11/12/2022 0 Comments Magic memories![]() I grew and I made friends.”īy the time Girard came along, the Rollodrome had already been around for nearly two decades. #MAGIC MEMORIES HOW TO#I didn’t know how to skate at all when I first started. “My mother always made sure that me and my sister had some money to go,” he says, “but good lord. Times were lean for Girard’s family, but his mother recognized that roller skating on weekends was a rather harmless endeavor and one that would likely keep her son out of trouble. Skaters crowd the Rollodrome in Auburn in this photo from the late 1950s. He would find those friends, as it happened, through one grand, unifying location across the bridge in Auburn: The Rollodrome, a place that would continue to be a part of Girard’s life even 50 years on. New to the downtown streets, Gary was desperate to make friends and to develop connections. In the early 1970s, Gary Girard was just another kid struggling to get by in downtown Lewiston where he lived with his mother and sister. Gary Girard: Making friends and bouncing off the walls We heard from so many enthusiastic skaters, we couldn’t possibly talk to them all, but we talked to some and each responded with great passion about that special place in Auburn that had so shaped their lives. With the rink presently up for sale, its future uncertain, we decided to ask our readers for their Rollodrome memories. Over the years, the Rollodrome has transformed the lives of untold numbers of people who skated, grew up and built their lives, and then skated some more, passing the tradition on to their own kids and so on and so forth through the generations. Yet, as it turns out, the rink has many faces. In a way, he had been the face of the Rollodrome, and for a very long time. Those who knew him best say Marquis skated at the Rollodrome almost to the very end, completing a near 70-year run on eight wheels.Īt the news of Marquis’ death, many in the roller-skating community went into a spell of mourning. 26, at the age of 82 after a battle with cancer. He was a different person when on roller skates, Marquis said. “If I got to skate it was a miracle.”īut Marquis did skate and once he started, he rarely stopped. “We’d skate back and forth, take them off, give them to the next one,” Marquis said in a 2018 interview with the Sun Journal. You can pick 20 people from this area at random and I guarantee you, you’ll get stories from the Rollodrome from just about all of them.” Submitted photoīack in 1954, when a new skating rink called the Rollodrome opened in Auburn, Marquis would walk four miles to get there and another four to get back.Īt the time, he had to share a single pair of skates with his eight siblings, which wasn’t optimal, but he made do. “It’s been an amazing place through the years. this combined with the relatively low pay and an understandably annoyed customer base, it causes a stressful work environment.Gary Girard, top right, with his wife, Ginger, in the orange shirt, pose with their children and friends at the Rollodrome in Auburn. horribly cold in winter and dangerously hot in summer, a hard-core work style you only get a single 30-minute break a day. I witnessed a co-worker have heat sickness from inside the photo runs because the AC is never working. It's a dangerous work style and on multiple instances, I was nearly hit by the human freight trains that are servers. all while dodging servers with heavy and hot serving trays and sometimes actors who aren't paying attention to anything but their cues. interrupt people enjoying an expensive dinner show to sell them needlessly expensive photo packs. the only difference between a school and this place is teachers who have enough self-confidence to stop others from bullying and treating other students like garbage. most of the employees at the time were 16-20 and they all acted 12. Difficult and toxic when I worked there it was like a second high school but worse. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |