that the stuff you should Know Army since we went to Guatemala has raised just shy of one million dollars and we really want to hit that one million dollar mark. Yep. We're basically trying to drum up a hundred thousand dollars in donations, which is a lot unless you break it up and divide it among

this stuff you should know Army. So if you want to go chip in a dollar five dollars and knowledge whatever your heart desires, you can go to Cooperative for Education dot org slash s y s K and they will put your money to really good use. And uh we are chipping into so okay, so let's start talking, chuck about roller skating, because there's worse things that you could talk about. Yeah, maybe let's start out with our

own personal experience. UM. As a sort of semi sheltered Baptist boy, my parents did not drop me off at the roller rink on a Friday night to go roller skating like all the other kids were doing, because it was unsupervised boys and girls together and that's where dirty things and naughty things happened sometimes. So the only time I got to go roller skating was when I went on youth group outings to the roller rink, which we did some long and short of it is, I was

never a great roller skater. I don't remember if I was a good roller skater and not. I certainly was never like a good roller skater. But I didn't fall that much, and I certainly didn't have to like hold onto the wall. Did you go? Did your parents drop you off and you got to go like try and kiss girls and stuff? Yes, and your parents weren't too far off. The first condom I ever saw in person was at the rollers probably totally right to keep me out of there in some dude's wallet. Um, Yes, but

it was it was much more. That was like literally the worst thing I ever saw at the roller ring. I can understand where that left a ring in a wallet? Right, Um, but no, it was like a like a Friday night thing usually. Um it was a school sponsored thing, so you know, like everybody there, which was pretty cool. Um. The slow skate like Arrowsmith Angel was always amazing. Um. Yeah, it was a really fun experience. I went to Ohio

skate was the name of my roller rink. The one we went to was called stones Gate because it was near Stone Mountain. Yeah that makes sense. But again I didn't get to go enough. I was okay, it wasn't so much where when I went, people are like, you know, who's the Mennonite over there? He still it looks really nervous. But you know, I did okay, but I wanted to go dry and kiss girls and I wasn't allowed to.

I don't recall kissing a girl at the roller rink ever, So you know you kissed the girl eventually, right, You're you're fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm married. You didn't miss that much. But it was fun. It was a fun time. I I all of my memories from the roller rink are very fond ones. I wanted to kiss a girl in the seventh grade, and I just that did not happen. Okay, yeah, I think I had my first kiss in second grade. Of course you did, because your boss there and your

boss now, thanks a lot man. All right, so let's talk roller skates. They have actually been around a lot longer than I thought. You put this together, right, Dave helped us with this one. Oh all right, I didn't know that I forgot about this one, I guess. Yeah, but they've been around a lot longer. They've been around since the seventeen hundreds. I did not know that the Dutch are Dutch friends were the ones who first started thinking of ways to put wooden spools into a line

and rolling around on them. But it's our English friends that get credit for being the first to have documented use of roller skates. There was a production in London on stage in seventeen forty three, not sure what it was called, but they were supposed to be pretending to be ice skating, So the actors on stage used roller skates. And if that doesn't bring up thoughts of like delighted gasps that the audience is the curtain rises and there's

people magically ice skating on stage. I don't know what does Yeah, absolutely uh. Not too long after, in seventeen sixty, there was an inventor from Belgium named John Joseph Merlin who debuted these roller skates that he made at Masquerade Ball. When he rolled in playing the violin, was like, hey, everybody,

look at me, I'm playing the violin. I'm rolling. Oh no, a mirror and like just sort of sounds like skated right into this mirror and broke it and broke his violin because at the time there were no toad stops and there were no trucks on the bottom of your skate, which we'll get to, but that's what allows you to to kind of lean and steer a skate a little bit right. For some reason, I think of Merlin like as he as he gets more and more out of control,

his his violins playing speeds up too. Rather than the opposite natural things just stopped playing violin, he keeps he's playing like his own demise that I keep imagining it like that. Oh, I love it. I wonder why the guy just didn't see it coming and like decided to just fall on purpose rather than crash into a mirror. I'm not sure. Maybe it's because he was so you know, playing so fast. He was doing the Devil went down to Georgia. So there's a guy named Jay mzel Plimpton

and he's considered um pretty much all around. Is the first inventor of the real roller skate back in eighteen sixty three. And in super nineteenth century fashion, he wasn't an inventor. He was a furniture store owner in New York because that's who invented stuff back in the nineteenth century. Yeah, it's pretty cool. They were called the rocking skates, and

they were the first quad skates. They were the first ones that have you know, the two wheels in the front and the two wheels in the back next to each other. And I mentioned those trucks, the first one that had a truck, and that is, instead of the skate just being fixed in position on the bottom of a wood shoe in in Amsterdam, the wheels are secured to a truck and the truck is secured to the

shoe or the boot, and those trucks. You know, if you ever skateboarded, you know you loosen and tighten the trucks. You can do the same thing on skates, and it's not quite like a skateboard. Like the trucks give just just a little bit on a roll or skate such that like most of your turning and stuff is done by picking up your feet. Uh, and not just like leaning really hard to the left and doing a circle.

