Stardust gears up for last-ever skate party
At the height of its popularity, the Stardust Roller Rink was the Studio 54 of Surrey, the place to be and be seen, complete with a rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack.
“Friday and Saturday nights were crazy busy with people coming and going, regular skaters and big groups of friends,” said Tracey Gravel, who worked at the rink for 18 years.
Public sessions would pull in 300 skaters eager to bust a move under the giant mirror ball.
With school bookings, public skating, family nights and roller hockey, the facility ran nearly 24 hours a day in the 80s. Although the rink has been closed for 12 years, it will reopen this Saturday for one last skate party before the building falls to make way for a 53-storey tower.
Surrey’s Stardust was the third in a chain, which was started in North Vancouver in 1964 by Mel Ross and Bud Allen.
Gravel arrived in Surrey as a seventeen-year-old in 1987, an unwilling migrant from Thunder Bay.
“I wasn’t too happy about leaving all my friends, but I got this job at the Stardust two days after I arrived and met a lot of people and made a lot of friends,” she recalled. “I had skated at home, so this was kind of a dream job.”
She is not alone in her enthusiasm for working at the Stardust. Gravel’s former boss Bonnie Burnside put in more than 30 years, starting in the concession and ending her run as manager.
“Initially, I was a snack bar girl pushing popcorn and it was a fun place to work, with fun people,” said Burnside. “We would work until after midnight on a Friday or Saturday and then go for pizza. It was very social.”
Working at a roller rink is not without its perils, however.
“There are a lot of songs that come on the radio even now that totally give me flashbacks,” said Gravel. “Closing Time by Semisonic we played every night near the end and that always reminds me of the Stardust.”
Jump by Van Halen had a long run on the most-requested list, along with most of Queen’s greatest hits. Some memories — tunes like Disco Duck and YMCA — are impossible to erase.
“Some songs were quite controversial and people would complain and write letters; thank goodness we didn’t have the Internet, then,” said Burnside.
“At first people thought that Supertramp were all stoners and that we shouldn’t play them, but that went away when the band went mainstream,” she said. “I never thought Teenage Dirtbag was appropriate, so I always made the staff turn it off.”
Burnside grew up at the Stardust locations in Richmond and Surrey and eventually employed nearly every member of her family
“My mom worked for me, my dad worked for me, two of my sisters, two of my nieces and my nephew. It was a real family kind of place,” she said.
The surviving original owner, Ross, sold the property last year for $8.7 million and presented Burnside and another longtime employee Noel Hardy with a share of the proceeds, 11 years after it closed.
— With files from John Mackie