Derby memoirs

Seasoned veteran of roller rink shares past experiences

Advertisement

She started in the sport so long ago they used wooden wheels.

Fifties roller derby star Loretta "Little Iodine" Behrens, a Bronx native who has lived in Las Vegas since the early 1990s, is trying to keep memories of roller derby's glory days alive while also trying to help the game's new participants learn a little something from a seasoned veteran who knows a little something about it.

After playing off and on from 1950 to 1978 on teams like the Washington Jets -- her first team in 1950 -- the Brooklyn Red Devils, the San Francisco Panthers, the Seattle Ravens and the Chicago Westerners, Behrens is commemorating the sports' old days on her Web site www.derbymemoirs.bravepages.com. Another goal of the site is to educate the younger generation of players on some of roller derby's intricacies.

Behrens, who lives in the Southeast part of the valley with her husband, Phil, and her noisy pet parakeet with no name, explained how she became involved in the sport.

"(I was) a young, cocky kid, skated at a roller rink, went into speed skating -- I was a klutz at it but I was a speed skater." Behrens said. "Roller derby was on TV at that time and about three or four of us from the speed club went down and tried out."

On her Web site, the spunky Behrens reveals how hard it was physically at first. "No one told me that becoming a roller derby skater in those days was going to be easy. There were hours and hours of daily training before and even after each live professional game. The training sessions were very strict. We had long hours of it. I felt as if I would have to be carried out the door every night. My feet, legs and entire body were exhausted.

"I remember we did a lot of pacing to build up endurance and wind. We would pace so much that we had blisters on top of blisters on our feet. Then we had rough blocking exercises where the men and women learned how to block with the forearm and elbow."

Behrens, who once skated in a $1,000 match race between periods against Gerry Murray back in the day, talked about a specific workout designed to help players avoid fallen players on the track.

"There was the chair throwing exercise where the trainer or coach would throw a chair onto the track as if it was a fallen skater and we would have to jump and avoid it otherwise roll right into it. The chair exercise helped me to move quickly and think of my skates. At the time, I was pretty scared of hurting myself. Later, I would find this exercise was something that I would need every moment in my professional games."

When asked what her parents thought of their daughter getting involved in such a rough-and-tumble sport, Behrens said she was up front about her plans.

"When I joined the derby as a new kid I was like 16 years old. I went home and told my mother I was leaving town and that I was getting $50 every three weeks and my father said that's good because we had six kids," she said. "And as the years went on, we got our room and board and traveling expenses."

Behrens, who has played in places as far away as Australia and Japan, admitted her attitude and her mouth got her into her share of trouble in the beginning.

"When you're coming into a profession where you're still basically a child and you're among adults and you're a new kid ... new kids were told to sit there and keep their mouths shut and just sit there and listen," she said. "And my problem was I never was one that shut up. I was a cocky new kid. And I was benched many a time, and you'd sit on the bench and hope someone would break their neck so you could get out there and skate."

The self-proclaimed "big-mouth" explained how she erned the nickname Little Iodine.

"There was a comic strip when I was a little kid called 'Little Iodine' and I was always a character and was always getting into trouble as a kid and my uncle and my family always used to say, 'You're just like that brat in the comic strip,' " Behrens said.

Behrens, who has three children -- Hilton, Alan Nass and Robin Noe -- said the early days in roller derby was a lot like a travelling circus.

"In the early days, we traveled and barnstormed and it was from town to town," she remembered. "Sometimes you lived in the buildings you skated in. We also carried our own dietician. We went by train, we went by car. You caravanned sometimes. It all depended how far you were going."

And don't dare let Behrens know you thought the sport was staged in the early days.

"When they turn around and say we are choreographed, I get very upset with that," she said.

Showing how much the primary tool of her trade -- the roller skates -- meant to the players back then, Behrens told a story of a fire in one of the venues and how she ran into the place screaming, "Our skates! Our skates!" to grab her prized and well-broken in pair, which she still displays to this day.

"Our skates were our life," Behrens said. "They're worth a million dollars to me."

Asked if she watched the recent A&E cable television show "Rollergirls," Behrens said she had, but said this modern renaissance of the game with girls in mini-skirts is just not the same as when she and her peers played the sport.

"My personal opinion is I give them all a lot of credit for learning something that took many years of skaters to have to train and do," she said of the show. "As far as their talent, I saw a lot of talented skaters there. As far as the way they play their game, I would change a lot of the ways they play their game. I have three ways to say it -- They clunk, they plow and they push.

"Maybe five girls out of that whole TV show actually learned how to skate the track. I would say the rest of them, who are pack skaters, they have not been taught, or they are still learning to be taught the game."

Behrens also is trying to help Las Vegas' entry in the Women's Flat Track Derby Association, the Neander Dolls, a select group of players chosen for games from the Sin City Rollergirls league founded less than a year ago by coaches Denise Grimes and Trish Ethier.

Whereas the girls on A&E's "Rollergirls" skate on a banked track like Behrens and the late legend Ann Calvello -- who got together at last year's RollerCon convention in Las Vegas and playfully did a lap around the track together with walkers -- the newest trend in the rapidly growing sport is the flat track.

Behrens thinks the flat track game is more of a show than a sport and wishes this modern wave of skaters would more frequently listen to her and other veterans.

"Going from a flat track to a banked track is quite a big difference," she said. "Unfortunately, a lot of the skating ability is gone and it's become more of a circus than a three-ring."

Behrens, who regularly attends all the Neander Dolls' home games and who has a relationship with SCRG league co-founders Grimes and Ethier, says despite the contrast in style between her roller derby and these new rollergirls' game, she is always willing to let them know what's on her mind.

"She (Denise Grimes) knows when I sit in the audience and I'm watching the game and my eyes get bigger, I see something that's not right," Behrens said.

Known as one of the toughest girls of her day, along with Midge "Toughie" Brasuhn, Behrens also is candid when recalling her role in the game.

"I knocked my share of teeth out," she said with a mischievous smile.

Asked if she misses the sport that entirely changed her life, Behrens laughed and said she does miss it, but said she still pictures herself doing laps around the banked track.

"I still do it mentally," she said.