Paid post by AARPPublished on: July 18, 2024

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Story by Vikki Ortiz and photography by Monika Wnuk

PAID POST BY AARP

While the rest of the world zooms full speed into the modern – cyber trucks and AI and same-day deliveries – the more amazing discoveries these days may be from the past.

Consider Chicago’s thriving roller skating scene.

Some of the area’s most storied rinks have closed in recent decades. But a steadfast few still bring in thousands of skaters each week for exercise, for lessons, for competition, for breaks from caregiving, for social connection, for love.

AARP Chicago was happy to discover that roller skating is alive and well in the area – and that many of the people gliding through the rinks are in their 60s, 70s, 80s – even 90s.

As a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to improving lives for older adults, we proudly share this collection of photos and stories.

These inspiring, everyday people who are 50+ embody AARP’s belief that nothing is a foregone conclusion when it comes to aging.

Roger Wampach, 80

There are people who put on roller skates for date nights and birthday parties.

And then there is Roger Wampach, roller skating champion, coach and ambassador.

He’s laced and and rolling in his own skates long before students walk in, never mind that he just celebrated his 80th birthday.

“Age is not the determining factor. The real determining factor is your own desire. Most people like to skate. There’s a few that really love to skate, and then there’s a few like me, they’re a little crazy. This is my love,” he said.

Roger started skating on his 12th birthday, went on to place in national skating competitions from 1960 to 1968, took 49 years off to work and raise a family and returned to competitive skating 8 years ago.

Leave your fear at the door, and skating will glide you through your golden years, Wampach insists. He’s handwritten and photocopied a list of reasons for anyone who needs them:

*Best Overall Exercise Next to Swimming
*500-1000 Cal/Hr
*Skating is social, music, exercise
*Balance is Beauty
*Meet Friends Not at a Bar or Over a Meal and you can’t beat the cost/hour
*Breaks down social barriers

Sure, he’s seen his beloved pastime change quite a bit over the years, from packed rinks with pipe organs to DJs with CDs to the closure of many skate centers around the Chicago area.

But skating, like those who love it, will never grow old, he says.

“To many older people, they say, well, I can’t do that anymore or I shouldn’t,” Roger says. “I taught my mother-in-law how to skate when she was 84.”

Lorrie and Dean Becker, 70 and 68

It was 25 years ago in March when a man glided effortlessly across the rink to approach Lorrie Becker at the Aurora Skate Center.

He asked her to waltz.

“For me it was almost like some enchanted evening at the roller rink,” said Lorrie, who went on to marry the man, Dean Becker. “The minute I met him, I really liked him.”

Lorrie and Dean had each discovered their love for roller skating on their own. For Lori, it was something of a family tradition; her parents met at a rink and took she and her three siblings skating almost as soon as they could walk. Dean started skating after college when some buddies decided to check out the sport. The music hooked him in.

But after that March evening in 1999, roller skating became a couples’ thing. The pair can be found at Aurora Skate every Monday night, in coordinating outfits doing the Fox Trot, the Tango and their favorite waltz to “Only You.” They have skating couple friends, who join them at dinner breaks between sessions and on vacations to Florida and Oregon.

Lorrie and Dean say that there’s a lot more to couples’ skating than holding hands. You need skate to close without hitting each other’s wheels. You have to take your own steps while your partner takes theirs at the same time. If you rush a step, you must both wait for the next beat.

There will be falls.

“It’s just part of it,” Dean says. “You’re never too old to learn it right or get better.”

At 70 and 68, Lorrie and Dean say the health benefits of roller skating far outweigh a few bumps and bruises they’ve collected over the years.

“You have to memorize the patterns and, you know, it stimulates your brain to start going out and coasting around, just listening to the music,” Dean says.

So they don’t plan on stopping any time soon.

“It really has been quite a blessing in our life to be able to do this. And it just, I don’t know, we’ll be married, 24 years in August… But it just kind of dawned on us we’ve been skating 25 years together. Oh my gosh, it doesn’t seem like it. The time went by fast. Well, when you are having fun, time flies.”

Alice May, 81

Alice May’s doctor knows better than to tell her to hang up her skates.

Two replaced knees, surgery for a dislocated finger and a couple of concussions over the years have barely slowed her down.

