Stuff You Should Know - Roller Skating: Fun and Cool

Episode Date: November 24, 2022

The Victorians were the first to go bonkers for roller skating and since then the pastime has had bursts of popularity every few decades. Over the years skaters have come up with some amazing things to do on skates that go way beyond just going in circles.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and this is the podcast, Stuff You Should Know. That's right. Before we get going, we want to

very quickly go on a little fundraising drive that we're helping out our friends from co-ed. Our friends that took us to Guatemala so many years ago who helped break the cycle of poverty through education. They're a great organization. They do great work and we learned that the Stuff You Should Know Army, since we went to Guatemala, has raised just shy of one million dollars and we really want to hit that one million dollar mark. Yep. We're basically trying to drum up $100,000 in donations, which is a lot unless you break it up and divide it among the Stuff You Should Know Army. So if you want to go chip in a dollar, $5, $10, whatever your heart desires, you can go to cooperativeforeducation.org slash sysk and they will put your money to really good use. That's

right. And we are chipping in too. Absolutely. So don't worry about that. Okay. So let's start talking, Chuck, about roller skating because there's worse things that you could talk about. Yeah. Maybe let's start out with our own personal experience. As a sort of semi-sheltered Baptist boy, my parents did not drop me off at the roller rink on a Friday night to go roller skating like all the other kids were doing because it was unsupervised boys and girls together. And that's where dirty things and naughty things happened. Sometimes. So the only time I got to go roller skating was when I went on youth group outings to the roller rink, which we did some long and short of it is I was never

a great roller skater. I don't remember if I was a good roller skater and I certainly was never a good roller skater, but I didn't fall that much and I certainly didn't have to hold on to the wall. Did you go? Did your parents drop you off and you got to go like try and kiss girls and stuff? Yes. And your parents weren't too far off. The first condom I ever saw in person was at the roller rink. You were probably totally right to keep me out of there. In some dude's wallet. Yes, but it was much more. That was literally the worst thing I ever saw at the roller rink. I can understand where your parents were. And his condom that left a ring in a wallet. But no, it was like a Friday night thing. Usually it was a school-sponsored thing,

so you know like everybody there, which was pretty cool. That's cool. The slow skate for like Aerosmith's Angel was always amazing. Yeah, it was a really fun experience. I went to Ohio Skate was the name of my roller rink. The one we went to is called Stone Skate because it was near Stone Mountain. Yeah, that makes sense. But again, I didn't get to go enough. I was okay. It wasn't so much where when I went, people are like, you know, who's the Mennonite over there? He looks really nervous. But you know, I did okay, but I wanted to go try and kiss girls and I wasn't allowed to. I don't recall kissing a girl at the roller rink ever. So, you know, you kissed a girl eventually, right? You're fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm Mary. Okay. You didn't miss that much,

but it was fun. It was a fun time. All of my memories from the roller rink are very fond ones. Yeah, I wanted to kiss a girl in the seventh grade and I just, that did not happen. Oh, okay. Yeah. I think I had my first kiss in second grade. Of course you did. Because you're a boss there and you're a boss now. Thanks a lot, man. All right. So, let's talk roller skates. They have actually been around a lot longer than I thought. You put this together, right? Dave helped us with this one. Oh, all right. I didn't know that. I forgot about this one, I guess. Yeah. But they've been around a lot longer. They've been around since the 1700s. I did not know that. No. The Dutch, our Dutch friends were the ones who

first started thinking of ways to put wooden spools into a line and rolling around on them. They did everything they would. But it's our English friends that get credit for being the first to have documented use of roller skates. There was a production in London on stage in 1743. Not sure what it was called, but they were supposed to be pretending to be ice skating, so the actors on stage used roller skates. And if that doesn't bring up thoughts of like delighted gasps at the audience as the curtain rises and there's people magically ice skating on stage, I don't know what does. Yeah, absolutely. Not too long after in 1760, there was an inventor from Belgium named John Joseph Merlin who debuted these roller skates

that he made at a mass grade ball when he rolled in playing the violin was like, hey, everybody, look at me. I'm playing the violin. I'm rolling. Oh no, a mirror. And like, just sort of sounds like skated right into this mirror and broke it and broke his violin because at the time there were no toe stops and there were no trucks on the bottom of your skate, which we'll get to. But that's what allows you to kind of lean and steer a skate a little bit. Right. For some reason, I think of Merlin like as he gets more and more out of control, his violin's playing speeds up to rather than the opposite natural thing to stop playing violin. He keeps, he's playing like his own demise. I keep imagining it like that. Oh, I love it.

