By 1950, roller skating had emerged as the number-one participatory sport in America. Ironically, the war years launched the Golden Age of Roller Skating. Soldiers serving overseas pleaded for skates along with their usual requests for cigarettes and letters from home. Stateside, skating uplifted morale and kept war factory workers exercising. By the end of the decade, five thousand rinks operated across the country. Its epicenter: Chicago! And no one was left behind! The Blink Bats, a group of Braille Center skaters, held their own at the huge Broadway Armory rink. Meanwhile, the Swank drew South Side crowds to its knee-action floor and stocked jukebox. Eighteen celebrated rinks are now gone, but rinks that remain honor the traditions of the sport's glory years. Author Tom Russo scoured newspaper archives and interviewed skaters of the roller capital's heyday to reveal the enduring legacy of Chicago's rink rats.

The children are going to a skating rink. Find out what they need to take with them and what they will see. The text features are photographs, signs, labels, and directional arrows.

Iley and Marie Hinton created one of the most successful roller skating rinks during the 70's and 80's, Skate Odyssey. Told by their youngest son, this is a memoir of Iley and Marie, the family they created, and the business that brought thousands of people together.

A phenomenally unusual three-way murder mystery. With a murder at its heart, Roberto Bolano’s The Skating Rink is, among other things, a crime novel. Murder seems to have exerted a fascination for the endlessly talented Bolano, who in his last interview, according to The Observer, “declared, in all apparent seriousness, that what he would most like to have been was a homicide detective.” Set in the seaside town of Z, north of Barcelona, The Skating Rink is told in short, suspenseful chapters by three male narrators, and revolves around a beautiful figure skating champion, Nuria Martí. A ruined mansion, knife-wielding women, political corruption, sex, and jealousy all appear in this atmospheric chronicle of a single summer season in a seaside town, with its vacationers, businessmen, immigrants, bureaucrats, social workers, and drifters.