Fun on Wheels

When the movies came into U. S. life, band concerts, vaudeville, parlor games faded out. So did roller skating. But in the past few years, roller skating has come rumbling back again.

Last week skaters whirred around some 3,000 U. S. rinks, from Skowhegan to San Diego, from Atlanta to Seattle. The skaters in Detroit's Arena Gardens, largest of the city's four roller rinks, were especially gay. For they were celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Arena Gardens Roller Skating Club (membership 5,000) and honoring portly, fiftyish Fred Martin, the man mainly responsible for all this fun on wheels.

Fred Martin started out as a hand-organ grinder in a San Francisco roller-skating rink, climaxed his whirring career by winning a roller marathon in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden (309 miles in 24 hours), then settled down to the swivel-chair job of managing rinks. When he took over Detroit's million-dollar Arena Gardens, he began to angle for tonier patronage and a national organization to clean up the country's shady, shoddy roller rinks. He caught both fish.

Three years ago, hearing that Londoners danced on roller skates, Manager Martin got England's famed roller-skating Ridstones, James & Joan, to tour the U. S. Their spellbinding exhibition of figure skating started America's roller-skating boom. Today most roller skaters, instead of going round & round in the old-fashioned way, do the Chicken Scratch, the Howdy-Do and other "called-out" (square) dances, waltz, tango and fox-trot in pairs. More ambitious skaters learn to do rockers and counters, brackets and loops, hope to be able some day to compete in the annual April tournament of the R. S. R. O. A. (Roller Skating Rink Owners Association), the governing body of the sport.

Figure skating on rollers is similar to figure skating on blades--except that roller skaters use the heel & toe where ice skaters use the blade's edges. Both have approximately the same 41 school figures. At the Arena Gardens, which "skate about 6,000 a week" at 50-c- a head, Manager Martin offers a half hour's free instruction in figure skating, elementary or advanced dancing every night. His 30-year-old son Bob and 19-year-old daughter Marjorie, aided by two other professionals, teach figure skating all day, at 50-c- to $1.50 for a 20-minute lesson. The Martins get requests for their dance routines from as far away as Australia, mail their monthly magazine, the Detroit Roller Skater, to 14 countries on four continents.

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