Looking Back: Winter memories from the ‘50s and ‘60s

Winter memories from the ‘50s and ‘60s

My classmate from first grade through high school, Pat Maroney Embree, shared some wonderful winter memories with me from the ‘50s and ‘60s. As I read her email it prompted me to ask a couple of other old friends what they recalled from that era. It was a trip down memory lane!

She told me, “I cannot watch ice skating without the memory of how it felt to so freely glide across the ice. At the ice rinks the boys would hog the space to play hockey. So after school I would grab my skates and skate up and down the frozen Moon Brook (the section off South Main Street). I could practice my jumps that through my eyes looked pretty good. But “judging eyes” would probably have held up cards giving me a score of 1 or a very generous 2!”

She added, “I have good memories of sledding on a moonlit night after a snowstorm where the moon shone down giving the snow a blue hue. The snow clung to the tree branches looking every bit like a winter wonderland. Laughter rang out when we were four on a toboggan and usually spilled out one by one as we went down the hill. Perhaps our laughter made Mother Nature smile at the purity of the night she had given us.”

Another classmate of mine, Mary Hutchins Hendricks (“Hutch” to her friends), remembers skating at the local “pollywog pond” near the dead-end section of Engrem Avenue and Jackson Avenue. I am very familiar with it as I used to go skating there with my cousin, Betty Mumford. I recall that there were always a lot of kids having fun on the ice in their own backyard. They had to shovel it off after snowstorms but doing that had seemed like fun and not work.

Hutch also told me about the days she spent at White’s skating rink. She recalled, “We spent many hours there skating, playing tag and whip and standing up to the ‘boys’ who liked to speed by us and hedge us off into the snow banks.” 

She also remembers Butch West, who was just a few years older than we were, maintaining the rink by hand shoveling and spraying the ice. As Hutch said, “He also had to deal with all the teenage nonsense that went on.”

My cousin, Betty, also remembers skating at White’s rink in the ‘60s. All the girls wore white figure skates and the boys wore black hockey skates. I remember Betty was an excellent skater who could “twirl” and skate backwards with the best of them! I wasn’t that talented but managed to remain upright! Being able to go out at night with our friends was a big deal back then. It was one of our first tastes of freedom!

As I mentioned in a previous column the kids in my neighborhood had a wonderful skating rink provided by Warren and Eleanor Goodrich who flooded the lot next to their house. But as they say, “The grass is always greener!” That theory led some of us to shovel a large icy area at the end of Rutland Street. It was somewhat bumpy but it was our secret spot for daytime skating.

Just down the hill from Howard Avenue is Piedmont Pond. The owners did not allow us to skate on it but being kids, we managed to do it anyway. Not only did we break their rule but the ice broke under us one time and one of the boys fell in and got soaking wet. When that happened we skedaddled from the pond as fast as we could and the boy who fell in headed home to dry off and warm up.

Perhaps our memories will trigger some of your own as you look back at the fun times of winter in yesteryear!