I wonder why the guy just didn't see it coming and like decide to just fall on purpose rather than crash into a mirror. I'm not sure. Maybe it's because he was so, you know, playing so fast. He was doing the devil went down to Georgia. Right. So there's a guy named James L. Plimpton and he's considered pretty much all around as the first inventor of the real roller skate back in 1863. And in super 19th century fashion, he wasn't an inventor. He was a furniture store owner in New York because that's who invented stuff back in the 19th century. Yeah, it's pretty cool. They were called the rocking skates and they were the first quad skates. They were the first ones that have, you know, the two wheels in the front and the two wheels in the back next to each other.

And I mentioned those trucks, the first one that had a truck and that is instead of the skate just being fixed in position on the bottom of a wood shoe in Amsterdam, the wheels are secured to a truck and the truck is secured to the shoe or the boot. And those trucks, you know, if you ever skateboarded, you know, you loosen and tighten the trucks, you can do the same thing on skates. And it's not quite like a skateboard. Like the trucks give just a little bit on a roller skate such that like most of your turning and stuff is done by picking up your feet and not just like leaning really hard to the left and doing a circle. But they really helped. Yeah. So not only did Plimpton invent the modern rolling skate, he also basically introduced the past

time of roller skating to the world. He's like, I'm definitely onto something here. He rented a ballroom in a hotel in Providence. Couldn't find out what hotel it was and set up a roller rink there is basically a proof of concept. And then he started touring the country and I think the world showing people how great skating was, giving demonstrations, giving lessons, throwing skate parties, I guess. And in a very short time, the Victorians were like, this is a really great thing that we're into. He invented the skate in 1863. By the 1880s, there were 3,000 roller rinks in the United States, England, Europe and Australia. Yeah. I was about to say this would make a good movie, but now that I think about it,

it would make a great drunk history episode. Especially the John Joseph Merlin part. Yes. And so just why haven't we been on yet? Derek Waters, get Josh and I on junk history and let us tell the story of roller skating. I think that we need to get in the way back machine and ask him because the show's not on anymore. I thought it was still going. No, we missed our chance. I'm totally down to get in the way back machine and ask him. I know, but I don't know. I'm really sad now. I didn't know that. I need it. It's done. It has completed its run. Okay. Well, never mind, Derek Waters. Put us in the next thing you do. He's like, why don't you guys have me on? I'll have you on. I'll have Derek Waters on any

time. Okay. Roller rinks became all the rage and young Victorians were out there at a time before you could go on a date and stuff like that. So it was kind of like young Chuck. It would have been a time for me to talk to girls and stuff. And that's what it was back then in the 1880s and 90s. Yeah. But I guess unlike your parents, the Victorians were like, this is okay. We're going to let them hang out by themselves, you know, unshap around. But the thing is, if you went skating back in the 19th century, they would have like a full orchestra or an organist playing, like a carousel basically, I think is what it was a lot like. Because if you're just skating around silently in like a, with like no music, that seems really unwholesome and weird. So I think they figured

out really quickly that you kind of need music to skate. This is a pretty cool fact that was in 1890, though, is at the Grand Hall Olympia in London. A 68,000 square foot roller rink was built, which is about the size of a soccer field. So that just kind of goes to show like how much people were into skating. It worked its way into vaudeville. It worked its way into the pictures in the 1930s. Charlie Chaplin very famously in modern times, skated, blindfolded. Just if you've never watched any Chaplin, go just check this out at least and get a slight appreciation of his genius. But there was a, he was on the fourth floor and there was no railing because it was under construction. And so he's skating around blindfold and of course,

it's so scary. And also that vaudeville act, I just have to shout out Charles Professor Frank, the Dean of Roller Skating. And in particular, I want to shout out his five-year-old daughter, Lily, who could roller skate on stilts. I've never heard of anybody doing that before or since. I feel like I've seen that at a circus. Okay. Well, you can thank Lily Frank for, for innovating that one. I wonder if she invented the stilt, probably not. So in the fifties, the, the peak of popularity of roller skating happened starting around 1957, I believe, the late fifties. And apparently Chicago was the epicenter of this roller skating revival because in between the Victorians and the fifties, roller skating actually developed

a really seedy reputation. I saw it like an article from the seventies where a roller rink operator said that back then, roller rink was the kind of place you wouldn't let your daughter go hang out. Like they were just not good places. But all of the roller rink operators that had hung on kind of banded together and like really worked to revive roller skating's image and were successful, so successful that the late fifties saw the greatest number of roller skating and roller rinks in history. Yeah. My parents didn't get that memo. I guess they were still working off the 1940s code. But yeah, more than 5,000 rinks were operating in the 1950s. And if you think you grow up in the like seventies and eighties and you're like, no, that was the heyday. They're only,

well only, there were a lot back then too, but about 3,500, like 1,500 fewer ranks than the 1950s. Yeah. And I definitely think of the late seventies as like the pinnacle, but I was wrong. My eyes are open now. Shall we take a break? Yeah, let's take a break and come back because there's some really unexpected coolness coming up. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously,

