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"Dedicated to the history of theatrical deception" |
House of Deception Library: Roller Derby History
| Author | Title | Publication Year | Publisher |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coppage, Keith | Roller Derby to RollerJam: The Authorized Story of an Unauthorized Sport | 1999 | Square Books, Oxford, Mississippi |
| Deford, Frank | Five Strides on the Banked Track: The Life and Times of the Roller Derby | 1971 | Little Brown, Boston |
| Fitzpatrick, Jim | Roller Derby Classics...and More! | 2005 | Trafford, Victoria, BC |
| Mabe, Catherine | Roller Derby: The History and All-Girl Revival of the Greatest Sport on Wheels | 2007 | Speck, Golden, Colorado |
| Michelson, Herb | A Very Simple Game: The Story of Roller Derby | 1971 | Occasional Publishing |
HouseofDeception.com Sacramento 916.451.8170  about us |
Welcome to the Roller Derby History portal. Many thanks to Jim Fitzpatrick for his contributions to this page. Jim, a former professional Roller Derby skater, referee, photographer and fan, has spent years compiling a huge collection of memorabilia from the Golden Age of Roller Derby. His book on Roller Derby is Roller Derby Classics...and More! |
Roller Derby History Books |
Please bookmark & link to HouseofDeception.com - New titles are added periodically. |
Golden Age Roller Derby History Links |
Joe Blenkle Article (Sacramento, CA): Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 Bay City Bombers: History of the Sport | Honoring the Past Gary Powers' Roller Derby Foundation: Hall of Fame | Museum | About | DVDs Gary Powers' National Roller Derby Hall of Fame: Home | Inductees | Roller Derby Timeline Phil Berrier's Roller Derby Forum: Roller Derby Yahoo Forum Discussion of Roller Derby, Roller Games, and other banked-track skating groups of the past only. Loretta "Little Iodine" Behrens: Derby Memoirs Banked Track Memories: Banked Track Memories Home University of Texas, Austin: The Buddy Atkinson Collection Los Angeles Thunderbirds: L. A. T-Birds Team History National Museum of Roller Skating: brief Roller Derby article Joel Justin.com: son of early Roller Derby stars |
Origins 1914-1949 In 1914, The New York Times reported on a 24-hour banked-track roller skating race held at Madison Square Garden. The reports didn't use the word "derby", but called the team relay event "the first twenty-four-hour roller skating race that has been held in New York in years," and made mention that the crowd enjoyed the sudden sprints and spills in preliminary races held the day before. In 1922, the Chicago Tribune announced and reported on the results of two "roller derby" events. These were multi-day events during which roller skating races were held on a flat track at Chicago's Broadway Armory. In 1929, as the Great Depression began, a struggling film publicist named Leo Seltzer felt that dance marathons were undermining attendance at his Oregon cinema chain, so he began holding his own dance marathons. Hundreds of unemployed people participated, hoping to win a $2,000 cash prize. Since dance marathons usually ended up with people lazily shuffling around, he soon changed the events to "walkathons." The contests were emceed by celebrities like Frankie Laine and Red Skelton, and grossed $6 million in three years. In 1935, the novelty of walkathons wore off, but a roller skating fad arose again, and Seltzer decided to combine the two concepts as Transcontinental Roller Derby, an event more than a month long, staged at the Chicago Coliseum. It was a simulation of a cross-country roller skating race in which 25 two-person teams circled a track thousands of times, skating 11½ hours a day, to cover 3,000 miles—the distance between Los Angeles and New York City. Teams were disqualified if both members were off the track during skating times. Sixteen teams dropped out due to injuries or exhaustion, but nine teams finished, and the winning team, Clarice Martin and Bernie McKay, held the lead for the last 11 days of the event. Over the next two years, Seltzer took the Transcontinental Roller Derby on the road, holding similar races throughout the U.S. with a portable track that reportedly cost $20,000, for daily crowds averaging 10,000 in number, who paid 10 to 25 cents admission. Occasionally, massive collisions and crashes occurred as skaters tried to lap those who were ahead of them. Sportswriter Damon Runyon realized this was the most exciting part, and encouraged Seltzer to tweak the game to maximize physical contact between the skaters and to exaggerate hits and falls. Seltzer bristled, wanting to keep the sport legitimate, but agreed to the experiment, which fans ended up loving. Over time, the spectacle evolved into a sport involving two teams of five skaters, with a team scoring points when its members lapped members of the other team, which is the basic premise of roller derby to this day. Transcontinental Roller Derby rapidly grew in popularity as a spectator sport. Matches were held in fifty cities in 1940, for more than five million spectators, some of whom formed fan clubs and newsletters like Roller Derby News (later renamed RolleRage). Teams began to represent and compete in other U.S. cities, although some