Sept. 19, 2024

By John Hult, for SiouxFalls.Business

Fifty years ago, Anne and Chris Erickson got their wheels a-rollin’ to Sioux Falls, and they’ve never looked back.

The Minnesota natives had a young child back then, but no solid plans on what they’d do with their lives. Chris had recently finished his service with the military, and he’d worked a few jobs by the time Anne’s father pitched the idea of opening a roller skating rink in Sioux Falls.

“He asked Chris and I if we wanted to do something crazy and move to Sioux Falls to run a skating center,” Anne Erickson said. “We said: ‘OK, that sounds interesting. Let’s go.’”

They could skate but certainly weren’t pros. Neither had run a business, and neither knew much about the city, aside from how much smaller it was than the place they’d grown up.

What they did know was the thing that got Anne’s father interested in the idea: How popular roller skating was in the 1970s. 

Disco was king, and the music soundtracked skating floors all across the U.S., usually illuminated by disco balls and almost always packed with young people burning off energy and adolescence with wheels on their feet.

“The mid-1970s was really the start of the roller skating boom across the country,” Chris Erickson said.

Here’s a sense of that nostalgia in a old commercial:

The business was still going strong when the Ericksons sold it in 2015, marking the end of an era as Carousel Skate. The roller rink was rebranded as Skate City.

On Saturday, Skate City will be decorated with Carousel Skate logos as the rink celebrates 50 years in Sioux Falls. The Ericksons, who’ve been impressed with the new ownership’s efforts over the past nine years, will be on hand. 

Skate City’s Facebook page invites potential revelers to “bring your memories, photos and stories from your youth and years spent at Carousel Skate.”

The event runs from 6 to 10 p.m. for what the owner calls the “throwback price” of $5 for admission.

Rink survives, others close

When the Ericksons opened the doors to the rink off Kiwanis Avenue on Third Street in 1974, it became the third rink in town.

Before long, Chris Erickson recalls, Carousel’s advertising, including the “get your wheels a-rollin” jingle that ran for more than 30 years on radio and TV ads, drew more skaters into all three.

Early on, advertising for roller skating was fairly rare.

“Quite honestly, I think when we came into town with a brand-new building and we started to promote skating, we kept hearing that it actually helped their business,” he said.

Within a few years, they’d bought out Anne’s father’s share of the business and settled into a rhythm.

The salad days of Sioux Falls skating didn’t last, but the Ericksons did. 

The two stayed on and stayed partners, even after their divorce in 2006, becoming familiar faces for generations of skaters.

The big neon skate sign at the corner of Kiwanis and Third hasn’t changed a bit.

“That’s definitely vintage, 50 years old, and we always kept it going,” Anne Erickson said.

Both took pride in upkeep and aimed to make the place welcoming for families. 

Chris Erickson would buff the skating floor Friday mornings to prepare for busy weekend skate traffic. He’d do it again every Monday.

When things broke, he would fix them. If a few young skaters got a little too close in areas a little too dark, they wouldn’t have long before a Carousel employee clocked them and told them to cool down.

That built a reputation as a safe, family-friendly place, Anne Erickson said.

“That was one secret of our success: We always had enough people there to keep an eye on everyone,” she said.

Over time, they added pinball machines, skee-ball, a pool table and video games to keep the skaters engaged and pull in a little more revenue.

And, of course, they always made sure to offer Saturday morning skating lessons for newbies and to fill every two-hour session with skating rink staples like the hokey pokey – Chris’ favorite game – and the limbo – Anne’s favorite. 

There aren’t many rinks left in South Dakota, for the limbo or anything else. The Ericksons’ rink, however, found a way to survive.

New owner steps in 

The pair sold the business in 2015. Chris was ready to retire a bit before Anne was, which may have been why he never got rid of Kevin Curtis’ business card. 

The Colorado native had walked through the doors of Carousel Skate around 2013. He worked for a company in that state called Skate City, he told them, and was looking to buy his own rink. 

He liked how clean Carousel was, he told them, and how well maintained it had been over the years. 

The Ericksons remembered that two years later. They both felt better entrusting their life’s work to someone with experience and a good sense of the business.

They’d watched skating enthusiasts launch skating businesses that fell apart after a few years. 

A love for skating and customers is essential, Chris Erickson said, but business acumen is what keeps a rink rolling.

Curtis had that. The Colorado native owned his own private investigation business for decades but caught the skating bug when his son started doing in-line hockey at a local rink. Soon enough, Curtis was playing. Before long, he’d helped organize some events for the rink, so when the rink’s owner wanted a partner, Curtis got the offer. 

Skate City is a brand, but it’s not a franchise. Curtis and his partners have a handful of locations around the country, each operating in a similar fashion under the name but otherwise operating independently.

Curtis was on the lookout for a rink in 2013. He found himself in Sioux Falls because the city had a rink, basically. The startup costs for a new rink are too high to pencil out these days, he said, “so you kind of take what you can get.”

But Sioux Falls had a lot to offer: a trusted brand in a growing city, for example. 

“Things were going really well, actually,” Curtis said of the rink at the time he took over. “They had a good business going here, so I was able to just take over.”

But more importantly, it had a rink that stood out among the others he’d visited around the Midwest.

“When you go around the country looking at rinks, you could see how much work Chris put into keeping it up,” Curtis said. “There are a lot of rinks out there that are dumps, and this wasn’t one of them.”

Family memories

Watching kids get the hang of skating, bit by bit, is gratifying for Curtis. Skating builds confidence, he said, and people don’t forget the learning experience.

“Then, sometimes when we’re out and about, someone will come up and go ‘you taught me to skate,’ which is a nice feeling,” Curtis said.

Heather Christensen already knew how to skate the first time a friend’s dad dropped her and the friend off at Carousel. She was 5 and kept going regularly until middle school.

“I don’t know how, but we managed to have a party every single weekend,” Christensen said of her grade school.

There was a fish bowl at that point, she said, and kids could enter their name for a birthday party. She remembers that, the unique smell and the carpet – carpet that somehow looks similar to the carpet in every rink she’d visit later in life.

“There must be a ‘Rinks R Us’ warehouse out there somewhere,” she said. “There’s like four patterns to choose from, and they all scream ‘skating rink’ the moment you see them.”

Christensen stopped going to Carousel in middle school, but she never stopped skating. In 2006, when the Sioux Falls Roller Dollz derby team started up, she was an original member, competing as “Dusty Bibles.”

By then, she’d once again taken a liking to her local rink. The Dollz would practice there sometimes.

“I think I had one of the last birthday parties there when we rented out the whole place for my 30th birthday,” she said.

Now, her kids go to Skate City. So do members of the Sioux Falls Junior Roller Derby teams she coaches, who range in age from 7 to 18. Both owners have been supportive of the teams, and some junior derby competitors work there now.

She appreciates the support, but she’s also impressed that there’s a rink in town to offer support at all. Most of the skating rinks that popped up in the ’70s and ’80s around South Dakota are gone.

“I’m super-proud that Sioux Falls has been able to sustain a roller rink for this long,” she said.