I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody you everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's

like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars. If you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the

iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck. So I don't typically, or I didn't before, associate roller skating with civil rights, but they really went hand in hand early on. I think one of the earliest sit-ins was in 1949 outside of the White City roller skating rink in Chicago. That is early. Like I equate sit-ins with like maybe the 50s, definitely the 60s. But one of the reasons why they targeted roller skating rinks for sit-ins and civil rights protests is because some historians said that everywhere in the country, segregation, whether like on paper or in practice, was a real problem. But in particular, black Americans found that public pools, amusement parks and roller skating

rinks were the three hardest places to integrate. And everybody liked skating, but not everybody had access to it. And so black Americans were like, no, that doesn't sit very well with us. We're going to do something about that. Yeah, like they may show up at a roller skating rink. And even if it was not legal to do so, they would say, we have a private party tonight, you can't come in. So stuff like that was going on. And in 1963, there was a man, a 27-year-old from Chicago named Ledger Smith, who very famously rollerskated almost 700 miles to attend the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which is the very famous, I have a dream speech where that took place. And he was called Rollerman. He had a sash that said freedom.

He was backed by the NAACP and rollerskated 685 miles to attend it. And to a lot of media fanfare. And obviously it was, for the time, it wasn't widespread media, but it got attention. Right, for sure. So after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, and there was again on paper, no such thing as segregation or racism in America, black Americans going to roller rinks still were faced with just being shut out. But to kind of follow the law in the least way possible, roller rink operators would set aside one night a week for black patrons. And they would call them things like Soul Knights or Martin Luther King, Jr. Knight. And it was what black Americans had to work with in the 60s if they wanted to go roller skating in some places.

That's right. But it ended up being something that really changed roller skating because on Soul Knights or on Martin Luther King, Jr. Knight at the roller rink is where things got super cool. And where they said, hey, white people aren't here. We can do what we want. We can get our dance on on these roller skates. And we can get that organist out of the room and play some good music. And that's what they did. They got like 50s and 60s Soul and R&B and then eventually like funk music playing on the turntable. Right. And all of a sudden skating got 1000% more awesome. Yeah. Because up to that point, everybody was like, no, you don't do that. You skate around in a circle with a smile on your face. That's roller

skating. A little like baseball game organist. Right. Exactly. But everything that you think of with roller skating, if you think it's even passingly cool, you can thank mid-century black Americans for basically saying like, there's a much better way to do this and integrating dancing and roller skating was a big part of that. And so that really laid the groundwork for that skating revival that you and I talked about that seems like to us like the peak of roller skating, even though it wasn't. And there was one guy in particular that was kind of the conduit for the whole thing. His name was Bill Butler. And he was an Air Force Sergeant. And all the way back in the late 50s, he was trying to convince rink owners. He traveled around a lot as part of his

Air Force service. So he would go to different rinks by himself, I guess. And he would try to convince the owners to like play some records instead of this organist, you know. And every once in a while, he was successful. And when he was, he really showed people like how great it was. But as much as he was laying the groundwork in the 50s, in the late 70s, he was basically the place where disco shot through into roller skating. He was like the prism that disco came through and spread into roller disco. Yeah. And that was in New York, of course, sort of the apex of disco in Brooklyn, actually, at Empire Roller Disco is where Bill hung out. And disco happening, it all, like you said, is sort of coalesced at this moment in time where skating was sort of retaking off.

And then all of a sudden, you had this great music to dance to. And dancing on roller skates is even cooler if you could pull it off. It's very hard. I've tried to do that stuff. I'm not, that's not very good disco roller skater. But rollers, they kind of like dip their toe in it as far as the rinks go. They would have like a club night where they would play those records and stuff. And then eventually, when disco really, really hit, the riding was on the wall. And they started fully converting roller rinks into what we think of roller rinks now. Like before this, they didn't have like all the amazing sort of dance lights and mirror balls. And like disco is what brought all that stuff in. So all of a sudden you have like neon and like cool carpet

