Roller Derby Trailer Park Queen, Oh Yeah That Was Me

Some girls love ballet, some loved playing with their dolls, but for me, it was always roller derby. As a kid my greatest ambition was to join the Los Angeles T-Birds. The T-Birds were the local team and I felt like they were my roller derby team. My T-Birds were pure 70’s cool. The girls often had feathered hair or gigantic fros. The men wore their hair on the longish side and I remember many a bushy mustache. Their uniforms, as I remember them, were first red white and blue, but were later changed to green, gold and white. My early roller derby queens cruised the track, their satin shorts wrinkling at their legs with stripes riding up the side of their shorts to their waists. And all of this over tights, knee pads and a team shirt that said T-Birds in slanting script moving up and over their chests. The later teams moved to a kind if stretchy pants with a solid stripe running up the side of their legs.  Either way, they were awesome.

I watched the games on TV at home but I think I started my roller derby obsession at my grandparents place. Gramdpa Jim, or Gramps as we called him liked what I remember as “fake stuff”. By “fake” I mean things like wrestling and HeeHaw. When I was very little, my grandparents lived in a house in North Long Beach. There they had a yard, an empty lot next door and my Great Uncle John who played with me. But at some point, they moved to a trailer park and there was much less for a kid to do outside. So TV it was, and TV at least distracted from the “scary picture” that followed me around the spare bedroom. The “scary picture” was a very old portrait of my grandmother’s parents that had eyes that seemed to move. I did anything to avoid looking at that photo, including watching TV. HeeHaw never piqued my interest, but roller derby sure did. It was here that I came to love watching all- girl T-Birds games. I know there were all-male games also, but there just weren’t as much fun to me.

And I wasn’t alone in my love of the T-Birds. My cousin Nancy liked them enough to “play T-Birds” with me outside in front of the trailer. At least she acted enough like she liked it to make me happy. Nancy may have been humoring me. I am three years her junior and I think she humored me a lot.

When we played T-Birds our uniforms consisted of Gramps’ giant wife beaters worn over our clothes. The wife beaters came to our knees and billowed around us. Our Gramps wasn’t a very tall man but he cut a striking figure all the same. He had a huge hard gut that jutted out over polyester western-style slacks. Gramps wore cowboy boots (except to church) and always had a wife beater under his plaid button-up shirt. Nancy and I thought the wife beaters were distinctive enough to make us look like a team and my favorite maneuver was “shooting the whip”. This consisted of us holding hands, trying to skate as quickly as we could and one of us flinging the other ahead while trying to remain upright.

Nancy and I tried all the moves we saw on TV and being as it was a different era, our grandparents completely ignore us. They ignored the jamming, they ignored the blocking and they especially ignored the flinging. I’m sure they were just glad that we weren’t underfoot. I wonder if Nancy would still be up for a game of T-Birds? I am.

http://liquidbluetour.com/photos/bandmembers/scott/T-BirdHistoryHome.htm

http://liquidbluetour.com/photos/bandmembers/scott/T-BirdsTeamPhotos.htm