teams were actually the same traveling group that would just change names depending on where they were playing, and all were part of the Seltzer-owned Roller Derby league. The entry of the United States into World War II at the end of 1941 interrupted the sport's ascent; many skaters enlisted in the armed forces, crowds dwindled, and the fledgling league was reduced to one team skating mainly for the entertainment of soldiers. After the war's end in 1945, Seltzer successfully resumed growing the sport, although a 1946 attempt to bring it to New York's Polo Grounds failed due to twelve straight days of rain. In 1948, well before television was in widespread use, Roller Derby debuted on the CBS television network, but the following year moved to ABC. Seltzer changed his residence to Encino (Los Angeles) that same year, a westward move that foreshadowed changes to come. By 1949, Roller Derby games were being televised live throughout the U.S., and Seltzer was grossing $2 million a year. In 1949, the National Roller Derby League was formed, and the season playoffs sold out Madison Square Garden for a week. Meanwhile, from 1946 through 1948, flat-track roller derby was enjoyed as an intramural sport at the University of British Columbia in Canada. In Los Angeles, Roller Derby was broadcast on the radio as early as 1939, and on television as early as 1949. 1950-1973 In 1950, Leo Seltzer moved the base of operations to New York, where it was easier to produce Roller Derby's first wave of televised popularity. Broadcasts centered on the New York Chiefs, who enjoyed nationwide appearances on CBS and ABC. At one point, Roller Derby could be seen on ABC several times a week. Besides the Chiefs, teams in the National Roller Derby League included the Chicago Westerners, Brooklyn Red Devils, Jersey Jolters, Washington Jets and the Philadelphia Panthers, with these six clubs affectionately considered by fans as the ancestors of all incarnations of Derby teams through 1973. Off television in the fall of 1951 due to overexposure and declining ratings, the Derby suffered a dramatic fall in attendance. In July 1953, citing the effects of the Korean War and a dearth of venues, Leo Seltzer moved the Derby from New York to Los Angeles and created the L.A. Braves for their debut at the Rose Bowl. The Braves became the first international team when a tour of Europe was launched in 1953. However, this was not the first time audiences outside the U.S. had seen the game played live. A renegade league, International Roller Speedway, known in some countries as Roller-Catch, formed in 1937 and toured Europe and the Philippines. Roller Speedway was a modified version of the sport and normally featured two teams, representing Europe (the "home" team) and USA. The 1950 film The Fireball, starring Mickey Rooney, was based on the life of one of the league's stars, Eddie Poore, who skated under the name Eddie Cazar. Roller Speedway ceased operations in 1952. In 1954, the Derby established the most fabled team in the history of the sport, the longtime champion San Francisco Bay Bombers. Stars on this team eventually included Charlie O'Connell, Joanie Weston, and Ann Calvello. In 1958, Leo Seltzer gave up on the sport in favor of real estate interests, and his son Jerry Seltzer took full control of Roller Derby. Within a year, he moved the operation to the San Francisco Bay Area. He syndicated Roller Derby to 120 television stations, and he changed some of the rules. For the first time, skaters were required to wear helmets, and at the behest of KTVU television announcer Walt Harris, he made the game more TV-friendly by making jammers' helmets easier to spot. A more theatrical imitation called Roller Games was started in 1961 in Los Angeles featuring retired Roller Derby skaters who chose not to make the move to San Francisco. Owned by Bill Griffiths, Sr. and Jerry Hill, Roller Games was the only viable rival organization to the original Roller Derby, and actually consisted of several separate leagues, including the (U.S.) National Roller Derby (NRD), soon renamed to National Roller League (NRL) since the "Roller Derby" trademark was aggressively protected by the Seltzer organization. The NRD/NRL consisted of the Northern Hawks (sometimes billed as the Chicago Hawks), New York Bombers, Texas Outlaws, Detroit Devils, Los Angeles Thunderbirds (nicknamed "T-Birds"), and Philadelphia Warriors (sometimes billed as the Eastern Warriors). There were also several attempts in markets that failed quickly, with teams such as the Baltimore/Washington Cats, the Florida Jets, and the Western Renegades. Roller Games also encompassed the Canadian National Roller League (CNRL) and Japanese National Roller League (JNRL). Some former Roller Derby stars found new fame in the Roller Games, and a handful of skaters simply went back and forth between the two organizations. After 1968, however, the Roller Derby to Roller Games defections were few; instead, a handful of Roller Games skaters returned to their roots and began skating for the Derby again. 