Courtesy of Strauss Skates
John Strauss of Strauss Skates, 1919
John Strauss of Strauss Skates making blades, 1919
Minnesotans are ice innovators, and for good reason—the land of 10,000 lakes means we have a whole lotta ice. We carve it, melt it, catch fish beneath it, and build castles with great blocks of it. But it’s thanks to John Strauss Sr.—a German-American fellow who immigrated to St. Paul in 1881—that we do that windswept and wondrous thing: skate across it. Strauss revolutionized ice skate design with a secret steel hardening process and closed-toe blade. Nearly a century and a half later, Strauss Skates is still around in Maplewood.
Jenelle and Shaun Hastings are a part of the Strauss lineage: they run Strauss Skates with a team of family members and other old-timers. They say John Strauss Sr. was destined early for a career in sharp implements: as a teenager, he traveled to Italy and was trained to craft rifle bayonets in an armory. When he arrived in St. Paul, Strauss worked as a locksmith, but kept a side hustle making bicycles. Back then, most bikes were made for touring: they featured one oversized wheel in front, and a tiny one behind. But Strauss crafted steel racing bicycles with wheels of equal size, designed for speed.
“The same men who raced bicycles, in the winter, they would speed skate on our frozen lakes in Minnesota. They were used to having to get their blades imported from Europe. Which in the 1800s, would have been costly, time consuming, and immensely difficult,” says Jenelle. “They decided to talk to the person manufacturing their race bikes, and say, ‘Do you want to try this?’ That turned out to be this amazing fit, with his history of working with steel and sharp edges.”
But John Strauss Sr. didn’t just make ice skate blades. He revolutionized them. Before Strauss came along, blades were fastened to rough hunks of wood that skaters strapped onto their boots—their front ends curled up around the toe like sleigh runners. Strauss invented “closed-toe” skates by attaching the front of the blade to the base plate, bringing it underneath the foot for strength and control. He also created the “rocker,” giving his blades a customized curvature: more curved blades for agility, flatter blades for speed. Strauss also invented a secret steel hardening process that made his blades sharp and hard, but not so brittle they’d break on impact.
Courtesy of Strauss Skates
Strauss Skates, St. Paul
Eventually, Strauss opened a skate shop in St. Paul, and his clientele grew: local athlete Harley Davidson carved up the rink on a pair of Strauss’s figure skates, and Axel Paulson—inventor of the axel figure skating jump—zoomed around the track on a pair of his speeds. Strauss supplied early NHL teams like the Chicago Blackhawks and the New York Rangers, and Olympic figure skating champion Sonja Henie credited Strauss’s skates with her success in the 1935 world championship. Strauss made an average of two pairs of ice skates every day. For Ice Follies—Minnesota’s traveling ice show, a direct predecessor of Disney On Ice—he crafted stilt skates that elevated skaters feet above the ice. Today’s Disney On Ice performers stop at the Strauss shop to have their skates sharpened when they pass through town.
Strauss Skates moved from St. Paul to its Maplewood location in 1970. John Strauss Sr. passed away in 1946, and his son, John Strauss Jr., eventually handed the baton to a nephew in 1983. They stopped manufacturing their own skates around the same time. Strauss Skates remains a family business—the Hastings say that today, the shop is known as a laid-back, grassroots skating hub.
“We have NHLers who come in and hang out for hours. That’s why they like to hang out here, we treat them just like any other old hockey player… Kids will come in, and we’ll have players go out to their car and come back in with several sticks and sign them for the kids that are in the store. It’s organic, and it’s grassroots,” says Shaun. “There’s a culture in the shop—to hang pictures of the people who have come through, or to Tweet when somebody comes in, would detract from that culture.”
Courtesy of Strauss Skates
Strauss Skates
The Hastings say that Minnesota’s hockey scene—made up of so many rec teams and community-based associations, run by volunteers and parents—is a rare jewel in the national hockey landscape. In most other states, they say, hockey is dominated by for-profit business models. And here, many of the same volunteers who run the rec teams maintain the outdoor rinks that dot the Twin Cities metro, making skating more accessible to the entire community.
“There’s such a conception that hockey is so expensive, and it certainly can be, regardless of where you live,” says Shaun. “But it doesn’t have to be. Just like we have Parks and Rec soccer or you have club and travel soccer, we actually still have that Parks and Rec hockey. It just so happens that what would be our club-level hockey is still community based, [that’s] where our strong hockey is.”
The Hastings say that over the decades, ice skating has lost some of its recreational appeal: decades ago, everyday ice skating aficionados would buy long-blade skates and glide around the Cities’ ice arenas and frozen lakes in droves. Long blade skates were once a popular genre of their own: not quite figures, hockeys, or speeds, but skates designed for recreation and pleasure. Things aren’t quite the same anymore.
But with the COVID-19 pandemic sending more people outdoors during winter’s chilly months, Strauss Skates is seeing a wave of new skaters come through its doors. Jenelle says that pleasure skating can be a fantastic intergenerational activity, and a way for neighbors to connect in a time of isolation.
“It’s really neat in that it’s one of those sports that can be a life-long activity,” says Jenelle. “Maybe the kids are off playing a pickup game of hockey. And parents are on the pleasure rink, teaching the toddler to skate while the older one is out. It's something that a whole family can go and enjoy together. It's a great neighborhood thing, too—kids go down to the park and they see who's there. It’s a very organic way of playing and having fun, and meeting new friends.”
As advice to new skaters, Jenelle recommends skating close to the boards for support, or even bringing out a lawn chair to scoot around the rink. Going to local outdoor rinks, where crowds are smaller, can be less intimidating. For the truly dedicated, there are learn to skate programs for both kids and adults.
And the heirs to the Strauss legacy—where do they skate? The Hastings love the Roseville Oval, and say that the speed skating track alongside the indoor rink makes it a gem of a facility. But few things are better than that rare experience gifted to us last December: wild ice. When lakes froze in flawless glass sheets all across Minnesota, the Hastings family skated two miles from one northern cabin to another. There’s something to it, Shaun says, the sound of blades carving the ice. In Norway and Sweden, extreme wild ice skaters glide across barely frozen lakes for the thrill of it, just to hear the ice sing and thrum as it cracks. For him, the pleasure is even simpler—it’s the feeling, so rare in this trapped-inside year, of flying.
“When I think of skating, I close my eyes, and I think of … the distance you can cover in a short amount of time, the cool crisp air in your face, and the wind in your hair,” says Shaun. “It’s like riding a bike in the summertime, but different. You can just fly, and it seems so effortless. You’re just gliding on ice. It’s just awesome. And this year of all years, too.”