and like a killer sound system. And it was like a disco on wheels. Exactly. And one of the reasons why it got so big is because disco really brought Americans of all races together for like the first time more than ever before. I don't want to say the first time, but definitely more than ever before. It was a really integrative, I think that's a word, kind of cultural movement, right? So basically another way to put it is white people who already liked disco were like, oh, you guys are roller skating to disco would show up at the roller rinks and learn from the black Americans who'd been dancing all this time. And we're now like had basically laid the foundation for roller disco to show them that there's more to roller skating than just going around in a circle with

a smile on your face. That's right. And Bill Butler leading the way in Brooklyn, like anyone who is anyone in the disco scene would like, they would go to studio 54 or one night and then they would go to Empire Roller Disco. If you were Cher or Linda Ronstadt or, you know, God knows who else. So you could skate with Bill Butler. And it was like a genuine movement was happening. There was very little barrier to entry, you know, because you rent the skates generally, like, of course, a lot of people bought their like super cool skates if they could afford them. But, you know, a couple of bucks to get in and like 75 cents to rent skates. And all, you know, there weren't like the velvet rope wasn't happening like at disco clubs where they wouldn't let you in if you didn't

have the right look. And it was sort of democratized in a way. Yeah, it was really inclusive, which is cool. There was one other thing that happened in the 70s to that that changed roller skating forever and basically made it what we think of today. And that was the introduction of the polyurethane wheel. And that did a couple of things. One, you could go outside now to roller skate. Obviously, you could before because Ledger Smith roller skated 700 miles. But one thing you don't realize is that Ledger Smith probably did that on metal wheels. That's amazing. And a description of roller skating outside on metal wheels I saw was that the whole point is to just keep your teeth from rattling out of your head. So polyurethane wheels are softer and they're much more forgiving outdoors.

So people were now allowed to go outdoors and roller skate and particularly roller disco outside. And then indoors, it allowed for much greater control and movement and precise movement in the roller rink than the older wheels had as well. Yeah. I mean, we talked about this in the skateboarding same thing happened there. They were already being made for skateboards. But there was a little bit of a dip in popularity for skateboarding at one point in the 70s. And then the wheel manufacturer said, hey, let's put them on roller skates. Everything changed. All of a sudden, you can go to Central Park in New York and see some really super cool roller disco happening on the sidewalks and pathways. It's essentially the definition of 70s groovy. Yeah. You know?

Oh, yeah. All of a sudden, it felt like every other movie or TV show you saw had some sort of roller skating either seen or part of the plot. Yeah, like Skate Town USA was a big one. Patrick Swayze was in that. Roller Boogie was another one starring Linda Blair. Xanadu, great movie, starring Olivia Newton-John. And then like you said, even randomly too, if you watch The Warriors, the leaders of one of the rival gangs like gets around on roller skates. Like it was just part of the zeitgeist basically. Yeah, not a tough look for a gang leader. No. But that's one of the great things of The Warriors. He looks like a troglodyte though. So he is really scary, but he's also on roller skates. It's a weird juxtaposition. While I was checking out Dave's

original piece he put together for us, I stopped there before turning the page and was thinking, wait a minute, I remember a Chips episode very distinctly where there were bank robbers that had those big platform wooden shoes and would like click a button and wheels would come out. And they would roller, that was their getaway car, was their roller skates. They would leave an oil slick trail from the heel. And it was chips. It was a two-parter. And I went and looked it up and I didn't see that part, but there's a very fun YouTube video. I think it's called like the most 70s TV scene ever or something like that. But just look up Chips Roller Skating, Bank Robbery or whatever and it'll come up. And

it is a huge fundraiser for the CHP on the show. And they're at a roller disco place. And almost every 70s person you can think of was in this scene. And they were just announcing that was really long. It was like three minutes and they're like, and here comes Ruth Buzzy. And here comes like, I can't remember all the guys, but there were just, it was just like a murderer's row of 70s icon like TV and movie stars out there roller disco-ing some poorly. And then some, if you look closely, they had a little disc line going like the disco line where you go through the middle. I saw one guy doing a move. He didn't even have roller skates on. He just kind of walked out in these loafers. It's hilarious. It's a very great video.

I feel like Chips doing a two-parter on roller disco really lets us off the hook for our two-parter on evil Knievel. I think you're right. There was another thing that came out too. Like Cher had a single called hell on wheels. And she actually created a music video for the song, which was weird because it was released two years before MTV came out. So that was a really unusual thing to do. But if you watch it, she combines the roller disco craze and the trucker chic craze by rollers, roller disco-ing in front of a tractor trailer on a road. It's a really unusual video and unusual song too. But it's got, I mean, a disco beat for sure. Yeah. I remember the trucker thing. We had a CV. It was, oh, so funny. That was a convoy, that movie.