But they but they really helped. Yeah. Um. So not only did Plimpton invent the modern rolling skate, he also basically introduced the pastime of roller skating to the world. Um, He's like, I'm definitely onto something here. He rented a ballroom in a hotel in Providence, couldn't find out what hotel it was, um, and set up a roller rink.

There is basically a proof of concept. And then he started touring the country and I think the world, showing people how great skating was, giving demonstrations, giving lessons, throwing skate parties, I guess, and um, in a very short time, the Victorians were like, this is a really great thing that we're into. He invented the skate in eighteen sixty three. By the eighties, there were three thousand roller rinks in

the United States, England, Europe in Australia. Yeah. I was about to say this would make a movie, but now that I think about it, it it would make a great drunk History episode, especially the John Joseph Merlin park. Yes, and so just why haven't we been on yet? Derek Waters, get Josh and I on junk History and let us tell the story of roller skating. I think that we need to get in the way back machine and ask him because that do not on anymore. I thought it

was still going. No, we missed our chance. I'm totally down to get in the way back machinery. I know, but I don't know. I'm really sad now I didn't know that it has completed. It's run. Okay, Well, never mind, Derek Waters. Put us in the next thing you do. Why don't you guys have me on? I'll have you one. I'll Derek Waters on anytime. Uh, roller ranks became all

the rage and young Victorians were out there. There's time before you could like go on a date and stuff like that, so it was kind of like young Chuck. It would have been a time for me to talk to girls and stuff, and that's what it was back then, in the eighties and nineties. Yeah, but I guess unlike your parents, the Victorians were like, this is okay, We're

gonna let them hang out by themselves chaperone. But the thing is, if you went skating back in the nineteenth century, UM, they would have like a full orchestra or an organist playing um, like a carousel basically, I think is what it was a lot like um because if you're just skating around silently in like with like no music, that seems really unwholesome and weird. So I think they figured out really quickly that you kind of need music to skate. Uh. This is a pretty cool fact that was in though.

Was at the Grand Hall Olympia in London, a sixty eight thousand square foot roller rink was built, which is about the size of a soccer field, So that just kind of goes to show like how much people were into skating it. It worked his way into vaudeville. It worked this way into the pictures. In the nineteen thirties,

Charlie Chaplin, very famously in modern times, skated blindfolded. Just if you've never watched any Chaplain, go just check this out at least and get a slight appreciation of his genius. But there was a he was on the fourth floor and there was no railing because it was under construction, and so he's skating around blindfold and of course they is so scary. Yeah. Um, and also that Vaudeville act.

I just have to shout out Charles Professor Frank, the dean of roller skating, and in particular I want to shout out his five year old daughter, Lily, who could roller skate on stilts. I've never heard of anybody doing that before or since. I feel like I've seen that at a circus. Okay, well, you can thank Lily Frank for for innovating that one. I wonder if she invented

the stilt. Probably not so in the fifties. Um, the peak of popularity of roller skating happened starting around ninety seven, I believe the late fifties, and apparently Chicago was the epicenter of this roller skating revival, because in between the Victorians and the fifties, roller skating actually developed a really

seedy reputation. UM. I saw like an article from the seventies where a roller rink operator said that back then roller rink was the kind of place you wouldn't let your daughter go hang out, like they're just not good places. But all of the roller rink operators that had hung on kind of banded together and like really worked to revive roller skating's image. And we're successful, so successful that the late fifties saw the greatest number of roller skating

and roller rinks and in history. Yeah, my parents didn't get that memo. I guess they were still working off the h code. But yeah, more than five thousand ranks were operating in the nineteen fifties. And if you think you grew up in the like seventies and eighties and you're like, no, that was the heyday there only well only there were a lot back then too, but about thirty hundred fewer ranks than the nineteen fifties. Yeah, and I definitely think of the late seventies is like the pinnacle.

But that was wrong. My eyes are open now, Uh, shall we take a break. Yeah, let's take a break and come back because there's some really unexpected coolness coming up. Okay, Chuck. So I don't typically, or I didn't before, associate roller skating with civil rights, but they really went hand in hand. Um early on. I think one of the earliest sit ins was in nine outside of the White City roller Skating Rink in Chicago. This early, like I equate sit

ins with like maybe the fifties, definitely the sixties. Um. But one of the reasons why they targeted roller skating rinks for sittings and civil rights protests because some historians said that everywhere in the country segregation, whether like on paper or in practice, was a real problem. But in particular, Black Americans found that, um, public pools, amusement parks, and roller skating rinks where the three hardest places to integrate.

And um, everybody likes skating, but not everybody had access to it, And so Black Americans were like, no, that doesn't sit very well with us. We're going to do something about that. Yeah, Like, they may show up at a roller skating rink and even if it was not, you know, legal to do so, they would say that we have a private party tonight, you can't come in.

So stuff like that was going on. Uh. In the nineteen sixty three there was a man seven year old from Chicago named Ledger Smith who very famously roller skated almost seven hundred miles to attend the March on Washington for jobs and freedom, which is the very famous I have a Dream speech where that took place, and he was called roller Man. He had a sash that said freedom.

He was backed by the N double A C P. And roller skated six and eighty five miles to attend it and to a lot of uh, you know, media fan fair and like obviously it was um for the time. It wasn't like widespread media, but it got attention right for sure. UM. So, after the Civil Rights Act was passed the nineteen sixty four and there was again on paper no such thing as um segregation or racism in America, UM, black Americans going to roller rinks still were faced with, like,

you know, just being shut out. But to kind of follow the law in the least way possible, roller rink operators would set aside like one night a week for black patrons, um. And they would call them things like

Soul Nights or Martin Luther King Junior Night. And it was what black Americans had to work with in the sixties if they wanted to go roller skating in some places, that's right, but it was it end up being something that really changed roller skating because on Soul Nights or on Martin Luther King Jr. Night at the roller Rink is where things got super cool and where they said, hey, um, you know, white people aren't here. We can do what

we want. We can get our dance on on these roller skates, and we can get that organist out of the room and play some good music. And that's what they did. They got uh, you know, like fifties and sixties soul and R and B and then eventually like funk music playing on the turntable and all of a sudden, skating got one thousand percent more awesome. Yeah, because up to that point, everybody was like, no, you don't do that.

You you skate around in a circle with a smile on your face, than the than the little like baseball game organist. But right exactly. But every but everything that you think of with roller skating, if you think it's even passingly cool, you can thank mid century black Americans for basically saying like, there's a much better way to do this, and integrating dancing and roller skating was a big part of that. And um so that really laid the groundwork for that skating revival that you and I

talked about. That seems like to us like the peak of roller skating, even though it wasn't. Um. And there was one guy in particular that was kind of the conduit for the whole thing. His name was Bill Butler, and he was an Air Force sergeant and all the way back in the late fifties he was trying to convince rink owners. He traveled around a lot um as part of his Air Force service. UM, so he would go to different rinks by himself, I guess, and um he would try to convince the owners to like play

some records instead of this organist you know. Um. And every once in a while he was successful. And when he was he really showed people like how great it was. But Um, as much as he was laying the groundwork in the fifties, in the late seventies he was basically the place where disco shot through into roller skating. He was like the prism that disco came through and spread into roller disco. Yeah. And that was in New York,

of course, sort of the the apex of disco. Uh in Brooklyn actually at Empire Roller Disco is where Bill hung out and disco happening. It all, like you said, to sort of coalesced at this moment in time where skating was sort of retaking off, and then all of a sudden you had this great music to dance too, and dancing on roller skates is even cooler. Uh if you could pull it off. Um, it's very hard. I've

tried to do that stuff. I'm that's not very good disco roller skater, but rollers they kind of like dip their toe in it. As far as the rinks go. They would have like a club night where they would play those records and stuff. And then eventually, when disco really really hit, the riding was on the wall and they started fully converting roller rinks into what we think

of roller rinks now. Like before this, they didn't have like all the amazing sort of dance lie It's and mirror balls and like disco is is what brought all that stuff in. So all of a sudden you have like neon and like cool carpet and like a killer sound system and it was like a disco on wheels exactly. And one of the reasons why it got so big is because disco really brought um, Americans of all races together for like the first time, more than ever before.

