On Frozen Pond

Back in the ‘good old days,’ almost everyone was an ice skater. When I was a kid growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, I learned to ice skate on Shiloh Park Lagoon in Zion, Illinois. My older brother and sister would walk the two blocks with me to the park after I got my first pair of skates. Our first stop was the Warming House, which sat close to the shore of the lagoon. This 20 ft by 20 ft building had rough wooden floor boards due to the skate blade traffic and long wooden benches to sit on while changing your shoes for skates. The smell of fresh popcorn filled the air of this busy, crowded little building, as people were constantly coming and going, changing footwear, buying refreshments and just coming in to get warm.

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My first skates were of the double-blade variety, which made it a bit easier to get the hang of keeping your balance on the ice. But I still spent a fair amount of time falling on the ice after they let go of my hand. I seem to remember them giving me a push from behind, too, but that usually ended up with the same results. Back then, snow pants (held up by clip-on suspenders ) were made of wool with no vinyl or nylon outer layer, so after a while the wool would soak up a lot of moisture from the ice and snow and eventually your clothes underneath would be wet, too. Time to head to the Warming House and popcorn!

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The surface of the ice varied quite a bit, which made a big difference in how well you could skate. If the pond froze over on windy days, the ice would be rough and bumpy. The best skating surface, of course was when it froze with no wind and it was as smooth as glass. Often, the ice had snow on top of it. Just an inch or so and we would just skate through it, but a larger amount required the pond to be cleared by small bulldozer.

One day I discovered my dad’s old hockey skates in the basement and thought I would give them a try. Of course they were way too big for my feet, but that did not stop me. I stuffed newspaper in the toes of the skates to transform them to my size. If you know the difference between hockey skates and figure skates, then you have guessed what happened to me when I got onto the ice. I now began to skate on my ankles. That’s right, hockey skates are low cut with no ankle support like high-laced figure skates. I had very little strength in my ankles, so that didn’t work out so well.

Part of the adventure of outdoor ice skating is the danger of thin ice. There were often areas of the lagoon roped off to keep us away because we might fall through the ice. Many times, while skating, I could hearing the ice cracking beneath me. We were a more ‘at risk’ society back then; no seat belts or air bags in cars with metal dashboards, no car seats for kids, no bicycle helmets, no GFI outlets and so on. How exciting to watch the kids slide onto the ice in “It’s A Wonderful Life” until Harry Bailey falls in the water. But somehow we all managed to survive our dangerous childhood.

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Eventually, I got a pair a figure skates and became quite a good skater. One winter we had a lot of rain, almost flood conditions, and then it got very cold and all the water froze. My brother and I decided to go to the park to skate, only this time we put on our ice skates at home and skated down the road for two blocks to the lagoon. Another winter years later, we had similar conditions of ice everywhere and part of the back yard was frozen over so that my niece and I were able to play hockey.

A new building was built at the end of the lagoon in 1962. The upper floor was the new library and the ground floor was a multipurpose meeting room/rec room. During the winter, this lower level became the new ‘Warming House’ and the old Warming House was torn down.

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As the bulldozer was clearing off the snow one winter, it fell through the ice. They never cleared off the ice again after that incident and posted ‘No Skating’ signs around the lagoon. In the mid 1970’s, an indoor ice skating rink was built about a block from the lagoon where you could skate around in a circle, round and round you go, but it was never the same. I could never understand why they couldn’t continue to clear off the lagoon so we ‘real’ skaters could continue to skate outside. Well, they were charging a fee to skate inside and outside was free, so… I decided to go to a pond down by the railroad tracks. I brought my snow shovel and made my own path and was able to skate in the wild again.

When I went to college, there was a small pond across the street from my dorm. A guy and a gal I met there and I would go ice skating on that pond. I found some cut logs nearby and set them in a row on the ice and we would skate along and jump over the logs. We formed the unofficial ‘NIU Log Jumping Team.’

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Although I did not know it at the time I was skating on it, my Grandfather, Arthur Snelling, was the one responsible for digging out Shiloh Park Lagoon. They used mule teams to pull the scoops. Lots of hard work to be sure! This was back in the 1920’s when he was the Manager of the Zion Livery Department. Thanks, Grandpa!