Yeah. But Cher made it okay for truckers to like roller disco now, I guess. LA had their own version of Empire in Brooklyn. It was called Flippers. And I looked it up. I think it was at La Cienega in Santa Monica, kind of right there in central Hollywood. And it is now a CVS. Are they all? I think so. Every old cool thing is a CVS now. There's a CVS in, I think it's in Green Point in Brooklyn. And it has an old disco ball still in the ceiling. Oh, wow. It's like, what was this place? And I've never found out, but I don't think CVS installed it. I think it kind of came with the location. Yet I don't have a CVS convenient to my home somehow. That's funny. I don't. I mean, they're not that far because all the Intel neighborhoods

in Atlanta are fairly close, but I don't know. You want a CVS like within five minutes drive. Right. And I don't have that. I guess you don't live near a defunct roller disco. No, they took the Eckerd drugs near me that was convenient and changed it into a kidney dialysis place, which is useful. But like, you know, where am I going to get my Goody's headache powder? For sure. But Flippers was big in the late 70s. And it was, you know, the West Coast version, where like David Lee Roth would hang out and Rod Stewart would hang out and Jacqueline Bissette through her 35th birthday party. Yeah. And Ted Kennedy held a fundraiser there for his 1980 presidential campaign. That's very, yeah, very 1980s. Yeah. And between Flippers and Empire,

all throughout the United States, there was like seriously a thousand new roller rinks that came online in the 70s. And it was pretty cool. But then it went out very quickly. I mean, 1979-80 was the peak of roller disco. And there was almost not like a crest or a trough. It was almost like inverted V. It just came around, peaked and just dropped off really quickly, right? People started getting into like jazz or size and then break dancing and all that. It just went on to other stuff. But it never actually went away. Yeah. Like, I feel like it didn't go away in a couple of sectors. I think adults, like my parents looking for the next cool thing, like they took disco dancing lessons, which is not like them at all. But that's how ubiquitous disco was, right? I

feel like adults kind of moved away. I think kids still went to the roller skating rink as evidenced by us. And Black Americans did. It was still a very popular activity, like up through the early 90s for African Americans in the U.S. Yeah. And it's just so typical. But you think of like, oh, the peak of roller skating happened in 79-80. And then it just went out. When really, Black America had been basically creating like a roller dancing and then roller disco, White America came around, was interested for a while, became disinterested and moved on, and then just assumed that it just evaporated and went out of existence because White America stopped paying attention to it. But yeah, there are whole subcultures of Black America that said,

no, we really like doing this and we're going to keep on doing it. And over time, from that roller disco era, which really was like a just a bomb drop that really changed roller skating forever, it went on and became refined and new like styles were created. And it's pretty cool how it kept going. I love it. Should we take a break? Let's take a break. All right, we'll talk about skating styles and just kind of how these skates were put together right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would

Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever

you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to

father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Shall we talk skating styles? We shall. This is when it's a little bit like when you talk about hip hop culture and break dancing and that there are like sub styles within the larger culture, which is kind of a cool thing. I love it when a culture has a subculture where it's like, hey, if you like to rhythm skate, rhythm skate. If you like to jam skate, jam skate. And there's a lot of overlap, but

and some of this, like all this stuff, you kind of have to look up examples to really get the nuance. But what is jam skating? Jam skating at its base is an incredibly difficult combination of break dancing and roller skating. If you watch a break dancer, like a good break dancer, what they're doing is impossibly hard and incredibly, it takes an incredible amount of talent and skill and stamina and creativity just to break dance. Someone like you, for instance. Exactly. Me in third grade, for sure. Now, take that person who's able to do that and put them on roller skates. And then what you have is jam skating. And if you watch a video of it, it is beyond impressive. Like to see people who are really

good and proficient at it, because it is break dance. And there's a lot of floor work. There's shoulder spins. Like there's like, you know, like that whole jumping in thing. I can't remember what you call it where you kind of like skip back forward. I can't remember what it's called, but it's super cool. People do that on roller skates. And then there's also like b-boy battles where there's like, you know, one crew is battling another, one person's battling another. So they just go back and forth with a little like with the dances until somebody wins. I don't remember how they ever figure out who wins. Oh, I think it's clear. But okay. Yeah, probably. But that's jam skating and it's really, really impressive to see. All right. All this stuff is impressive,