I don't want to say the first time, but definitely more than ever before. It was a really integrative I think that's a word, sure, um kind of cultural movement,

right so um. Basically, another way to put it is white people who already like disco, we're like, oh, you guys are roller skating to disco would show up at the roller rinks and learn from the Black Americans who'd been dancing all this time and we're now like had basically laid the foundation for roller disco to show them that there's more to roller skating than just going around

in a circle with a smile on your face. That's right, and Bill Butler leading the way in Brooklyn, like anyone who is anyone in the disco scene would like they would go to Studio fifty four or one night and then they would go to Empire roller Disco. If you weren't Share or Linda Ronstat or you know, god knows who else, so you could skate with Bill Butler and

it was like a genuine movement was happening. There was very little barrier to entry, you know, um, because you rent the skates generally, like of course a lot of people bought there, like super cool skates. If they could afford them, but you know, a couple of bucks to get in, like seventy cents to rent skates and all of you know, there weren't like the velvet rope wasn't happening like at disco clubs where they wouldn't let you in if you didn't have the right look. And it

was sort of democratized in a way. Yeah, it was really inclusive, which is cool. Um. There was one other thing that happened in the seventies too that that changed roller skating forever and basically made it what we think of today, and that was the introduction of the polyurethane wheel, and that um did a couple of things. One, you could go outside now um to roller skate. Obviously you

could before because Ledger Smith roller skated seven miles. But one thing you don't realize is that Ledger Smith probably did that on metal wheels. And a description of roller skating outside of metal wheels I saw was that the whole point is to just keep your teeth from rattling out of your head. So Paul euthane wheels are softer and they're much more forgiving outdoors. So people were now allowed to go outdoors and roller skate and particularly roller

disco outside and then indoors. It allowed for much greater control and movement in precise movement uh in the roller rink than the older wheels had as well. Yeah, I mean we talked about this in the skateboarding up. The same thing happened there. They were already being made for skateboards, but there was a little bit of a dip in popularity for skateboarding at one point in the seventies, and then the wheel manufacturer said, hey, let's put them on

roller skates. Everything changed all of a sudden. You can go to Central Park in New York and see some really super cool roller disco happening on the sidewalks and uh and pathways. It's essentially the definition of seventies groovy, you know. Oh yeah, like all of a sudden, like any like, it felt like every other movie or TV show you saw I had some sort of roller skating either scene or like part of the plot. Yeah, Like Skatetown, USA was a big one. Um. Patrick Swayzy was in

that roller Boogie. There's another one starring Linda Blair, Zanna Do great movie starring Olivia Newton, John Um and then like you said, like even randomly to like, if you watch The Warriors, the leaders of one of the rival gangs like gets around on roller skates, like it was just part of the part of the zeitgeist. Basically, Yeah, not a tough look for a gang leader, no, but that's any the great things of the Warriors. He looks like a troglodyte though, so he is really scary, but

he's also on roller skates. It's a weird juxtaposition. Before, while I was a checking out Dave's original uh PEC put together for us, I stopped there before turning the page and was thinking, wait a minute, I remember a Chips episode very distinctly where they were bank robbers that had those big platform wooden shoes and would like click a button and wheels would come out and they would rollers that was their getaway car, was their roller skates.

They would leave an oil slick trail from their heel, and it was Chips. It was a two parter um. And I went and looked it up, and uh, I didn't see that part. But there's there's a very fun YouTube video. Um I think it's called like the most seventies TV scene ever or something like that. We just look up Chips roller skating, bank robbery or whatever and it will come up and it is a huge fundraiser for the HP on the show. And they're at a roller disco place and almost every seventies person you can

think of was in this scene. And they were just announcing that it was really long. It's like three minutes, and they're like, and there comes Ruth Buzzy and he coughs, like I can't remember all the guys, but they were just it was just like a h murderers row of seventies icon like TV and movie stars out there, roller disc going some poorly and then some if you look closely, that a little disc line going like the disco line where you go through the middle. I saw one guy

doing a move. He didn't even have roller skates on. He just kind of walked out in these loafers and it's hilarious. It's a very great video. I feel like Chips doing a two parter on roller disco really lets us off the hook for our two part on Evil kinevil Um. There was another thing that came out to like.

Um Share had a single called Hell on Wheels and Um she actually created a music video for the song, which was weird because it was released two years before MTV came out, so that was a really unusual thing to do. But if you watch it, she combines the roller disco craze and the trucker she craze by rollers roller disc going in front of a tractor trailer on a road. Yeah. It's a really unusual video and an unusual song too, but it's got I mean, a disco

beat for sure. Yeah. I remember the trucker thing. We had a CV. It was oh so funny. That was the Convoy that movie. Yeah, but she but Share made it okay for truckers to like roller disco now, yeah, I guess. Uh. L A had their own version of Empire in Brooklyn. It was called Flippers and I looked it up. I think it was at La Sienega in Santa Monica, kind of right there in central Hollywood. And it is now a CBS, aren't they all? I think?

