To their claims that Springfield isn’t a skating or ice rink town, Andy posed the salient question: Say what???
As a result, I have accepted Andy’s request that I explore local history for evidence of any prejudice against ice rinks.
As you’d expect, the story goes back to most recent Ice Age. Cave paintings found in the Cedar Bog area depict the story of how local Neanderthals not only repelled the invading ice sheet when it came down from Canada but repelled the early Canadians who came with it.
The locals purportedly blackened the eyes and knocked out the teeth of the invaders, and it’s believed in the retreat north, the dispirited tribe worked out face-offs, off-sides and other details of the modern game of hockey.
In recorded history, Simon Kenton is said to have developed a dislike for ice after sheets of it destroyed tone of his earliest grist mills in the village of Lagonda, the Shawnee word for “ice jam.”
There’s evidence, too, that George Rogers Clark’s raid against the Village of Peckuewe was timed to disrupt construction of a rink on the grounds now occupied by the park that bears his name.
Had the battle turned out differently, historians consider it likely that a Tecumseh Park in the same location would have had its own ice rink.
(Oddly, Tecumseh’s brother, the Prophet, is said to have had a vision in which the name of the frontier figure Blue Jacket was linked in the distant future with a bizarre a version of the Indian game of lacrosse played on ice.)
Many of today’s progressive readers will remember that contemporary painter P. Buckley Moss struck a blow against ice sport prejudice with her romantic rendering of a skater in Snyder Park.
Her heroic individual act, however, must be weighed against evidence that only pressure by powerful state convention lobbyists stopped framers of Ohio’s constitutional amendment against gay marriage from including language that would have prohibited the staging of any events in publicly supported venues featuring male figure skaters.
Historians are evenly split on the final piece of evidence I found on rink prejudice.
The 1850 census for Clark County mentions a boarding house resident whose name the census worker recorded as Sam Boney. Some speculate the name was actually an Americanization of the Italian name associated with modern ice rinks: Zamboni.
As I see it, Andy, there’s a reason they spell it prejud-ice.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
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