Photography by Ed Meyer of the St. Louis Star-Times, courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
Go to Forest Park and lace up your skates and you’ll still see sporting scenes like this one, but in 1947, skating owned a much larger piece of the American imagination. It was the Sonja Henie era, after she’d hung up her gold medals in favor of Hollywood. Everyone wanted to skate. The Arena held multiple classes a day, hiring English champion Megan Taylor to teach. In 1945, Joe Forshaw, one of the organizers of the St. Louis on Ice Outdoor Skate Show, recruited her as his star. Huge audiences showed up, standing around the edge of the Grand Basin in freezing temperatures to watch Miss Taylor perform alongside dozens of amateurs. The show was a smash; there was an encore the next week at the orphan home on Manchester. Forshaw told the paper they’d set a world record: the first successful large-scale outdoor figure skating event involving full costumes. We suspect that someone—possibly Henie, with her juggernaut ice pageant tours—got there first, but Forshaw had been skating his heart out for 59 years, and he’d never signed an autograph or drunk Champagne with Cary Grant. We’re inclined to give him this one.