So every old cool thing is a CDs. Now there's a CVS in I think it's in green Point in Brooklyn and it has an old disco ball still in the ceiling, Like what was this place? And I've never found out. But I don't think CVS installed it. I think it kind of came with the location. Yet I don't have a CBS can Menia to my home. Somehow, it's funny, I know, I mean if they're not that far, because all the Intel neighborhoods Atlanta are fairly close. But

I don't know. You want to CVS like within five minutes drive and I guess you don't live near a defunct roller just go. No, they took the Ecker Drugs near me that was convenient and changed it into a kidney dialysis place, which is useful, but like, you know, where am I gonna get my goodies headache powder? For sure? But Flippers was big in the late seventies, and it was you know, the the West Coast version where like David Lee Roth would hang out and Rod Stewart would

hang out, and Jacqueline Bassett through her thirty fifth birthday party. Yeah, and Ted Kennedy held a fundraiser there for his nineteen eight presidential campaign. It's very, uh, very nineteen eighties. Yeah. And between Flippers, in between um Empire all throughout the United States there was like seriously a thousand new roller rinks that came online in the seventies, um, and it was pretty cool, but then it went out, um very quickly. I mean was the peak of roller disco. And there

was almost not like um a crest Or trough. It was almost like an inverted V. It just came around, peaked and just dropped off really quickly. Right, people started getting into like jazz or size and then break dancing and all that. It just went on to other stuff, but it never actually went away. Yeah, Like I feel like it didn't go away in a couple of sectors.

I think adults like my parents looking for the next cool thing, Like they took disco dancing lessons, which is not like them at all, but that's how ubiquitous disco was, right, I feel like adults kind of moved away. I think kids still went to the roller skating rink as evidenced by US and Black Americans did. It was still a very popular activity like up through the early nineties for African Americans in the US. Yeah, and it's it's just

so like typical. But you think of like, oh, the peak of the peak of roller skating happened in seventy nine eighty, and then it just went out when really, um, Black America had been basically creating like a roller dancing and then roller disco White America came around, was interested for a while, became disinterested and moved on, and then just assumed that it just evaporated and went out of

existence because White America stopped paying attention to it. But yeah, there are a whole subcultures of of Black America that said, no, we really like doing this and we're going to keep on doing it. And over time, from that roller disco era, which really was like a just a bomb drop that really changed roller skating forever. Um, it went on and became refined and new like styles were created, and uh, that's pretty cool how it kept going. I love it.

Should we take a break. Let's take a break, all right, we'll talk about skating styles and just kind of how these skates were put together right after this, all right, shall we talk skating styles? We shall? This is when it's a little bit like when you talk about hip hop culture and breakdancing and that they're like substyles within the larger culture, which is kind of a cool thing.

I love it when a culture has a subculture where it's like, hey, if you like to rhythm skate, rhythm skate if you like to jam skate, jam skate, and there's there's a lot of overlap, but uh, and some of this, like all this stuff you can you kind of look up examples to really get the nuance. But what is jam skating? Jam skating at its base is

a incredibly difficult combination of breakdancing and roller skating. If you watch a breakdancer, like a good breakdancer, it's what they're doing is impossibly hard and incredibly it takes an incredible amount of like talent and skill and stamina and creativity just to break dance someone like, for instance, exactly me and in third grade for sure. Um, now take that, take that person who's able to do that, and put them on roller skates, and then what you have is

jam skating. And if you watch a video of it, it is beyond impressive, like to see people who are really good and proficient at it, because it is breakdance and there's a lot of floor work. There's shoulder spins, like there's like you know, like that whole jumping in thing, I can't remember what you call it, where you kind of like skip back forward, I can't remember what's called, but it's super cool. Again, people do that on roller skates.

