I’ve got a junk box. (The Lady Marjorie insists I have many more the just one.) I’m sure most of you have one also, or at least a drawer were all those things get tossed that are considered just too valuable to throw away, or that possibly may be useful at some latter date.
I was digging around in mine the other day, looking for a little piece of wire, when I came across an old skate key I’d thrown into the box for some reason.
The skate key must be at least five decades old, it’s been at least that long since I’ve had a pair of adjustable, strap-on, metal-wheeled, roller skates. Why I’ve hung on to the skate key is beyond me.
The skate key had two tool functions that helped adjust the fit of the skates to your foot. At one end was a hexagonal hole that fit the bolt in the middle of the skate that locked the skate’s two sliding pieces together to fit the length of your foot. You could never apply enough leverage to the little key to get the bolt tight enough so that it wouldn’t slip and lose adjustment. A quick visit to my father’s tool box delivered a 3/8-inch socket and a ratchet wrench with a long enough handle that provided the leverage you needed to fasten the nut tight enough so that it wouldn’t loosen again.
The other end of the key fit over the square adjustment rod that tightened the fixture that squeezed the toe clamps together around the front part of your shoe, this was why you needed regular shoes to hold the skates on, the rubber soles of a tennis shoe were just too flexible for the skate to grip tight on to. A leather strap ran from one side of the heel piece, around your ankle to the other side, so your heel was firmly held down.
I must have gotten my first pair of roller skates sometime while we were still living in Cincinnati in the early 1950s. I got my first two-wheeled bike back then, and I’m sure I must have gotten my first pair of skates before that.
We had cement sidewalks in front of the Cincinnati house and the sidewalk got a lot of use by me and the rest of the kids on the block as our makeshift skating route. Our Chicago house had a long, wide cement driveway with the garage set at the very back of the lot that also got a lot of skate use.
Our L.A. house also had a big, wide skate-able cement driveway that was definitely preferable to skating out on the blacktop-covered street. The vibrations that came up through the metal-wheeled skates on blacktop was enough to make your feet numb after just a short skating distance.
As a kid, I was always walking around with scabs on my knees and I’m sure a large number of them were caused by roller skating crashes. All it took was a little pebble in my path and that was usually enough to trip me up and down I’d go.
That I actually still have a skate key is amazing, it seemed like I was always losing them. The skates themselves disappeared when we made the move from California to Detroit, some 48 years ago. Perhaps I have found a valuable historic artifact? You never see kids anymore with strap-on roller skates. I wonder if the Museum of History and Industry would be interested? Probably not.
In 1960, I remember, everyone was glued to their TV sets watching the XIII Winter Olympics in somewhat nearby Squaw Valley, California. It was the first time we had ever spent any time watching ski racing, it may have even been one of the first times that ski racing was featured, on prime-time TV. We were very impressed with the skiers weaving their way down hill, slicing between the bamboo gate marker poles.
It wasn’t long before we had our own racecourse marked out in the driveway. Using empty tin-foil frozen pot pie pans as gate markers, my neighborhood friends were soon weaving their way down the driveway, cutting as close to the pie tins as we could get. If you ran over one of the tins, it was readily evident and your run didn’t count. You’d missed that gate.
I learned, while trying to dodge the pie tins, that you could skid the metal skate wheels on the smooth concrete if you turned them sharp enough. Having a skate skid out from underneath you, also contributed to my skinned up knees.
This old skate key was clearly placed in the wrong place, resting in the bottom of my junk box. I moved it up to the miscellaneous drawer in my toolbox. You never know when you’re going to need a skate key.