but certainly jam skating. Agreed. Rhythm skating was from about the mid-70s. Had a lot of roller disco influence there, obviously. And this is, you know, this is dancing. It's kind of like disco dancing while you're roller skating. Very precise and choreograph. Like you would see a lot of people do like routines, but it is not quite artistic skating, which is a little more akin to figure skating. Right. But you can still rhythm skate with someone and come up with your own like you would at the disco if you had like Saturday Night Fever. Like if you had your dance partner and you would do your thing rather than just sort of freestyle dancing with someone. Exactly. That's exactly rhythm skating. And then rhythm skating, I suspect even goes further

back to probably the 50s when people started playing R&B music at the roller rink on like Soul Night or whatever. But today, it's still around today. And it kind of spread out to like local areas so that regional styles started to develop. And Atlanta has its own style. If you seen the movie ATL from I think 2006, you know, part of the thing that's going on there is a backdrop is like the roller rink. And that's a lot of what you would see in ATL. You would see at an actual roller rink today in Atlanta, where there's a lot of like, it's rhythm skating. So like you said, it's like dancing, but on roller skates. But they kind of, it's connected to break dancing in that there's like crew battles and that kind of thing. But it's still, it's not

break dancing necessarily. It's just like dancing on skates. Yeah. Cleveland apparently has their own style, which is a little more figure skating style. Apparently like axles and jumping and stuff like that. Detroit, of course, is going to have their own style. I bet there's a Chicago style too. There's got to be. It has a pickle on it. You put a pickle on it. It's deepish. Well, I just figured since it was the center, then they probably have their own style. But who knows? Detroit had their own style though. And this was, this is what I didn't quite get. What is sliding? Sliding to the side, like not going forward or backward, going to the side, sliding on your skates. All right, that makes sense. A lot of sliding in Detroit style apparently.

Right. Which is really cool because there's also a lot of precise foot movement too. And those two things required two different hardnesses of wheels, but they managed to figure it out in Detroit. It's really cool to see people slide. I saw one clip of a dude and he was in the middle of the rink and just slid all the way to the edge and then onto the carpet. Nice. It was really cool looking because it's just such a smooth move. The one that I think I liked the best when I was a kid was, I believe it would be the freestyle dance skating. Unless I'm wrong, I think that was the lady or the guy at the rink that was just, they were going in the circle and they were, they were skating forward the whole time, but the whole time they were also

just sort of dancing. And they were lifting the skates up and knees up and legs forward and backward and crossing over here and there. And it was just very smooth and fluid and just looked super cool. Like you wouldn't stop and do a split or do like a break dance move. You were just sort of grooving around the rink. Right. And you could tell that they probably hadn't like come up with the moves necessarily ahead of time. They were just feeling the music. Feeling the music. It's the kind of roller skate dancing that like somebody would probably do in a bathing suit. You know what I mean? That's freestyle dance skating. And like what's cool about it is anybody can do it. Like you can, you just have to, again, you just have to be able to

roller skate and feel, feel the groove. But there's people who can do it better than others. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Cause I did that stuff. I could, you know, at my apex of roller skating, I could like stay up and look pretty good and do a good crossover on the corners. Oh, really? That was about it. That's, that's, I think that's better than me. I don't remember being able to do anything like that. I was just a rink skater. I go in a circle with a smile on my face. No, no, no. That's what I'm saying. I mean crossover, like when you're on the turns, you cross one, your right foot over your left foot.

Yeah. I would just not do that. Well, would you do just lean? You would lean? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I would prepare for the turn in advance, not do that crossover thing. I think I probably did once or twice, but it wasn't something that I was utterly confident. I wasn't going to like totally biff when I tried it. You know what I mean? Did you do the Snoopy? No. Do you remember that? I say, I mean, I'm just pulling this off the dome, but I'm pretty sure the Snoopy was when you went all the way down on one skate and then held your foot, held the toe stop off the floor with your hand. I think that was called the Snoopy.

At least maybe there's a regional or something. I don't know. It sounds really familiar. I think you might be right about that. I know, I know the move you're talking about, and I think it might be called the Snoopy. What a cute name for a move. Could I do that? I don't think so. I hadn't been drinking at that age. And then I never got backward skating down super well, which is a really key component if you wanted a couple skate. Otherwise, you're just holding hands and going forward together. If you were a boss, you would turn around and take that girl by the hips.

Man, you're advanced. No, I'm not. Not that dirty. It's like slow dancing. You put your hands on her hips. She puts her hands on like around your neck. And then when you dip, she dips. You both dip. But you got to be able to skate backward really fluidly to do that. Chuck, that is, I don't recall even seeing that. What? What kind of couple skating were you seeing? Again, we were going around in a circle like skates right next to each other at all times, holding hands, maybe speeding up. That's it.