And then there's also like b boy battles where there's like, you know, one cruise battling another. One person's bad ling another. So they just go back and forth with a little like with the dances um until somebody wins or I don't remember how they ever figure out who wins. I think it's clear, but okay, yeah, probably, But that's jam skating, and it's really really impressive to see. All right, all this stuff is impressive, but certainly jam skating. Rhythm skating

was from about the mid seventies. I had a lot of roller disco influence there obviously, and this is you know, this is dancing. It's kind of like disco dancing while you're roller skating. Uh, very precise and choreograph like you would see a lot of people do like routines. But it is not quite artistic skating, which is a little

more akin to figure skating. But you can still rhythm skate with someone and come up with your own like you would at the disco if you had like Saturday night fever, like if you had your dance partner and you would do your thing rather than just sort of freestyle dancing with someone exactly. That's exactly rhythm skating. And then UM, rhythm skating. I suspect even goes further back to probably the fifties when people started playing R and B music at the roller rink on like soul night

or whatever. UM. And but today it's still around today, and it it kind of spread out UM to like local areas, so that regional style started to develop. UM in Atlanta has its own style. If you've seen the movie A t L and I think two thousand six, you know, part of the thing that's going on there is a backdrop is like the roller rink UM, and that's a lot of what you would see in A t L. You would see at an actual roller rink today in Atlanta, UM, where there's a lot of like

it's rhythm skating. So like you said, it's like dancing but on roller skates. UM. But they kind of it's it's connected to break dancing and that there's like crew battles and that kind of thing. UM, but it's still it's it's not break dancing necessarily, it's just like dancing on skates. Yeah, Cleveland apparently has their own style, which is a little more figure skating style apparently like axles and jumping and stuff like that. Detroit, of course is

going to have their own style, Chicago style too. There's got to be it has a pickle on it. He put a pickle. It's deep dish. Uh. Well, I just figured since it was the center, then they probably have the Earn style, but who knows. Detroit had their own style though. Um, and this was this is what I didn't quite get. What is sliding sliding to the side, like not going forward or backward, going to the side,

sliding on your skate, All right, that makes sense. A lot of sliding in Detroit style apparently, right, which is really cool because there's also a lot of precise foot movement too. And those two things required two different hardnesses of wheels, but they managed to to, you know, figure it out in Detroit. It's really cool to see people slide. I saw one clip of a dude and he was in the middle of the rink and just slid all

the way to the edge and then onto the carpet. Um. It was really cool looking because it's just such a smooth like move you know. Uh. The one that I think I liked the best when as a kid was I believe it would be the freestyle dance skating, Unless I'm wrong. I think that was the lady or the

guy at the rank. That was just they were going in the circle and they were they were skating forward the whole time, but the whole time they were also just sort of dancing and they were lifting the skates up and knees up and legs forward and backward and crossing over here and there, and it was just very smooth and fluid and just look super cool. Like you wouldn't stop and do a split or do like a

break dance move. You were just sort of grooving around the rink right, and you could tell that they probably hadn't like come up with the moves necessarily ahead of time. They were just feeling the music, feeling the music. It's the kind of roller skate dancing that like somebody would probably do in a bathing suit, you know what I mean. That's freestyle dance skating, And like what's cool about is anybody can do it like you can. You just have again, I have to be able to roller skate and feel

feel the roof. Um. But there's people who can do it better than others. All right, Because I did that stuff, I could, you know, at my apex of roller skating, I could like stay up and look pretty good and do a good crossover on the corners. But that was about it. That's that's I think that's better than me. I don't remember being able to do anything like that. I was just would you do a rink skater? I go in a circle with a smile on my face.

No, no no, no, that's what I'm saying. I mean crossover like when you're on the turns you cross one your right foot over your left foot. Yeah. I would just not do that. You would lean exactly. Yeah, I would prepare for the turn in advance, not do that crossover thing. I think I probably did once or twice, but it wasn't something that I was utterly confident. I wasn't going to like totally biff um when I tried it. You did you do the snoopy? What do you remember that? Huh?

I say, I mean, I'm just pulling this off the dome, but I'm pretty sure the snoopy was when you uh went all the way down out on one skate and then held your foot held the toe stop off the floor with your hand. I think that's called the snoopy. At least maybe this a regional or something. I don't know, it sounds really familiar. I think you might be right about that. I know that I know the move you're talking about, and I think it might be called the snoopy.

What a cute name for a move? Could I do that? I don't think so. I hadn't been drinking, and then I never got backwards skating down super well, which is a really key component. If you wanted a couple of skate, you're just holding hands and going forward together. Right. If you were boss, you would turn around and you know, take that girl by the hips. Oh man, you were advanced. No, I'm not like the dirty. It's like, you know, slow dancing.

You put your hands on her hips, she puts her hands on like around your neck, and then you gotta be able to but you got but you gotta be able to skate backward really fluidly to do that chuck. That is I don't recall even seeing that. What what kind of couple skating were you seeing? Again? We were going around in a circle like skates right next to each other at all times, holding hands, you know, maybe speeding up. That's it. And then you split some money

and rings and I can't remember what I like. They're probably like square pizza. That's probably what I would get pizza. Um. There's also there's also, um, there's inline skating, which after that, Um, the peak in the seventies and eighties of roller skating and just general popularity. Roller blades came out right after that, apparently like an eighty three or something like that. I didn't realize that because I was associate them with the nineties, but I think that's when they kind of blew up.

