Roller Skating: Fun and Cool

The Victorians were the first to go bonkers for roller skating and since then the pastime has had bursts of popularity every few decades. Over the years skaters have come up with some amazing things to do on skates that go way beyond just going in circles.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is
the podcast Stuff you should Know. That's right before we
get going, we want to pretty quickly going a little

(00:22):
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(00:43):
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(01:04):
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

(01:28):
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

(01:48):
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

(02:09):
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.

(02:29):
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,

(02:52):
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.

(03:16):
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

(03:36):
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

(03:57):
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

(04:20):
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

(04:40):
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,

(05:03):
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

(05:26):
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

(05:48):
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

(06:11):
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

(06:31):
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.

(06:52):
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

(07:13):
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

(07:35):
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

(07:58):
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

(08:21):
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

(08:44):
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

(09:05):
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

(09:27):
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

(09:48):
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

(10:08):
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

(10:30):
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,

(10:50):
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

(11:11):
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

(11:32):
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

(11:53):
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.

(12:32):
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

(12:52):
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

(13:17):
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

(13:37):
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

(14:00):
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

(14:22):
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

(14:44):
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

(15:05):
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

(15:25):
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

(15:46):
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

(16:07):
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

(16:30):
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

(16:50):
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

(17:13):
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

(17:34):
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

(17:54):
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.

(18:15):
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

(18:37):
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

(18:59):
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

(19:22):
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

(19:46):
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

(20:08):
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

(20:29):
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

(20:52):
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

(21:15):
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

(21:38):
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

(22:02):
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,

(22:24):
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

(22:45):
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

(23:06):
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

(23:29):
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

(23:50):
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

(24:12):
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

(24:33):
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

(24:55):
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

(25:17):
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

(25:38):
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

(26:00):
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

(26:20):
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,

(26:43):
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

(27:04):
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

(27:25):
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,

(27:48):
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,

(28:23):
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

(28:44):
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

(29:06):
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,

(29:27):
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,

(29:48):
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

(30:08):
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

(30:30):
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

(30:51):
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

(31:13):
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

(31:34):
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

(31:57):
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

(32:21):
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

(32:42):
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

(33:05):
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

(33:26):
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

(33:48):
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,

(34:08):
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

(34:30):
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?

(34:53):
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

(35:14):
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

(35:38):
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.

(36:00):
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

(36:21):
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

(36:43):
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

(37:04):
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

(37:27):
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

(37:51):
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

(38:13):
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

(38:37):
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

(38:59):
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

(39:22):
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

(39:43):
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

(40:04):
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

(40:27):
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

(40:49):
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

(41:09):
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

(41:32):
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

(41:53):
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

(42:13):
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

(42:35):
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

(42:56):
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

(43:18):
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

(43:40):
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

(44:01):
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

(44:21):
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

(44:41):
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

(45:04):
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.

(45:27):
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

(45:49):
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,

(46:13):
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

(46:33):
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

(46:56):
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

(47:18):
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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