Then you'd split some onion rings and make out. I can't remember what I'd like. They're probably like square pizza. That's probably what I would get. Square pizza. There's also, there's inline skating, which after that, the peak in the 70s and 80s of roller skating and just general popularity, roller blades came out right after that, apparently like an 83 or something like that. I didn't realize that because I was associate them with the 90s, but I think that's when they kind of blew up. Do you ever get into that? No, I never did.

I was skateboarding at the time, so I wasn't doing inline skating. I had one pair of roller blades in my life, but I didn't use them very much. And I remember thinking like, all right, I should just get rid of these. But I mean, people can get like nuts on those. There's a type of inline skating called aggressive skating. And it is, it's like skateboarding, but you're doing it on roller blades, which seems to me like way harder actually. And then there's one other thing I learned about inline skating, Chuck, that we just have to share.

What's that? So in the early 90s, Amish teenagers found out about roller blades and they're like, we're going to use these despite their elders protests. They said, no, nay, I think is probably what they said. We are going to adopt these. And they don't, I don't think they do any aggressive skating or anything like that, but they use them to get around. And still to this day, you can see Amish teenagers rolling around on roller blades in Amish country.

Good for them. Yeah. That's what I say. What else you got? Well, I guess we should talk about, I mean, we have a whole episode on roller derby, which you should go listen to. Yeah, for sure. But maybe we should finish out with the least interesting part,

which is the anatomy of a roller skate. Gotta cover it because that's what we do. If you want to buy some skates today, you can spend $150 on average. You can spend $1,000 if you want. I remember, do you remember when they came out with like the tennis you skate when we were kids? And how cool that was? That was a little before my time. But yes, when I look at pictures of them now, I'm like, those are really cool.

Like blue adidas with yellow stripes. Yep. Those are really cool. Like a full, fully functioning, not fully functioning, but like a full tennis shoe. Didn't have any upper ankle support or anything. And then it had the, well, I guess we'll talk about the parts here. I mentioned the boot and the boot uppers, anything above the sole. And of course you got the lining on the inside and the laces and all that stuff.

But the plate is what I was talking about. You'd had a regular old adidas, maybe modified slightly, but it was mounted to a plate, mounted to the trucks and the skates or the wheels. Yeah. Right. And they still have that today, but it just the, I don't think anybody's making adidas boots for roller skates, but usually they divide the boots into two types, high top and low top. And depending on the type of skating you're going to do, you want to choose wisely.

So freestyle, rink skating, which again is just going around in a circle with a smile on your face. Artistic, which is like figure skating and then rhythm skating, they all use high tops. And then low top is more useful for jam skating and speed skating. Right. So that's pretty much the only, it's not really looks necessarily. It's, you know, what kind of skating you're doing, whether you go high top or low. Yeah. You've got, you know, we talked about polyurethane, but you can also get different size wheels

and different hardness of wheels, depending on what you're looking to do. Right. And your outdoor wheels are going to be a little softer than the indoors. You're going to have more traction with a larger wheel, obviously. And a little more agility with the smaller wheel. You can be super cool and get those light up wheels if you want. They're so awesome. They're very cool.

Yeah. They have an actual like dynamo in them. They use magnetic spacers inside copper wiring. And so when the wheel spins, it generates electricity that powers an LED. So let's talk toe stops. So remember our friend, John Joseph Merlin, who broke the mirror when he was playing violin at the mass grave ball? No toe stop.

He didn't have a toe stop. He wishes he had, but it was like a hundred years later, I think. I think he was in the 18th century, was an old John Joseph. It wasn't until 1876 that toe stops were finally invented and people had a way to break. Yeah, 116 years after John Joseph Merlin. And all that is, is like a big hunk of rubber that's screwed into the underside of the toe of the boot. And all you do is just push down on your toe and the toe stop makes contact with the ground. And it slows you down, depending on how much pressure really quickly or kind of slowly and gradually.

Yeah, I'd never have been able to stop really quickly without busting my butt. So maybe I didn't know how to use a toe stop. I kind of drug it behind me to gradually slow down, but I don't know. That's a great technique. I didn't know if there were other methods. That's what's called the snoopy. No, I think other methods are, if you're really good, you just like peel out to the side.

Like you went on skis to stop quickly on skis. I think people do that on roller skates to stop suddenly. Well, that's way beyond me. For sure. There's also something called jam plugs, Chuck, which are the same thing, but they're much closer to the toe than a toe stop is, which means that you have way more clearance for the wheel. If you're like, say standing up on your toes and rolling, you could do that with jam plugs. You couldn't do that with the toe stop.

