With the first nice, summer-like weather arriving earlier this week on — in perfect timing — a holiday, vast numbers of people dug into their closets, found and dusted off their inline skates and took to the paths that meander through the parks and snake along the beaches.
What they encountered was something like rush hour on the Dan Ryan and we saw more than a few of these people forlornly walking home, skates slung over their shoulders like pairs of dead animals.
As you might have been able to assume, Osgood and I do not have inline skates.
“I am not interested in breaking any body parts,” said Osgood.
But I sit next to two young people in the Tribune Tower who tell me that inline skating is “a great way to see the city and work up a good sweat in order to get into your wedding dress” (she is getting married in September) and “an instant way to return to your childhood.” Though each — she 27, he too — grew up with roller skates of the traditional four-wheel variety on their feet, they have for many years been exclusively inline skaters.
The people in Osgood’s photo are roller skating at a wonderful place called the Martin Luther King Jr. Park and Family Entertainment Center at 1219 W. 76th St., which also houses bowling lanes.
“A lot of joy out there,” said Osgood, and he was right.
While watching the joyful skating it occurred to us that you rarely see people roller skating in the parks or along the beaches. Before the ascension of inline skates, which might be pegged to the mid 1980’s when a company called Rollerblade, Inc. began marketing inline skates as fitness equipment, roller skates were everywhere in the summers, up and down streets and sidewalks and alleys. It was a kids’ delight. We can not ever remember seeing an adult in roller skates and no one thought of it as exercise.
Larry Brown, a terrific guy and affable man who works nights as a doorman in a lovely old Hyde Park high rise, has been skating his whole life, growing up in the Gresham neighborhood and “roller skating, four wheels, up and down streets and alleys.” He can still be found there, at least once a week at The Rink, a friendly and handsome facility at 1122 E. 87th St.
“I stopped skating for about 20 years but then started taking my kids to The Rink and I got back into it,” he says. “It’s great exercise and then, even after the kids grew up and stopped, I’ve kept at it. I usually go on Tuesdays between 10 and 2. It’s kind of what I call the old-timers time. There are a lot of teachers and other folks and we really have a good time skating and talking and the owner treats us like family.”
We’re not sure that it is possible to find that kind of community wearing inline skates.
“And you can skate no matter what the weather,” says Brown.
Brown just turned 56 but looks a couple of decades younger.
Maybe it’s not too late for Osgood and me.
