Dad bought me ice skates during WW 2 and we would go skating in the marshes near where we lived but I never did learn to skate very well. Dad was a very good skater. Years later as a teen I would go Roller Skating and became quite proficient.
We ice skated on a shallow pond on the other side of the tracks with a bonfire going. Since our town then did such a horrible job with streets in the winter, we could ice skate on some of them too. I broke my wrist roller skating at "Pop's" roller rink when trying to stop to check my ticket stub number for a giveaway. I didn't win. The doctor never set it right so the bone is misaligned to this day.
Roller skating was a stage my girlfriend and I went through in high school that lasted only one summer. We would go every weekend. I was never any good at it. We didn't have a place to ice skate near by that I remember.
Ice skated on our ranch pond and also the covered outdoor rink in town. I learned to do a single salchow. I roller skated starting with the metal fasten on your shoes skates, around on the concrete shop floor, and as a teen, fancy booted skates for town rink skating. I did some rollerblading when it was popular, but not really my thing.
Yeah, roller skating, but with clamp-on metal skates, not those sissy custom-fitting shoe skates. (Wanna borrow my skate key?) Hal
I had clamp on metal skates too when I was a kid, but we didn't have any sidewalks. My grandmother's basement was one large room with a coal furnace smack dab in the middle. You could skate 'round and 'round it all day. It was the only place I could use them.