So things like jam skating would use jam plugs instead. Yeah. And I think they can be like heart shaped and you can get a little more creative with the jam plugs. Sure. Little faces and stuff, emojis. Yeah. You put all those together.

You got yourself a roller skate. You put it together twice. You have a pair of roller skates. And apparently a roller skating, and this is something I wasn't fully aware of, became a really big deal during the pandemic again. The only way I knew this was sort of happening was our former colleague, the wonderful Miranda Hawkins, started roller skating during the pandemic. And I would just see her Instagram stuff of her, her videos of her learning how to roller skate

and do these moves and tricks and stuff. And I saw Miranda make great strides over the course of the pandemic. But I just thought she was super cool because Miranda is super cool. Well, it's still super cool. Well, she's still super cool. But apparently a lot of people were doing it. I didn't know it was a thing. I thought it was just her thing.

It was a thing. And what's interesting is you can actually trace back to the person who started it as an actress named Anna Koto. She was in a movie called Ouija from 2014. It's a pretty good movie, actually. But she also is a really talented freestyle dance roller skater. And she started posting videos on TikTok of her roller skating. And they hit just right.

And at the beginning of the pandemic, everybody was like, oh yeah, we can go roller skating. You can do that outside. Makes sense. You can social distance and still have fun. And she kicked off this roller skating revival, especially among Gen Z. I love it. That's a perfect pandemic sport slash hobby. It is.

It's really cool. And I think it's already gone out again. Although the thing about roller skating is this is what it always does. There's peaks in popularity and then declines in popularity. But it always hangs on and just kind of goes its own way. And every time it becomes popular, it attracts a few more people who are now roller skaters when otherwise they never would have been. And then the next peak comes and even more people are into it.

And then it just seems to be this process as immutable as the wind across the dunes. Yeah. And the differences these days is you just don't have as many options for roller rinks. If you live in a major city, you might have a few. If you live in a small town, you might even have one. Because that's kind of the great things about small towns is you may still have a drive-in or a roller rink. Right.

But you're not going to have like, hey, which one of these like 12 places should we go to? Right. And as we always like to point out a good trivia question when we come upon it, it turns out that NWA held their first concert at a roller rink called Skateland in Compton. That's where Dr. Drey and EZE and Ice Cube met. I love it. You got anything else about roller skating? Negative.

Chuck, this one was an eye-opening episode for me because I realized in retrospect that I was not a particularly good roller skater. So thank you for opening my eyes to that. I feel like I know myself a little better now. Yeah, I was not either and you are worse than me. Right. So if you want to know more about roller skating, go do it. There's nothing stopping you.

Really just go have some fun skating. It's a lot of fun. And since I said it's a lot of fun, of course that means it's time for Elissa to remain. I'm going to call this gentle correction. We've gotten it from quite a few people. We goofed up in our Paper Towns ep. Hey guys, just finished the Fake Towns episode. I was hoping you would talk about Paper Towns and bring up the book.

I can't always tell if you're joking or not and say things wrong on purpose, which we do. Or if it was an honest mistake. So when Josh said he'd never heard of the author of Paper Towns, I wasn't sure if it was a joke. The author is John Green, not Tom Green. I was thinking of the hilarious Canadian comedian. Also, you almost certainly have heard of him. He is the co-founder of VidCon.

Which we've been to. Yeah, that was our... I'm sure VidCon is great, but we were not... That's where we met Tejon Day of Chocolate Rain famous. Yeah, I got a picture with Chocolate Rain. But that was also where we very famously did our worst attended live performance of what, 13, 14 people? Yeah, and we worked with half of them easily.

Yeah, it was not a good match for us, but VidCon I'm sure is wonderful. But John Green apparently co-founded VidCon, co-host of the podcast, Dear Hank and John, and host of the podcast, The Anthropocene Reviewed. And by the way, that podcast is also now a book. And the YA novel Paper Towns was actually turned into a movie. So Connie says, thanks for always making Connie smile. Connie was dropping a lot of extra information here. So we always appreciate that.

Thanks a lot, Connie. Yeah, that definitely wasn't Anna's mistake. I wasn't clever enough to be joking about that. And I didn't catch it. So anytime one of us misspeaks, it's always on both of us. Right. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Connie did and drop a knowledge bomb on us like she did,

you can do it as gently as she did because we like those. It's more like a bath bomb than a knowledge bomb, you know what I mean? I know what you mean. You can send it to us via email to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Badie about my new podcast and make sure to listen.

So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject,

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