Breaking the Ice

John’s Memoir

By Rosanne Gulisano

I blog about snippets and snapshots of the memoirs and life stories of everyday folks attending my Lifestories workshops. I have changed the names, but the stories are the real thing, from the plain and simple to the exotic and dangerous. Enjoy!


Breaking the Ice

Memories of cold weather and his boyhood friends came out in John’s memories of small town winter adventure. “Mom didn’t find out until much later,” John declared after he told us his terrifying tale of his “gang” and their winter escapades. John, or Blade, as he was known back then, grew up in Streator, Illinois in the 1940s.

As young daredevils will do, he and his friends used to go looking for some activity to stir the adrenaline and the blood in that sleepy, small town—especially in winter. His gang of friends included Shorty, Rib, Pony and Harry. They would gather at a pond near Shorty’s farm, bringing their ice skates for a game of hockey. They used tree limbs for hockey sticks, a flattened tin can for a puck, and their skates were the kind that clipped onto their sturdy work shoes.

As the game progressed, it became a bore and they decided to move to the center of the pond, smashing a hole in the ice and taking turns jumping over it. While this does not make a great deal of sense to most of us, the boys were enthralled by the heart-stopping challenge.

Logic tells us that if the ice is thin enough to smash a hole in it with a tree limb, it is probably pretty unstable to begin with! They heard a series of loud cracks and scrambled to the pond edge for safety. Harry went through the hole in the ice and the boys formed a chain held together with their hands and tree limb hockey sticks and managed to drag him to safety.

John (Blade) doesn’t remember what any of those boys told their parents that evening, but bets that it was a pretty far stretch of the truth. As he admitted freely, his mother didn’t learn the facts of that day’s near calamity until much, much later. Probably when he was too old to punish!