The entrance to our house had a walk in coat closet. It was actually two rooms, each about five feet square. One section you walked through to get into the house, which is where most of our coats hung, one above of the other in two rows. The lower hooks were for the little kids, and the top hooks for the older kids. Being the shortest of the thirteen children, it seemed I would never reach the top hooks. The second room of the" shed", as we call it was used for boots, hats, mittens, and scarves. This room was never organized. It was just a heap of winter ware piled knee high.

On Friday nights, that’s where we would be found, pillaging through the pile looking for our winter accessories. If the hat, mittens, and scarf you were looking for wasn’t there you might try looking on the register at the bottom of the steps drying from the last snow excursion. You would have to be careful if you had to resort to looking there. There were also hooks above the register that were piled three coats high. You couldn’t touch the coats or they would all fall on your head and you would spend more times picking up coats than looking for mittens. Not me, I was a luck kid. Grandma Lindgren made my mittens. They were hooked together by a string that went through the sleeves of my coat. My search was short, as long as Donna wasn’t wearing one of my boots. This happened from time to time since so many of our things were the same. We had the same blue snowmobile suits, the same boots and usually a variation of each other’s clothing. I think mom thought we were twins. We would spend a lot of time fighting with a plastic bread bag over our shoes trying to get those irritating tennis shoes inside of our rubber boots. Stomping and stomping until they went in properly. After bundling up we would head for the basement steps. As you looked down the steps to the right there were many hooks, which were filled with Ice skates hanging by their laces. We would grab our skate’s fling them over shoulders and the race was on. We were going to the Hillside Ice rink to skate. Out the door we would go. It was like clockwork. Karen, Terry, Joanie, Linda, Michael, Judy, Donna, and Mary with little Mark being drug behind by his wrist. Out the door we would go. It was the beginning of the winter weekend ritual.

The trip to the rink was a hard one. The sidewalks weren’t shoveled and we weren’t allowed to walk on the road, so we would walk on the sidewalks with the snow up to our butts. Our skates swinging and hitting us in the back and chest, falling uphill all the way. Sometimes the road would be so icy, you could run in place and not get anywhere. Up hill we would all go with Mark in toe about ½ mile to the Hillside outdoor Ice rink on the corner of White Street and Quincy.

About the time your lungs wanted to collapse from the cold and your legs burned from the up hill exercise it would come into sight. The warm glow of the rink lights.

The Hillside rink was about ½ the size of a football field. It was lit by strings of lights that were strung in the air like the yard lines of a football field. In the north west corner of the rink there was a telephone pole which had a big set of megaphone style speakers on the top. This is where the music would come from that flooded the rink. The music was a child’s nightmare (all waltzes). Of course there was the occasional Anne Murray or Elvis song, which was a step up in a kids mind.

At the West Side of the rink was a shack about the size of a one-car garage. The inside was divided into two rooms by a wood stove. The wood stove was the source of heat for the building and burned all evening long. The inside of the building smelled of the wood smoke along with the smell of old candy. The outside walls were lined with rustic wood benches worn uneven from years of kids butts sitting on them. The floor was bare wood smoothed out by the constant cut of skate blades, like the surface of a chef cutting board. On the north wall was the open window to the concession stand. The concession stand was wide, but not very deep. This was also the base for the musical entertainment only found at an ice rink.

When walking in the door we would take over the bench to the left. Throwing off our mittens and hats we would struggle to get our boots and shoes off and our skates on. We would place our boots under the bench for storage. Then we would sit and wait for Mary to come around with her magical pocket size skate tightener. Which looked like a pocketknife with a hook for a blade. Mary would tighten our skates so there was no room for circulation, gangrene couldn’t even set in. They would be so tight your ankles couldn’t bend.

Then we would hit the ice. The rink felt the size of the world, as we became Olympic skaters in our minds. "Some where my love" would play a million times as we held on to coattails in a chain, with Mary in the lead. "Cracken' the whip" as we called it. Of course there were private figure skating classes held by Mary in the middle of the rink. "Keep your ankles strait" and "figure eight" Mary would yell. Thank god dad cut the toe picks off of our skates or none of us would have our front teeth. (No offense Linda) Hot chocolate break and Ice scrapping were the only time we would clear off of the rink. Occasionally we would make a chair bench with your butt in a snow bank. Making sure not to let the snow bank crumble on to the ice. You could go inside to warm up, but rarely did for the fear of missing something. Or worse, the fear of running into the Kalio boys who on occasion would try to trip you and laugh while you scurried back to your feet.

The evening was filled with spills on the ice. It didn’t matter if you were a bad skater. It didn’t matter that you couldn’t feel your feet and your mittens were frozen in the shape of your hands. We were all there and it was great.

As always the evening would come to a close. We would meet at the entrance to the rink. If the roads were slippery enough and we didn’t fight at the rink, Mary would let us all skate back down the hill to our house. If not we all had to change back into our boots and walk home.

Upon arriving home we would pile into the shed hang our coats on the hooks. Big ones on the top hooks and little ones on the bottom hooks. Then we would head to the registers, where we would end our night crying because our toes stung from being in the snow all night. Mary would then make us Old Fashioned hot cocoa with real cocoa powder.
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