The instant that decided Patricia Lorimy’s future happened when she was riding the Renfrew bus home after shopping with her mother at the downtown Woodward’s department store. The bus rumbled by the PNE Forum and the 10-year-old looked out the window to see a cluster of girls, all with figure skates slung around their shoulders like handbags. A week later, Lorimy was one of those girls.
“Once I got on the ice, I never got off,” she said. “My first pair of skates, they were terrible! They cost five dollars, I think my mother had bought them from somebody she had met at the rink. They were high, up to my calves.”
It’s a clear memory, even for one that is now 70 years old. The sights and sounds and smells of the Forum with its one large rink reserved for the Vancouver Canucks who were playing in the Pacific Coast Hockey League at the time, and a smaller, square rink for the figure skaters — Lorimy remembers it all. Including taking to the ice like a bird to flight and staying the full two hours her first time at the rink.
She later went on to join the Vancouver Figure Skating Club and then the Killarney Figure Skating Club and won title after title including the Canadian Junior Pairs in 1952 with skating partner Norman Walker. When Lorimy had three girls and one boy of her own, she started coaching in 1966 — a year marked in the Killarney Figure Skating Club’s 50th anniversary exhibition program this past Saturday with a skating performance to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.”
Club president Yee Sin Law’s voice filled the arena during the show as he introduced the skaters before their performances, along with historical facts like when John F. Kennedy was killed and when the Internet was invented. Skaters performed to everything ranging from 1950s Elvis all the way up to 2013’s Bruno Mars, during which Erhen Chang attempted a triple axel jump.
Helsa Northof was by the rink bench, armed with a clipboard and herded various groups of excited skaters who ranged in skill from Canskate to Junior Enrichment with a few Starskaters and competitive level skaters. Northof, one of the club’s volunteers, started as a beginner skater 15 years ago when she was in her 30s and is now working towards senior bronze free skate and gold skills. In other words, working on perfecting double jumps.
“It’s not too bad if you know how to fall. And if you have a good chiropractor,” Northof said. “It’s a little more frustrating learning as an adult because it takes you longer. The kids just pick it up so quickly. When I showed up here, I had my Simpson Sears special skates and, well, the club got me cleaned up pretty quick.”
Northof skated casually as a child growing up in Alberta and longed for lessons. “It was an expensive sport and you know, there were four kids and there just wasn’t the money for that. I was sitting there, watching it on TV one day and thought, you know what, I could do this for myself now.”
Starting as an adult meant Northof missed out on having to practise compulsory figures, which are no longer a part of competitive figure skating’s curriculum.
“Doing patch!” groaned Laura Pasut, a former club skater who is now a board member with two figure-skating daughters, Kira and Jenna Wadden. “Patch was doing figure eights for an hour. Showing up at the rink at six in the morning and there was no music, no nothing,” she remembered. “Then the lines would be scrutinized. It was agonizing.”
When Lorimy competed, figure skating was comprised of 60 per cent figures and 40 per cent jumps, spins and footwork. While she acknowledges the sport has changed much since her day, there is one thing that remains the same — the volunteers.
She remembers many people from her 30 years of coaching with the club. John Chilton came to mind, a fellow who spent 35 years in the music room, a tiny box of a space above the rink, playing records for the skaters.
“I can tell you that without the benefit of volunteers,” she said, “there would be no club.”
rblissett@telus.net
