OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

When I leave Minneota after putting the paper together or covering an event, I occasionally take the longer route home and travel east to Marshall before turning north to head to Willmar. If I go that way home in the winter, I usually stop and look at the nice job they have done with the ice rink in Ghent along Highway 68 while reminiscing about the time that we used to spend at the former ice rink at Central Park in Tracy.
There were dozens of kids that utilized the ice rink on an almost daily basis. We were like the kids in the "Sandlot" movie in that nothing was organized as this rink, we were of different ages and came from all walks of life, while having varying degrees of skating ability, stick-handling ability, and toughness.
What we all had in common, though, was enthusiasm and a genuine love for hockey. We were Rink Rats.
Instead of Benny "The Jet" Rodriguez, the standout player for the "Sandlot" kids, we had John Lindstrom. He was a cut above the rest of us in ability and spent hours on the ice.
John was my best friend growing up, as I have mentioned a few times previously in my column. Ironically, he now lives in Willmar, too. His mother, Mary Lou, grew up in Minneota (Muhl was her maiden name) and was a former Mascot writer.
I called John this past weekend to jar his memory about our glory days at the rink.
"Skating seemed like a fun activity to a kid sliding with boots and seeing skaters leave one in the (snow) dust," he said. "Then came figure skates and actual pickup hockey games with the groups of different-aged kids."
Most of us graduated from boot hockey to figure skates because they were either the only skate available to us, or the cost of hockey skates was out of our family's budget.
John lived just a few blocks from the rink and spent most of his winters in the mid to late 70s with ice under his feet. He honed his skills handling a stick and shooting a puck while first wearing boots. He worked at the warming house, too, which also allowed him additional time on the ice.
John and I both delivered the Minneapolis newspaper and saved our money to purchase Bauer hockey skates.
"Finally, when new skates are needed — hockey skates ... then one is a real hockey player," John joked.
I still have my Bauer hockey skates hanging on my garage wall as a reminder of when life was much simpler.
The hockey rink at the park in Tracy descended below street level. With the lights illuminating the ice and all the snow framing it, the scene was like a Norman Rockwell postcard.
We took turns shoveling off the snow with wide-bladed shovels. The ice was never smooth and you had to learn where the rough spots were so you could avoid them.
As John also noted, the games were nothing but fun and the team that had the lead might suddenly lose it once one of its players had to go home to eat supper or a good player from the other team returned to the ice after a spell in the warming house.
Hard to forget that old warming house. It was cozy and warm with weathered benches to rest on. It was usually run by a high school kid trying to earn a few extra dollars. It wasn't used nearly as much as it should have been, though. We would be enjoying the moment on the ice so much that we didn't want to take the time to warm up, even though we often played in sub-zero weather. When we did finally go inside to "thaw out", the pain would sometimes be almost unbearable as the blood began circulating in our toes once again.
"A Minnesota kid who loves to skate soon figures out how to skate with frozen toes," John remarked. "The good news is the pain goes away after the toes go numb."
Whatever team was fortunate to have John on it generally was ahead in the score. Often, his teammates would give him the puck and just watch him weave around opposing players the length of the ice, deke out the goalie, and plant the puck into the back of the net. Sometimes, we tried to coax him into going into the warming house just so someone else could be "King of the Rink" for a few moments.
Had Tracy had an organized hockey system when we were young, I truly believe John would have been a star, much like Benny Rodriguez or Hickory's Jimmy Chitwood from the "Hoosiers" film. John skated circles around the rest of us, and handled the puck better than anyone else. He was also the first one to be able the "lift" the puck with his curved stick while taking a shot on goal, sometimes causing whomever was playing goalie without pads to run and hide behind the net.
A stoppage in play usually was to look for a wayward puck that had buried itself deep in a snowbank outside the rink. Like golf balls lost on a course, many times these pucks were discovered by someone else in the spring.
The sights and sounds of a busy ice rink are something that remains in a memory bank, including the reverberation of sticks and pucks hitting together and echoing into the frigid night air, kids yelling 'Mom's here', the sound of ice spraying as a skate blade digs into the ice, and the occasional primal scream as a puck or stick whacks against an unprotected part of someone's body.
There was rarely, if ever, any jealousy, arguments, taunting, or crying when we played games at the rink. It was as though time stood still and allowed us to bask in the glory of all that was good and peaceful.
"Wouldn't it be great if the world was more like an ice rink?" John concluded.