The sirens started not long after Tony and I went to bed. This isn’t all that surprising, since we live about a block off Route 31 in McHenry. Ambulances often use the route to get to the hospital at the corner of Route 31 and Bull Valley Road.
What seemed odd is that there were a lot of sirens. And the lights seemed to be going right past our house. Just when I thought they were done, there was another, jolting me back into consciousness.
Something big was going on, but I had no idea what.
I mentioned the sirens to Tony the next morning, but he probably slept through most of it, so good is his ability to sleep these days.
I knew I hadn’t dreamt it all when a neighbor who was walking his dog asked me about it as I went out to get the newspaper. He thought it might have been a car accident; I mentioned that it sounded like a fire at a building, like a school.
A text alert not long after solved the mystery: There had been a massive fire at the old Just For Fun roller rink along Route 31, about two blocks from our house. No doubt many of the responding fire departments had gone near our house to get to the scene of the fire.
When you live in the town where you grew up, you have to get used to things changing.
Many of the landmarks of my youth have changed, and the growth of our town has altered the landscape. Yet, I’ve always cherished the ones that have remained in place all these years later.
Up until last week, Just For Fun had been one of those landmarks of my youth.
My brother and I learned to roller-skate in our basement. How my mother put up with the racket we must have caused, I’ll never know. We had those old school skates that clipped onto the bottom of our sneakers.
Around and around we went on the concrete floor of the basement, weaving in and out of the support pillars and doing our best not to run into anything – particularly the furnace.
We had a gravel driveway, so trying to skate there was out of the question. The fact that we lived on a rural road, where drivers often exceeded the 55 mph speed limit, also made skating in the street an impossibility.
Every now and then we would be able to go to Just For Fun.
I remember one particular time I got to go with my girlfriends. We had to be about 10 years old at the time. My friend Michelle knew how to skate backward, which put her far ahead of the rest of us. She patiently tried to show us how it was done.
It was so much fun to be able to try my crossover turns while skating to the music of the day. Sadly, I never did perfect being able to skate backward, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.
We had at least one or two trips with my classmates during my junior high school years in the early 1980s. Good times were had at all of them.
In the years since, I’d always smile as I passed the building, and I rooted for that rink to continue. It made me sad when the owners of the business had to close because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I had hoped that they might be able to bring it back once more. It’s a McHenry tradition, after all.
Now all of that seems like it won’t be able to happen. I know I’m not alone in how sad that makes me.
Fire officials have indicated the fire that destroyed the rink was suspicious. On Monday, two 14-year-olds from McHenry were arrested in connection with trespassing at the building. Police say one of them started the fire that burned down the building. How senseless and sad.
It’s hard to say goodbye to yet another landmark of my youth, and it’s heartbreaking to think that area kids will no longer get to experience that joy.
Thanks for the memories, Just For Fun.
• Joan Oliver is the former Northwest Herald assistant news editor. She has been associated with the Northwest Herald since 1990. She can be reached at jolivercolumn@gmail.com.