“(Skating) has kept me in shape to be able to do anything I want. Gardening, anything. And it’s the skating, really, that has kept me young feeling,” May says. “My doctor always says ‘Keep skating!”

Nothing much about skating has changed for Alice since she started at age 13. That was 1956, when she first felt the wind in her face while skating on the sidewalk. She started making her own skating outfits – leotard with a shorty turtleneck and a skating skirt – and visiting the rink as often as she could.

She paused only while pregnant with each of her four children. Now those children are grown and her grandchildren made her an e-mail address with “RollerskatingGrandma.” Her entire family knows not to question the hobby of this octogenarian.

“They have not really come with me, except quite a few years ago when they were in grade school, in high school,” May says. “Now they’re all grown and different places, but yeah, they think it’s wonderful that I’m still skating.”

May is certain that if she were to stop skating, gardening and all the other physical activities she loves, that’s when the real problems would set in. Her knees would get tight. Her balance would be off. Her spirit would be low from not seeing her friends at the rink.

“I don’t think of myself as being 80, 81, and neither do my friends. I honestly feel like I’m in my 50s,” she says.

Karri Peronto, 63, and Tom Peeler, 61

A lot of people had to sign off on Karri Peronto and Tom Peeler becoming skating partners.

Peronto, 63, had a singles coach in Wisconsin. Peeler, 61, had a singles coach at Lynwood Sport Center near Indiana. And then there was the matter of Peeler’s wife.

“She was like, ‘no way in hell,’” said Peeler. “I just told her, ‘We’re just skating together. Once she made friends with Karri, she has no problems with it now.”

These are the complications you deal with when you start competitive skating in your 60s. You plan trips to regional competitions as your peers plan cruises to Alaska. You learn that coaches are hard to come by, and agree to faraway practice locations and tough love.

But for Peronto, a grocery store manager and grandmother, and Peeler, who got bored of other pasttimes like Frisbee and surfing, competitive skating brings a sense of accomplishment they’ve always wanted.

“I raised my kids. I went to all their sporting events,” said Peronto. “It’s my turn now to take over and just do what I want to do.”

The Rink

Five years ago, when a sale to a company that planned to tear down The Rink on Chicago’s South Side fell through, Curtis and Ramona Pouncy rewrote their retirement plans.

Ramona Pouncy, 63

The couple bought and renovated the skate center on E. 87th Street —  backdrop for countless memories over the last five decades for Chicagoans like the Pouncy’s and Chance the Rapper. They kept hundreds of photographs of neighborhood regulars hanging on the walls.

“So many people have told us that this skating rink has saved their lives,” said Ramona Pouncy. “We felt like we needed to save it for this community.”

And so The Rink rolls on.

Calvin Small, 67

Calvin Small, 67, teaches classes there every day, leading hundreds of skaters up and down the floor. Small is considered one of the forefathers of artistic roller skating; he’s been in two movies and is known worldwide for his spinning and co-founding a Chicago style of skating called “JB” (after James Brown).

Lloyd Kolar Jr., 67

Lloyd Kolar Jr., 67, a church pastor, comes to The Rink several times a week to clear his head. “There’s a time and a place for everything. I love God and I don’t mind talking about God, but sometimes when I come in here, I like to leave the church stuff behind and just skate.”

Emma Branson, 73

Before she retired from the Chicago Police, Emma Branson, 73, roller skated after her overnight shifts in Englewood. Today, she comes several times a week to stay strong after two knee replacements.

Lopoleon Swope, 91, and Adrian Boyd, 56

And The Rink is where Lopoleon Swope, 91, and Adrian Boyd, 56 met and fell in love. She is a JB skater. Swope only started skating at age 68, but he keeps up pretty well. “When I believe I can do it, I can do it,” he says.

The Rink offers a Gospel Skate, a Pay-What-You-Can Skate, and a Senior Skate every Tuesday and Sunday. Neighborhood kids do their homework next to older adults who play chess and shoot billiards.

Ramona and Curtiss Pouncy say it is not the retirement they planned at all.

It’s better.

“We do feel like this is a mantle that has been passed down to us to continue the legacy,” she said.

Joyce Harvey, 60+

The stress and exhaustion of caring for her sick husband and mother at the same time was sometimes too much to bear.

So on days when her mother could go to the Senior Center or friends could come relieve her for a few hours, Joyce Harvey put on her earbuds and skates.