Did you ever get into that? No, I never did. Um. I was skateboarding at the time, so I wasn't doing inline skating. I had one pair of roller blades in my life, but I didn't use them very much. In our we're thinking like, all right, I should just get rid of these, but I mean people can get like nuts on those. There's a type of inline skating called aggressive skating, and it is it's like skateboarding, but you're doing it on rollerblades, which seems to me like way

harder actually. Um. And then there's one other thing I learned about inline skating, chuck that we just have to share. What's that? So in the early nineties, Amish teenagers found out about roller blades and they're like, we're going to use these, despite their elders protests, they said, nope, nay. I think it's probably what they said we are we

are going to um adopt these, and they don't. I don't think they do any aggressive skating or anything like that, but they use them to get around and still to this day you can see Amish teenagers rolling around on on rollerblades and Amish country. Good for them. Yep, that's what I say. What else you got? Well, I guess we should talk about I mean, we have a whole episode on roller Derby which you should go listen to, but maybe we should finish out with the least interesting part,

which is the anatomy of a roller skate. Uh gotta cover it because that's what we do. If you want to buy some skates today, you can spend a hundred and fifty dollars on average. You can spend a thousand dollars if you want. I remember, do you remember when they came out with like the Tennessee skate When we were kids and how cool that was. That was a

little before my time. Yeah, but yes, when I look at pictures of them now, I'm like, those are really cool, like blue blue Adidas with yellow stripes, really cool, like a full fully functioning not fully functioning, but like a full tennis shoe. Didn't have any upper ankle support or anything, and then it had the well, I guess we'll talk about the parts here. I mentioned the boot, and the boot upper is anything above the soul, and of course you got the lining on the inside and the laces

and all that stuff. But the plate is what I was talking about. You've had a regular old Adidas, maybe modified slightly, but it was mounted to a plate mounted to the trucks, and the skates are the wheels, right, and they still have that today, But it's just the I don't think anybody's making Adida's boots for roller skates, but usually they divide the boots into two types, high top and low top. And depending on the type of

skating you're gonna do, you want to choose wisely. So freestyle um rink skating, which again is just going around in the circle with a smile on your face. Artistic which is like figure skating, and then rhythm skating they all use high tops, and then low top is more useful for jam skating and speed skating. UM. So that's pretty much the only it's not really looks necessarily, it's you know what kind of skating you're doing, whether you go high top or low. Yeah, you've got you know,

we talked about poly ere thing. But you can also get different size wheels and different hardness of wheels depending on what you're looking to do. And your outdoor wheels are gonna be a little softer than the indoors. You're gonna have more traction with a larger wheel obviously, and a little more agility with a smaller wheel. You could be super cool and get those light up wheels if you want. They're so awesome. They're very cool. Yeah, they

have an actual like dynamo in them. They use magnetic spacers inside um copper wiring and so when the wheel spins, it generates electricity that powers an LED. So let's talk toe stops. So remember our friend John Joseph Merlin who broke the mirror when he was playing violin at the Masquerade Ball. He didn't have a toe stop he wishes he had, but it was like a hundred years later. I think. I think he was in the eighteenth century,

wasn't old John Joseph Um. It wasn't until eighteen seventies six that toast stops were finally invented and people had a way to break um. Yeah, a hundred and sixteen years after John Joseph Merlin. And all that is is like a big hunk of rubber that's um screwed into the toe underside of the toe of the boot um. And all you do is just push down on your toe and the toe stop makes contact with the ground and it slows you down, depending on how much pressure

really quickly or you know, kind of slowly and gradually. Yeah, I'd never have been able to stop really quickly without busting my butt. So maybe it didn't know how to use a toe stop. I kind of drug it behind me to gradually slow down. But I don't know that's a great technique. I didn't know if there were other methods. Um.

