Things were going wonderfully Thursday evening.
How many falls is that? the Philipsburg Elementary fourth grader was asked.
And off she went to mix and mingle and fall in a pretzel heap again.
Sixth-grader Kylie Walker was at one end of the giant ice rink at the bottom of the hill in downtown Philipsburg. So were fourth graders Josie Ray, Elizabeth Graham and Madison Nienhuis, and Shawna Lenz and Tara Dunkerson from the third grade. More were showing up all the time.
These winter days, when school gets out, the children have a gathering place in the 'Burg. It's an NHL-sized slab of ice one block off Broadway and a quick walk from the school on top of the hill.
“The Christmas lists all include ice skates,” said Sue Johnson, principal at the elementary school. “We've got a lot of kids who are just so excited to get down there.”
The rink measures approximately 190 feet by 80. The local Rotary Club is transforming it from a smaller, decades-old skating pond, and set Jan. 6 for its grand opening.
Kids, however, were on the rink by Thanksgiving after an early cold spell. At Yule Night on Dec. 8, the $12,000 light system got its first shakedown. Between 25 and 30 skaters appeared out of the night.
“We just turned on the lights and they came like moths,” said Jim Jenner, chairmain the project for the Rotary Club.
Philipsburg's Rotary Club was formed in 1924, but it never before tackled a project of this scope.
“It started as our centennial project,” said Bob Winninghoff, at 74 the club's oldest member. “The (international) Rotary Club was celebrating its 100th anniversary and they asked every club to do something, so we just decided to take this on, to build a decent ice rink for the community.”
Winninghoff, who serves on the ski patrol at nearby Discovery Basin, has been an ice skater for some 60 years. For the past 40 or so, the kids in Philipsburg have gravitated to an undeveloped ice pond on land the Winninghoff family owned and donated for the new rink.
Bob's daughter, Deeann Alcamo, also donated the adjacent hillside to the Rotary Club.
“We're going to call this Winninghoff Park,” vowed Jenner.
It's turning into much more than a skating rink. The park sits in a natural amphitheater of sorts, and Rotarians figure it will make a fine concert venue.
“Joe McDonald is third- or fourth-generation here, and he's got an earth-moving company,” Jenner said. “He heard we wanted to do something for concerts, and his line was: I can hear the music.”
McDonald initiated the sculpting of 13 hillside terraces, each long enough to hold dozens of lawn chairs and blankets for summer-time concertgoers. The hillside was seeded with grass this fall.
Discovery has a snow-making machine they don't use much any more, and is willing to let Philipsburg use it.
“So we'll be able to make this into wonderful sledding hill,” said Jenner, eyeing the slope next to the terraced hillside.
By next winter, the Rotary Club plans to have a warming hut/clubhouse built on one end of the ice. The design is ready, and the club envisions it as a project similar to one the community undertook in June. Working in three shifts, volunteers built a playground at the elementary school in three days, supplying an estimated $75,000 worth of free labor.
The clubhouse will include a garage for a Zamboni that Rotarian Kevin Donlan went out and bought to keep the ice shaved. The machine recently arrived from Wisconsin, supposedly in need of major repairs to get it up and running.
Mechanics in town did some minor tinkering, and by the end of last week it was ready to roll.
“Now we just have to find somebody who knows how to run it,” Jenner said.
The club plans to pay Donlan for the machine, but the giving spirit has permeated the entire project. Some $40,000 has been raised and countless hours of labor have already been donated. Singer/songwriter Kostas gave a benefit concert for the centennial project in June, and may do another one next month.
“I've been the main beg, borrow and steal guy, and I've never had anybody say no to anything,” Jenner said.
Hockey teams are in the works, and while the school children were frolicking on the ice last Thursday Rotary Club president Pat Hughes broke out new broomball equipment.
The sport figures to catch on like wildfire with adults; indeed league play in Philipsburg opens Monday night.
Hughes made an important discovery: the manufactured high-plastic brooms, manufactured in Canada, don't work as well as the good old-fashioned kitchen broom that Craig Sorensen brought along.
Sorensen, a handyman in town, unveiled another sport he has in the works. He cut two bowling balls in half and attached handles to each, creating a pair of poor-man's curling stones.
He had in mind a game that will be a cross between bowling and curling.
“I'm calling it burling,” Sorensen said.
To Jenner, who runs the restored 1890 Broadway Hotel with his wife Susan, the ice rink is a link to making Philipsburg a winter destination town.
Discovery Basin and Georgetown Lake are cold-month magnets, but skiers, ice fishermen, snowmobilers and snowshoers tend to buzz on by Philipsburg on Highway 1.
“There are thousands of people who go to Discovery every weekend, but because it's a little bit of a bypass, they don't necessarily come into town or stay in town,” Jenner said.
Operators at Discovery are planning an access road from the Philipsburg side. Jenner said owners Beatriz and Peter Pitcher think the ice skating option in town will be a boon to the ski area.
“They got kind of excited about this, because most of the successful small-town operations have what they call after-ski activities - and skating's a big one,” Jenner said.
All but given up on as another Granite County ghost town in the 1970s and '80s, the 'Burg has primped and painted itself into a quaint down-home hometown.
It's known to kids of all ages for the Sweet Palace candy store, and there's the 115-year-old Opera House Theatre that was reopened not long ago. New 19th century-style street lamps, each produced at Marcus Daly's foundry in Anaconda and donated by a local merchant, light up the streets of town.
Through floating snow, from the hill above, the once-dilapidated burg looks like something out of Currier & Ives in the gathering darkness.
Down below, Gursky fell for the four hundred billion, nine thousand and twenty-fourth time.
“I'm a tough trier,” she said. “I never give up. I fall. I fall. I fall. I fall ...”
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