Maribel Vinson Owen
Joan Tozzer
uninterrupted by structural beams. Te original floor was a concrete slab, with the pipes for circu- lating the refrigerant embedded in it. Te rink remained open each year from fall
to spring. In 1967, the original floor was pulled up and replaced but that surface failed because the club had started its summer skating program in 1970 and frost penetration became an issue. In 1973, the club put down a sand floor with pipes resting in it, which required the ice be doubly thick to support the resurfacing machines. In 1993, the club faced a major crisis when
it had to replace the roof for the first time. Te wooden roof had absorbed moisture and had rot- ted away in many places. A galvanized steel roof was installed, along with a “low-E” ceiling of a parachute-like fabric for insulation, to which were added panels to reduce sound reverberation. Finally, after years of consideration and plan- ning, it was announced in 2011 that Te Skating Club of Boston would be moving from its current location to a new home six blocks away, where a multi-rink facility would be built, with a hoped- for-completion date in 2014 (see “What the future holds” below). An all-star roster From its earliest times to present day, Te
Skating Club of Boston has been a force on the national and international competitive scene. U.S.
Figure Skating’s chief historian and longtime Te Skating Club of Boston member Ben Wright pro- vided 24 pages of championships won by club rep- resentatives over the last century. Teresa Weld (later Teresa Weld Blanchard) earned the first U.S. ladies title in 1914. She went on to claim multiple national and interna- tional titles in ladies, fours, pairs and ice dance. In 1920, Weld and Nathaniel Niles were the entire U.S. Figure Skating Team at the Olympic Games in Antwerp, Belgium, where she captured the bronze medal in ladies, the first Olympic medal won in figure skating for the United States. Weld and Niles also competed at the Olympics in 1924 and 1928. In 1923, Blanchard and Sherwin Bad- ger won singles titles at the first North American Championships. She and Niles helped to launch SKATING magazine in 1923 in Boston, where they served as editors. Other great champions from those early years
included Niles, a three-time U.S. men’s champion, Roger Turner, a seven-time U.S. men’s champion, Maribel Vinson and Joan Tozzer, a three-time U.S. ladies champion. Badger, a five-time U.S. men’s champion, distinguished himself both on and off the ice, winning the 1932 Olympic silver medal in pairs (with Beatrix Loughran) of New York while also serving as president of U.S. Figure Skating. Vinson won a record nine U.S. ladies titles and
SKATING 25
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