Mean Dads for a Better America by Tom Shillue

Author:Tom Shillue [Shillue, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062656193
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-04-28T04:00:00+00:00

NOTHING EPITOMIZED MY 1950S CHILDHOOD IN THE 1970s as much as Roll-Land, an old-fashioned roller rink that had operated for generations and remained largely unchanged from its earliest days. It was housed in an airplane hanger–sized building along “Automile” on Route 1 at the edge of town.*

Roll-Land promised, as a banner inside proclaimed, “Leisure, Fun and Wholesome Recreation for the Whole Family” but Friday nights belonged to the junior high set. As young teens we would gather to skate, but mostly to socialize, and experience our first, tenuous interactions with the opposite sex. Raised up in a loft at the corner of the big wooden rink was a live organist who would accompany the skating on his Mighty Wurlitzer, playing everything from “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” to “Toot, Toot, Tootsie! (Good-bye).” That’s right, the entire Hit Parade. One side of the rink had turquoise melamine benches, and the other side had a snack bar that served burgers, dogs, pizza slices, and fountain sodas. Along the wall next to the snack bar was a line of pinball machines, which were usually monopolized by a group of toughs that looked like they were straight out of S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. There was a big sign on the wall that lit up skating commands, like ALL SKATE, COUPLES ONLY, RHUMBA, CHA CHA, and BOSSA NOVA. (The last few were of course used only for competitions.) On Friday nights, which was mostly all teens, the sign would display ALL SKATE most of the time, but every half hour or so, the COUPLES ONLY would light up, which was the signal for me and my buddies, who weren’t yet at the stage where we had coupled off, to skate off the rink and sit down on the hard plastic benches. The older teens would pair up, with the more serious, competition and skate-club skaters circling in their own smaller ring in the middle of the rink, where they showed off their moves while the love birds circled. For the weekend skaters and the seventh graders, we’d mostly use the time as an opportunity to get a slice of pizza or play pinball. There were a few adventurous eighth-grade boys who would ask girls to skate with them.

My friends and I used to talk about doing this, even dare each other, but we never acted on it. We’d use the COUPLES ONLY time to do the more accepted form of flirting—hovering near the girls and behaving in an obnoxious fashion.

At that age the boys were beginning to experiment with rudimentary, entry-level flirting by turning their teasing energies, usually reserved for each other, onto the girls. One of the pranks that boys always pulled on each other was to push a kid’s face into the water bubbler when they were taking a drink, so they’d get water up their nose. Kathy Doucette was a tough girl, generally considered “one of the guys,” and at Roll-Land one night John Plath tried it on her. But he

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