That's what's called the snoopy. Now. I think other methods are if you're really good, you just like like um, peel out to the side like you would on skis to stop quickly on skis, I think people do that on roller skates to stop suddenly. Well, that's way beyond me for sure. Um. There's also something called jam plugs chuck, which are um the same thing, but they're much closer to the toe um than a a toe stop is,

which means that you have way more clearance for the wheel. Um. If you're like, say, standing up on on your toes and rolling, you could do that with jam plugs. You couldn't do that with the toe stop. So things like jam skating would use jam plugs instead. Yeah, and I think they can. You know, you can have you can be like heart shaped and you can get a little more creative with the jam plugs, little little faces and stuff emogens. You put all those together, you got yourself

a roller skate. You put it together twice, you have a pair of roller skates. Uh. And apparently a roller skating and this is something I wasn't fully aware of,

became a really big deal during the pandemic. Again, the only way I knew this was sort of happening was um our former colleague, the wonderful Miranda Hawkins UH started roller skating during the pandemic, and I would just see her Instagram stuff of her, like her videos of her learning how to roller skate and do like these moves and tricks and stuff, and like, I saw Miranda make great strides over the course of the pandemic, but I just thought she was like super cool, because Miranda is

super cool. Well apparently, well she's still super cool, but apparently a lot of people were doing I didn't know it was a thing. I thought it was just her thing. It was a thing. And what's interesting is you can actually trace back to the person who started it. Um as an actress named on a Koto. She was in a movie called Wigi or Wigia from two thousand fourteen.

It's pretty good movie actually, Um but she also is a really talented like freestyle dance roller skater, and she started posting videos and the on TikTok of her roller skating and they hit just right, and at the beginning of the pandemic, everybody was like, oh, yeah, we can go roller skating. You can do that outside, you can social distance and still have fun. And like she kicked off this roller skating revival, especially among gen z. I love it. It's a perfect pandemic sports slash it is.

It's really cool, and you know, I think it's already gone out again. Although the thing about roller skating is this is what it always so, it's like peaks and popularity and then declines of popularity, but it always hangs on and just kind of goes its own way. And every time it becomes popular, it attracts a few more people who are now roller skaters when otherwise they never

would have been. And then the next peak comes and even more people are into it, and then it just seems to be this this process as immutable as the wind across the dune. Yeah. And the differences these days is it's, uh, you just don't have as many options for roller rinks if you if you live in a in a major city, you might have a few. Uh, if you live in a small town, you might even

have one. Because that's you know, that's kind of the great things about small towns, as you may still have a drive in or a roller rink, but you're not gonna have like, hey, which one of these like twelve places should we go to? Right? Uh? And as we always like to point out a good trivia question when we come upon it, It turns out that n w A held their first concert at a roller rink called skate Land in Compton. That's where Dr Dre and Easy and Ice Cube met. I love it. Ah, you got

anything else about roller skating? Negative? I took this one was an eye opening episode for me because I realized in retrospect that I was not a particularly good roller skater. So thank you for opening my eyes to that. I feel like I know myself a little better now. Yeah, I was not either, and you were worse than me. So right. Uh So, if you want to know more about roller skating, go do it. There's nothing stopping you. Really, just go have some fun skating. It's a lot of fun.

And since I said it's a lot of fun, of course, that means it's time for a listener. Megan, I'm gonna call this gentle correction. We've gotten it from quite a few people. We cooped up in our paper towns up. Hey, guys, just finished the Fake Towns episode. I was hoping you would talk about paper Towns and bring up the book. I can't always tell if you're joking or not say things wrong on purpose, which we do, or if it

was an honest mistake. So when Josh said he'd never heard of author of Paper Towns, I wasn't sure if it was a joke. The author is John Green, not Tom Green. I was thinking of the hilarious Canadian comedian. Also, you almost certainly have heard of him. He is the co founder of vid Con, which we've been to. Yeah, that was our I'm sure vicon is great, but we were. That's where we met Tjon day of Chocolate Rain famous. Yeah,

I got a picture with Chocolate Rain. But it was also where we very famously did our worst attended live performance of fourteen people. Yeah, and we worked with half of them easily. Yeah, it was not a good match for us. But bit Kuna true is wonderful. But John Green apparently co founded bit con, co hosted the podcast Deer Hank and John and host of the podcast The an Throw poss Sine reviewed by the Way. That podcast is also now a book and the y a novel

Paper Towns was actually turned into a movie. So Connie says, thanks for always making Connie smile. Connie was dropping a lot of extra information here, so we always appreciate that. Thinks a lot, Connie. Yeah, that definitely wasn't honest mistake. I wasn't clever enough to be joking about that, and I didn't catch it. So anytime one of us mispeaks,

it's always on both of us, right. Uh. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Connie did and drop a knowledge bomb on us like she did, you can do it as gently as she did, because we like those. It's more like a bath bomb than a knowledge bomb. You know what I mean, I know what you mean. Uh. You can send it to us via email to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.

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