Roller Rink

The Harford County Development Advisory Committee serves as a forum for the review of subdivision and site plans submitted to the Department of Planning and Zoning by those seeking building permits. The committee will review the following proposals at 9 a.m. Wednesday in the County Council chambers, 212 S. Bond St., Bel Air: Wyndemede Corporate Center Location: On the southeast end of Enterprise Court, Wyndemede Corporate Center. Developer: Enterprise Park, LLC/George W. Stephens & Associates.

Inside a nondescript building in the corner of a strip mall tucked off Joppa Road in Towson, the hip-hop music is thumping on Friday nights, the lights are low and the teenagers are showing off their moves. They just happen to be doing their socializing on wheels, roller-skating in endless circles around the floor at Skateland Orchard, where the decades-old pastime has attracted a new generation of fans. The 23-year-old roller rink draws about 300 skaters on a typical Friday, when it is open until after midnight and attracts the most young people.

Like a forlorn sentinel from Howard County's past, the decrepit former roller-skating rink and dance school facing U.S. 29 from Columbia Road in Ellicott City witnessed the disappearance of farms and fields. Now, it, along with the 1899 farmhouse next door, will soon be gone, replaced next year with 13 large homes selling for about $900,000 each. Older county residents remember carefree days in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, roller skating and eating homemade pies and sandwiches there in later years.

Ask any longtime resident for directions around Bel Air and you'll often hear the famous Bel Air Roller Rink on U.S. 1 used as a reference point. Built in 1952, the structure delights engineers, contractors and architects. When the experts said a single span with 100-foot trusses and without center support poles couldn't be built, Joseph "Bumps" Orr said it could, and he did it. Orr, who ran a little grocery store in Highland, five miles south of Delta, Pa., spent nights figuring out how to build a large skating rink with no poles to interfere with the skaters.

Helen Lee Ruehl, a homemaker and former co-owner of a Frederick roller skating rink, died of heart failure Thursday at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Rockville. She was 81. She was born Helen Lee Pfeiffer and raised in West Baltimore, and she graduated from Western High School in 1938. She briefly worked in Baltimore for the Household Finance Corp. Mrs. Ruehl, who had lived in Frederick since 1977, had formerly resided in Ellicott City and Allentown, Pa. She was married in 1941 to William F. Ruehl, a welding company executive, who survives her. In the 1970s, the couple and their son purchased Skatehaven, a Frederick roller rink they owned and operated until selling the business in the 1990s.

THE BOY approached them in the rain on a Friday night in Towson, in a parking lot outside a restaurant set back in a strange, commercial/light-industrial area off Joppa Road. The boy said he had just come from the nearby roller rink and needed money for the bus ride home, and home was miles away in East Baltimore. The couple had just come from dinner, their first night out in a long time. It was about 9 p.m. They had three children to pick up -- a teen-age girl at the movies, a teen-age son at a middle school mixer and a 10-year-old boy at a friend's house.

A NEWS release a couple of weeks ago from Project Open Space in Annapolis announced three more state-government grants for the county's Department of Recreation and Parks. Routine stuff, really, grinding the long-ago reported process another notch toward completion of three projects much needed here: Western Regional and Meadowbrook parks and the purchase of more ball-field acres in Elkridge. But deep down, the release referred to bucks that are earmarked for Meadowbrook - to be developed off the southeast corner of Route 100 and U.S. 29 in Ellicott City - being applied in part to an indoor arena.

Call it the Roller Derby in Randallstown. A group of 40 community organizations around the Liberty Road corridor is opposing a Baltimore County woman's plans to open a skating rink on Liberty Road. The organizations, known as the Liberty Road Community Council, met last week and voted to oppose the skating rink proposed by Karen Donaldson. Donaldson, a 34-year-old resident of the Milford Mill neighborhood, works with special-needs children at Kennedy Krieger Institute and has said she wants to provide a recreational outlet for Randallstown teen-agers.

BLAMING SKATELAND for Monday night's high-speed car crash into a Carney bar would be unfair. But mere mention of the roller rink in the Loch Raven-Baynesville community produces groans from residents and business owners, and with good reason. Skateland needs to review its security policies, and tighten where necessary to help prevent these kinds of problems. For years, Skateland has attracted packs of teen-agers to its Friday night public skating sessions. Youths up to age 19 can skate until about 12:30 a.m. After closing, they flood the parking lot and nearby streets.

Harry W. Morfoot, owner of Sportsman's Hall Roller Skating Center in Upperco, died Thursday of congestive heart failure at Carroll County General Hospital. The Upperco resident was 79.Mr. Morfoot was born in Baltimore and grew up in the Oakenshawe neighborhood. He attended Guilford Elementary School and Roland Park Junior High School.As a young man, he took over his grandfather's farm in Upperco and set up a huckstering route in the city, selling eggs and farm produce from a truck.In May 1959, he opened the roller-skating rink in the 15500 block of Hanover Road in Upperco.