Life — March 8, 1923 — page 7: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

LIFE - Teaching the Old Idea to Skate HEY told me that once you had skated, you never forgot how. It was like swimming, they said. I y, of course, that that wasn’t so. skating is nothing like swimming. But as I thought back on the days, ten years ago, when I used to glide easily over the lumpy surface of the Charles, it did seem plausible that some of the old facility had remained, even after all these years. I never was what you would call a fancy skater, even in my hey-day. None of my attempts at cutting nu- merals or weaving backward ever quite came off. I had the idea all right, and would start off rather finely, perhaps too finely, but at the turn something usually went wrong and I became discouraged, and while I seldom actually fell, it might have been more impressive if I had. A good, resounding fall is no disgrace. It is the fantastic writhing to avoid | R. C. B. a fall which destroys any illusion of being a gentleman. How like life that is, after all! On a good straightaway, however, I had always been able to make a re- spectable progress, nothing flashy but good, solid plodding, with a lib- eral swinging of the arms to add propulsion power which sometimes carried me along at what I flattered myself was a tremendous rate of speed. As I looked back on this ac- complishment, it did not seem over- confidence on my part to agree to join my little boy in a frolic on the ice. The pond was thronged with in- tensely young people. This in itself was disheartening. The girls, ar- rayed in knickerbockers, looked as if they would enjoy hugely anything that I might do in the way of acro- batics, and the boys were offensively proficient. They seemed to be ob- livious of the fact that I was a good competent skater when they were having trouble digesting their first carrots. And they were all so good- looking and well dressed. I was on the point of turning back then and there. I felt that my old blue track- sweater looked very seedy. And the funny thing is that it did. However, I had my pride and my little boy’s pride in his father which I somehow felt demanded that I go through with the thing. Just how I reasoned it out that making a display of myself on the ice was going to bolster up the family pride, I don’t know. Somehow it seemed the thing to do at the time, as the drunk said when asked why he deliberately put his fist through the plate-glass win- dow. Getting the skates on was not so simple a matter as I remembered it as being, especially as my hands got (Continued on page 31) “Oh, Mama! Alfred’s mother has three little kittens and she wants to sell them for nothing!” comicbooks.com