1961 also saw the advent of a short-lived New York City area rival league, the American Skating Derby (ASD), promoted by Joe Morehouse and Mike O'Hara. ASD debuted two teams of ex-Roller Derby skaters — one team representing "New York" and the other representing Brooklyn — at Long Island Arena in Commack, New York, around April 1961, with plans to appear throughout the Tri-State Region. A league split later that year resulted in the formation of another league, the Eastern Skating Derby (ESD), which lasted until mid-1964 and skated only in New York, sometimes at the same venues as the ASD. As with Roller Speedway, none of these splinter groups are remembered today by anyone outside the most dedicated fans and the skaters who participated in them. To the media, there was only one Roller Derby, and from Jerry Seltzer's takeover in the late 1950s the game reached new heights of popularity with a 120-station television network where taped games from the Bombers' home, Kezar Pavilion in San Francisco, were shown weekly. Television made fans of thousands and the Bombers packed arenas from coast to coast on cross country tours, regularly selling out arenas such as Madison Square Garden, Boston Garden, Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis and dozens more. The indoor record for Roller Derby was set at 19,507 at Madison Square Garden in 1970; it was broken by the outdoor record at the Oakland Coliseum a few months later at around 28,814 for a game between the Bombers and the Northeast Braves. The following year that record was topped again with 34,418 for a Bomber game at the Coliseum; their rival, the Midwest Pioneers, broke that record with 50,118 fans in 1972 for a game at Comiskey Park in Chicago. At this point, the Bombers home-team concept was duplicated with the New York Chiefs representing the Eastern U.S. and the Pioneers based in Chicago (but really everything west of Philadelphia). A one season run in 1971 by the Cincinnati Jolter team in the Midwest (Ohio, Kentucky and other areas) was not financially successful and the team became a road franchise once again. The Bombers were briefly a Southwest team moved from the Bay Area, but potential new owners couldn't come to terms with the Seltzer family and so the Bombers were returned home. (In an unusual move, the Chiefs were a "replacement" team for the Bombers during the period that franchise was supposedly based in Texas). In the early 1970's, a Roller Derby participant was depicted in the children's program, ZOOM, in a segment called, As the World Zooms; this was a main character of the segment who continued through the entire run of that incarnation of the program. In 1973, high overhead and other factors led Jerry Seltzer to elect to shut down Roller Derby. In a 2005 interview, Ann Calvello mentioned gas shortages during the 1973 oil crisis as a contributing factor because teams could not travel. Some of the IRDL star skaters were recruited to skate for Roller Games' International Skating Conference (ISC), which quickly eliminated all Derby teams except for the Chiefs to again focus on the Los Angeles Thunderbirds. However, within two years, the wrestling/circus-like approach doomed all of Roller Games; many Roller Derby skaters quit and fans deserted the arenas. Cultural historian Paul Fussell, perhaps editorializing, attributed the collapse of the sport to the declining economic class of its fan base in its final years; fans were ultimately unable to support the sponsors that had been keeping the sport on television. The article above has been edited and adapted by the House of Deception from Wikipedia Encyclopedia and may be read in its original, uncredited form (with references cited) at Wikipedia.org. |
History of the Roller Derby |
San Francisco Bay Bomber legend, Joan Weston, battles long time rival, Ann Calvello, 1969 Courtesy Jim Fitzpatrick Collection |
Ann Calvello (left) and Delores Doss sail through the infield, out of control, mid 1950's Courtesy Jim Fitzpatrick Collection |
1980 San Francisco Bay Bombers Bill Groll was player coach, Joan Weston was woman's captain. # 32 (right) is Jim Fitzpatrick. Jim is now the General Manager of the Bay Bombers. Order his book on the Roller Derby here. |
Bill Groll suffered a bad cut to his forehead after getting kicked by a skate, 1982 Photo by Jim Fitzpatrick |
Charles "Buckets" Gipson flies through the air after Darney McPherson nails him with a vicious block, 1982 Photo by Jim Fitzpatrick |
On this page (launched Feb. 10, 2008) you will find: .: a bibliography of Roller Derby history books .: photos from the Golden Age of Roller Derby .: a selective list of Roller Derby history links .: a list of movies and TV shows with Roller Derby themes (coming soon) .: a list of Roller Derby novels and short stories (coming soon) .: a well-written article on the history of Roller Derby .: paintings and other works of art with Roller Derby themes Please bookmark & link to HouseofDeception.com - New titles are added periodically. |
Roller Derby in Art |
Dave Love Roller Derby in Progress Acrylic |
Dave Love Roller Derby |
Jim Fizpatrick Ann Calvello |
Bay Bombers logo |
Jim Fitzpatrick made by a fan |
Movie Poster Mickey Rooney and Pat O'Brien in The Fireball (1950) Tay Garnett, Dirctor |
All Rights Reserved Copyright Duff Johnson 2004-2008 No text or image may be copied or reproduced without written permission. |
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