A personal account of a place where I grew up and has been torn down, so now all that is left are the memories.

The building’s torn down now. But the place and the people who inhabited it live in my memories, ghosts of a past filled with unique experiences. I grew up there. My dad took over as manager of the skating rink in Sinking Spring, PA, in Berks County, when I was two years old, in 1948. I was almost sixteen when he bought his own rink and we moved to Middletown, PA, so Sinking Spring Skatarena was where I spent my childhood. Such a fun place to be as a kid! The building sat in the middle of a large park, where picnics and clambakes were held in the summer. A creek ran through the length of the property, with a dammed-up section where we would swim on hot summer days. Near the entrance to the park, we’d play on swings and seesaws. Large grassy areas provided places to play baseball, football and croquet. The skating rink wasn’t the only building on the property. At the front of the park, the caretaker – we called him “Luddy” – lived in a small cottage. An old German, he took care of the grounds until he passed away when I was a teenager. Two bridges spanned the creek, leading to some old abandoned dwellings; we’d peek through grimy cobwebbed windows and share scary stories about the old man who had lived in the one shack, found dead sitting at his kitchen table, still holding a cup of coffee with the rats chewing at his hand. One bridge led to a bandstand, but I don’t think there were ever any shows or entertainment featured there when I was growing up. Possibly years before, during the big band era, because I remember being told that the skating rink used to be a dance hall. Another large building sat across from the rink, which was used mostly for storage, I think. I remember at one point helping to clean it out but can’t recall the reason. Behind the rink, at the back of the park, were several pavilions and picnic tables, usually filled to capacity during the summer months. The skating rink itself was a unique structure. Tiny for a roller rink, even in those days, but with features I’ve never seen anywhere else. Poles and railings, with benches on the corners, separated the inner section from an outer “track” area, which allowed skaters to continue “All Skate” in the center, while special skates like “Couples Only” or “Ladies Only” took place on the outside track. Sinking Spring Skatarena was the only skating rink I’ve ever been to where you never had to “Clear the Floor” for a special skate. Back in the 1950s, skating rinks all had live organ music. The organ booth at Sinking Spring Skatarena hung from the ceiling and the organist had to climb a ladder to get into the glass-enclosed booth. As he played the Hammond organ with the metronome ticking away to keep a steady beat for the skaters, he looked down on them as they glided around the floor and under his domain. Because it was situated in the middle of a park, there were huge windows all around the outside walls; when it was warm outside, we would lift open the wooden shutters and fasten them with heavy-duty hooks against the ceiling of the track area, to let in the breeze which was our only air conditioning. It also let in a lot of natural light, which saved on electricity during the day. The side aisle ran the length of the building. As you entered you paid admission, then stopped at the skate room if you needed to rent skates. A little alcove provided a place for the “skate boy,” using a skate key, to help you fasten your clamp-ons. By the late ‘50s, all the rental skates were shoe skates, so we no longer had skate boys. The office was next in line; a little window looked out into the alcove, and when the organist wasn’t on duty, someone in there played records and ran the program. We had a glass-covered bulletin board along the outside wall of the office, where upcoming events and specials were posted. Next came the snack bar with its array of candy, chips, ice cream and sodas prominently displayed, then the cloak room. During the cold Pennsylvania winter months, coats and boots, hats and scarves were checked along with the usual shoes and purses. It wasn’t until later that the self-serve lockers put the cloak room out of business. Finally, plenty of benches where you could sit down and put on skates or relax between forays onto the floor, and at the very end of the aisle were the rest rooms – ladies on the left, men on the right. But watch out, by the time you got that far back, the roof on that side sloped down so that a really tall guy had to duck down a bit to get into the men’s room. Some other interesting tidbits about Sinking Spring Skatarena that stick in my mind might be of interest. My mother taught skating and coached the artistic club. When we did the “dance steps,” sometimes we had to be creative in order to fit the correct steps onto that unique floor. For the beginning dances, which required two sequences of corner steps, we’d use only one because the center floor was too small to fit them all in. For some of the higher level dances, we used a more creative approach. There were four openings between the center floor and the track, two on each side which were spaced evenly across from each other. So, we would start the dance in the center, then head through the opening and use the track for the corner steps, only to return inside for the center lobe, then back out the next opening for the corner, and so on. You had to be very careful if you were going backwards as you approached an opening, because a collision with a pole could be painful. My dad coached the speed team, and races were held on the outside track area. We never needed pylons like they used at the other rinks, because we had our own built-in pylons: the poles that reached the whole way up to the ceiling. The downside to this was that racers couldn’t lean too far to the left as they went around the corner, and they didn’t have as much room to pass as other rinks afforded. But it definitely gave us a home team advantage, since we were used to our rink’s idiosyncracies. My family left Sinking Spring Skatarena in 1962, but the rink remained open for several years after that. When my husband and I were getting ready to move to Arizona in 1998, I drove to the park in Sinking Spring, and saw that the skating rink had been torn down. I felt as though a piece of my past had been torn down, too.