Ketchum

Ketchum between jams. Photo by Paulette Griswold/Novella Photography; 7/16/2016

Ketchum, formerly Rollin Redshirt, #1955 (he/him/his) is a now-retired skater who skated with the Dirty Dozen since the beginning. He’s a lifelong fan of roller derby and started skating when he was 51.

Read the transcript of his interview below!

Tell me about your derby name.

Well, my original derby name¹ which was… a lot of thought went into it because I wanted to somehow honor past derby because I’ve been a fan of derby since 1968. So the name I picked was Rolling Red Shirt. So Rolling was supposed to be sort of a play on words that we’re rolling on wheels and it’s a name, Roland, and then “redshirt” is an old-fashioned derby term, more of an insider’s term that the skaters would use. That the clean skaters, the hometown skaters would skate white shirt and the bad guys or visiting team would skate red shirt.

I always liked the bad guys so I picked the name Red Shirt and my skating number was 1955, which was the year I was born.

Did you ever get majorly injured?

Yes. One time I was skating behind someone who fell down and I… my skates came right up to this person’s skates, so they were laying prone and so hitting their skates I went forward. It was like, I’m not gonna land on this person and I put my hands down and broke like three fingers on the one hand. But the worst injury was… we went down to Pennsylvania, to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and that was the men’s team that skated a different set of rules but they were supposed to… the game was going to be played by our rules because even though they were part of a league that skated under the other rules, they also reffed a women’s team that skated WFTDA rules, so they knew the rules set that we used. And it was kind of a really strange night, I mean it started— there was a band playing music and wouldn’t get off the floor when it was time for the game to begin, and the captain of their team went and shoved the lead singer of the music group and swore at him and told him “Stop the effing music!” and I was like “Okay, this is going to be an interesting evening.”

And we had a ref with us who had been with Providence from like the beginning—he knew the rules better than anyone, probably, and he was trying to enforce the proper rules and they were arguing with him that he didn’t know what he was talking about. The game had so many penalties and stopping that the only people left in the audience were skaters’ mothers, and even they went home eventually. And I was just in the pack, there was no jammers near the pack, and I was looking one way and somebody hit me from the side for no reason. I mean, there was nothing happening, there’s no reason to block somebody, and my body turned one way and my feet turned the other way, and I just felt this incredible pain.

So when I went over to the side, our captain came over and said something like “Are you done?” and the EMT said “He’s done.” And in those days, we would go a great distance and then drive home the same night, so we’re in Pennsylvania, we drove home and I think we stopped at some convenience store and I got a bag of frozen vegetables and put it on my ankle the rest of the way home, and the next night went to practice and skated. And skated every practice and the last two games of the season, and I was in pain the whole time but I finished the season and then went to the doctor.

And then was told that I had a fractured ankle.

How did you hear about modern roller derby? What did you think of it?

And because I have online friends that are actually old roller derby skaters from the past and fans that we would have… Even before flat track derby came about there was a community of people online that would talk about old derby, so skaters and fans together talking about it.

And when flat track derby came around there were a couple of things that people hated about it that were fans of old derby. One it wasn’t co-ed. So, to us, derby was always co-ed. And the fact that it was skated on a flat track instead of the bank track, and then the fact that, especially the the beginning days, the skaters in flat track didn’t really have team uniforms. They would wear all kinds of different things around the same theme. Like there was a Connecticut team, the Widowmakers, and their colors were black and purple. And so as long as everybody on the team was wearing black and purple, and some even wore like a veil in front of their face like they were in mourning because they were the Widowmakers.

And so there were things like the penalty wheel that if you got a penalty, instead of going to the penalty box, you would spin a big wheel and whatever came up is your penalty. Like, go through Spank Alley, so all the skaters would line up and you’d go through and everybody would spank you. So fans of old derby and skaters from old derby kind of thought that this new type of derby was kind of a mockery of old derby.

So not only did people I talked to not like the new derby, I didn’t like the new derby. And we would talk to each other about how awful this new derby was, and then I thought well what if it ever came around to our area, what would I do? And I kind of got it in my mind that derby is derby and I would probably—assuming it was only going to be an all-female league if it ever showed up because that’s what everybody else was doing—I could go and I could be a time keeper… I didn’t know what they had, so towel boy, whatever I could do something at all.

And lo and behold one Sunday the Springfield newspaper, the front page of the newspaper was a picture of, I think, Jake and Sarah, the two that started the league and sort of the headline was “Roller Derby comes to Pioneer Valley” and I’m reading this article and it’s saying they want to have men skate, also, and I was like, “Wow, there goes one of my negatives.” My complaint that men couldn’t skate and here men were gonna skate.

Did you ever skate as a youth?

Yeah, I skated and I was not a very good skater. I could do crossovers, I didn’t even know how to stop. My way of stopping was kind of putting my hands on the rail on the side and slowing myself down. Couldn’t skate backwards, there was nothing fancy I could do but I loved skating, so I spent many weekend nights at Riverside, before it was Six Flags it was riverside and there was an old building that was under the roller coaster that was the original Riverside rink. And then when they updated the roller coaster, they tore that building down and built another rink across the street but then when Six Flags took over they turned the roller skating rink into the headquarters, the business offices.

Transcribed from Zoom interview on April 3, 2021