Winter sports as a kid...

Many of the kids I knew in Reno during the 1940s had skis. During the season there was a weekly bus trip available to any kid interested. The bus hauled you from Reno to Mt. Rose on the Nevada side of the Sierras. That Mt. Rose ski area is actually on Slide Mountain- Mt. Rose is across the other side of the highway. I did visit the area a few times in warm weather to fish in Galena Creek but I never visited the Mt Rose ski area in-season.

Mt Rose & Mt Rose Ski area

But skiing wasn't on my winter agenda - that took another 30 years... I was 42 when I finally rented some skis and took a lesson at Mt Reba above Angels Camp! 

My closest friends either went ice skating or messed around with a sled. The sled was great exercise- drag 15 pounds of steel & wood up a hill for 15 minutes then get a free ride down hill that lasted less than 2 minutes. The uphill part would have been less of a pain if the sled didn't also work like a snow plow. Didn't take long and ice skating looked more appealing.

 Similar- this one is from LL Bean

I thought I was pretty good at ice skating on the free skates I got as hand-me-downs from Danny Goodman. But I have a hunch I was confusing 'good' with 'not falling on my butt'. Whatever, I thought it was great fun compared to dragging a sled with steel-runners up a hill. 

Those free ice skates, however, had a quirky habit of sliding around my foot till I was actually standing on a combination of the sole of the boot and the blade. I looked for all the world like I had broken my ankles. I wasn't aware of it at the time but that's what happens when the blade isn't aligned properly under the sole of the boot. It is especially bad when the boot of the skates is too big for the wearer's foot. Oops.

After a couple seasons with those skates my parents bought me a new pair. Imagine my surprise when I found out I could stand on the skates without looking like I'd just broken both ankles! No longer did I have to skate on the combined edges of the skate blade and the inside edge of the sole of the boot (I actually wore away the leather). And the benefit of having a pair of skates that fit properly with the blade correctly aligned under the sole? All of a sudden I was back to falling on my butt. But it was fun. 

A few friends thought skating was boring unless you could play hockey but mostly that meant knocking one another off their skates- no one had a hockey stick much less a puck nor any clue what the game is about. And there was no instruction anywhere. Just a bunch of kids being jerks.

So I figured that made me a figure skater. Great. Then my parents arranged a winter trip to San Francisco and got tickets to see the Ice Follies. I was utterly amazed. Absolutely loved the performance. Back in Reno I tried a couple things I'd seen during the show and was back to falling on my butt. I correctly concluded I was not very good at ice skating and finally accepted I loved being a spectator. To this day I love to watch ice skating events as a performance or as a competition. Still not a fan of hockey.

Idlewild Park had a a good sized fishing pond which froze during the winter. There was a soft spot near the inlet from the Truckee River but otherwise it was decent ice. In a good year the fire department would come by and spray water on the ice just before sunset and Presto! Good ice surface again. A couple parents would try to push a snow shovel around to clean the ice to clear the surface but that just got in the way. I have a hunch 'scraping the snow off the ice is for sissies!' was the theme of our complaint even though we all crowded onto the strips of clear ice.

Across from St Theresa's Church was an empty lot. One year the fire department flooded the field then came back and sprayed the surface to get a nice surface to skate on. But the issue was that the earth below the ice wasn't cold enough and the ice failed with rocks or dirt showing up on the surface. That was a disappointment as it was just a short bike ride from our house. 

About 10 or 15 years later I went to several hockey games when hockey was relatively new to Los Angeles. Signal Oil Stations were giving away free tickets to the Los Angeles Blades- fill your tank and get a free ticket. I was working with a few guys that had grown up with hockey (Al Michaels was my boss at Autonetics and IIRC he was one of the organizers). They managed to get a group together to see a few games. There were so few people at the games pretty much everyone had a rink-side seat.

On one of those nights watching a game, I saw the puck clear the plexiglass barrier and head directly for me (the image is still in my head to this day!). I knew that trying to catch the puck was a fools game so I ducked below the seat-back in front of me. Then suddenly I got whacked on the back of my head by the puck- those things are hard rubber with a thick steel plug in the center. Turns out the idiot behind me reached over the back of my seat to try to catch the puck for a souvenir. The puck careened off his hand and hit me on the back of my head. 

Rink employees came down to check on me (more likely to retrieve the hockey puck which I didn't have!) but other than a knot on my head all was well. I felt a certain satisfaction knowing they didn't bother with the idiot who tried to catch the puck- probably had a few broken bones in his hand(s) from the frozen rubber and the steel center of the puck. Not much later everyone in LA loved hockey and that was the end of the free tickets.