By the time President Ronald Reagan designated October as National Roller Skating Month in 1983, I’d ditched my skates for more pressing interests. Yet, my previous four years spent at the East Side rink United Skates of America endure as supremely satisfying memories. In fact, USA helped ’70s kids like me roll into ’80s adolescence.
Built in 1974 on real estate now occupied by the Eastland Shoppes on North Green River Road, USA was an indoor arena of lights, music, and motion. A carpeted lobby led to the rental station and rows of tan, scuffed-leather roller skates with thick wheels and orange toe-stops. There was an arcade, snack counter, and skate shop. Everything surrounded the rink — an immense rectangle with rounded corners (a shape known as “stadium,” “pill,” and my favorite, “disco-rectangle”). Spinning mirrored balls and colored lights hung from the ceiling and reflected off the polished maple floors while music boomed.
Today, there are two songs that take me right back to the rink: “Hokey Pokey,” a folk dance-turned-children’s tune dating to the 19th century, and “Fly Robin Fly,” a 1975 hit by German disco group Silver Convention. Played every time I skated at USA, the former was a happy holdover from a childhood powered by PBS, while the latter (with just eight words repeated over and over) came from an adult world that was still rather confusing.
While the absolute beginners clung to the uncushioned perimeter walls, most skaters were absorbed into a smoother, revolving collective. The great ones with custom skates carved wide arcs and zipped effortlessly through throngs of slowpokes. The pace and direction of the skaters were always determined by the DJ; bumps and collisions regularly occurred but usually without any grave damage.
Between 1978 and 1982, I aged from 9 to 13 years and grew 4 inches. Imagine putting all that puberty disarray on eight wheels and sending it rolling atop a disco-rectangle of chaos with other curling, twirling hobbledehoys — but somehow, it all flowed along like water on glass. After all, the 1980 movie “Xanadu” starring Gene Kelly and Olivia Newton-John taught us to believe in magic whenever it came with skates.
Evansville boasted other rinks at the time, like one at Burdette Park that opened in the 1930s, an enormously popular time for roller skating despite being far from its origins in the 1700s. (Roller skating, it turns out, is older than the Hokey Pokey.) Although the world had already witnessed waitresses, actors, and dancers on skates, Americans spent the Depression years embracing competitive speed skating, ballroom skate dancing, and the roller derby. Evansville’s George L. Mesker & Co. even helped spread the fun around the country by manufacturing portable steel skating rink buildings.
Skating’s popularity was growing again in 1974, when Evansville teen George Galbraith discovered USA about a week after it opened. “I couldn’t really skate at first,” he recalls, so he went back until he could roll with the best of them.
Galbraith (nicknamed “Animal”) was a regular while USA helped train skaters for state competitions, although he only skated for pure enjoyment and camaraderie. “I skated at USA until the day it closed in [April] 1989. It was a great place to hang out at,” he says. Galbraith remains friends with nearly a dozen self-proclaimed “rink rats” from his time at USA and other rinks, including its East Side successor, Skate World, which opened in 1999 and still operates just off Vogel Road.
I, too, made the most of my USA years. Baby boomers kept disco-fying everything, so I skated to songs from movies like “Roller Boogie” (think “Boogie Wonderland” by Earth, Wind & Fire and The Emotions) and “Skatetown USA” (“Boogie Nights” by Heatwave). I won the occasional free soft drink during Saturday afternoon speed races and kept my time in the “penalty box” for reckless skating to a minimum.
One shadow over those sun-dappled times was that I never mastered backward skating. That’s the power move for taking “moonlight” couples skating beyond mere side-by-side hand-holding — and, perhaps, the real reason I hung up my skates to focus on moonwalking at The Victory under-21 club.
But no matter: USA gave me and lots of others room to move, fall, test boundaries, and find some rhythm before adulthood took over.