Along with her faith in God and time at church, her escape was to roller rinks or just the nearby basketball court. But in skating laps to the music of Bruno Mars, Tevon Campbell and Stephanie Mills, the devoted wife and daughter got a much-needed recharge.

“It took me to a different mindset,” Harvey said. “When the music is good, you don’t really think about your problems.”

Harvey’s husband, Frank, died of cancer in 2022, two days before their 23rd anniversary. Her mother, Adele Walker, held on until January of this year.

Now Harvey’s challenge is remembering what she used to do with her free time.

“I’m in this empty house trying to figure out ‘what do I do now?’”

Roller skating has helped to fill that void. She alternates between rinks in Aurora and Linwood, finding comfort and rhythm in the turns and songs.

She recently started traveling again.She just got back from a trip to visit a friend in Arizona. Next week, she’s taking her grandchildren on their very first cruise to Cozumel, Mexico.

“I’m giving myself time,” she says. “I’m trying to keep myself busy. Trying to figure it out.”

Laura (73) and Ralph (83) Taylor

They met at the Elm Roller Rink in Elmhurst in 1967. Soon after, Laura and Ralph Taylor began taking skating lessons together. Not long after that, they got married.

But for the next 20 years, as the Taylors raised their family, roller skating had to wait. There were three children to raise, jobs to work, other places they needed to be – although the couple did their best to do it all together.

“I never left my wife at home when went golfing or anything like that. We always did things together all the time,” Ralph Taylor said. “You know, when the kids were in high school where we were chaperons for the marching band, and we went every place with the marching band all over the United States.”

Then in 2009, the couple saw an article in the Chicago Tribune reminiscing about the Elm Roller Rink. It mentioned the Taylors’ old skating instructors and said they were still teaching at Aurora Skate.

The couple has returned for the live organ roller skating session at Aurora Skate nearly every Monday night since then.

“We enjoyed bringing back everything that we used to do in the past, and definitely having an organ music there to skate to,” Laura said. “We were used to all these organs that were playing in the past, so we still enjoy that today.”

These days, only Ralph can lace up skates and glide around the rink. Laura had spinal surgery and uses a wheelchair. But when the organists starts playing familiar routines – the Denver Shuffle, the Progressive Tango — Laura counts out the moves while her husband skates. Left, right , left, cross… Cross, left, left, side cross…

“Things go on in life where you find out that you can’t do the same things anymore, but it’s never a time that you should give up,” Laura Taylor said.

Carl DeSanti, 66 Organist

From his organ bench a few steps above the rink at Aurora Skate, Carl DeSanti can read the room.

If there are many younger people circling the floor, De Santi pumps out Taylor Swift’s “You Belong to Me,” Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” or a Bee Gees medley.

“I don’t want them running for the exits screaming, so I’ll play things they know,” said DeSanti, the regular organist at Aurora Skate Center’s Live Music Monday.

Sixty years ago, organ music was the common background sound at shopping malls, movie theaters and roller rinks. Then the disco music and lights arrived.

DeSanti was the house organist at The Orbit Skate Center in Palatine for 15 years before it closed in 2018. Today, Aurora Skate Center is one of few rinks that still offers live organ music. The rest of the week, DeSanti works as a Liturgical Minister at a Catholic parish.

Twenty minutes or so into the skating session, DeSanti calls couples to the floor. Pairs of skaters glide arm-in-arm to the smooth vibrato of DeSanti’s music for a couple’s only skate and the waltzes. He picks up the beat and the skaters bounce along to trios and a conga line. More experienced skaters stay on the floor for dance specials.

DeSanti loves seeing longtime skaters able to continue their intricate moves well into their 60s, 70s and 80s.

“It’s absolutely inspiring,” he said, adding that even beginners can get out there and have a great time. “There are many all-skates as well for those who just want to roll around and enjoy the experience.”

As a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to improving the lives of older adults, AARP Chicago is proud to share this collection of photos and stories. These inspiring, everyday people who are 50+ embody AARP’s belief that nothing is a foregone conclusion when it comes to aging.

AARP Chicago is here to provide you with resources, events and volunteer opportunities to help you find your community as you age. Find us at aarp.org/IL

This article has been supplied by AARP, a paid advertiser. The editorial staff of Chicago magazine had no role in this post’s preparation.