Long Lost Mittens and Gloves

Agent 54 at the Ice Palace

  Many years ago, Agent 54 played Ice Hockey in Pennsylvania.  My neighborhood Ice Rink was called The Ice Palace and it was a run-down old barn that was built before the war (I don’t know which war).  The boards were rickety, the locker-rooms were small and smelled of stale beer and mold but, it had the old ammonia cooling system for the ice so it was the best place to skate in the area.  The Ice Palace had an old-time feel to it and the Hockey players loved it.

  One other peculiar was the huge mound (15 ft tall) of reddish brown dirt that covered the entire west end of the rink and blocked foot traffic around the rink.  I’m talking about inside the building, just past the West end boards.  To make it even weirder, the dirt had 3ft tall fake Christmas trees planted every 5 or six feet.  It just didn’t look right, even with the Christmas lights turned on. 

One of the years that I ran for Allentown City Council, something happened at the rink, I don’t remember what, that inspired me to write the following.  I gave a copy of it to Ric, the owner and he had it pinned up on his corkboard for years before he sold the old barn and they turned it into a banquet facility.  Ric and I thought this was funny:

To Whom It May Concern:

  Four score and seven years ago, I first skated at the Ice Palace.  When I saw the mountain of real dirt impregnated with plastic trees I was amazed by the beauty of it all.

    But in the seasons since then a terrible problem has drawn my attention.  Lost mittens and Gloves.  Many a child has absent-mindedly stuffed their mittens between the glass and the boards.  Many gloves are abandoned in the penalty box.

These mittens then find their way to the lost and found box in the locker room where sweaty and drunken Hockey players use them to warm their beer drinking hand.  Beer is spilled on them and then they are usually stuffed into the drunkest players equipment bag or winged off to the farthest corner of the locker room, where they develop a disgusting stench, which renders them useless to children.  Hockey players use the mittens for other disgusting purposes that decency will not permit me to elaborate on.

  The solution it seems is to sell the parents one skate lace to attach to the mittens.  The skate lace is then strung through the arms of the child’s jacket, causing the mittens to dangle when not in use.

  As of now, no government funding is available for the research needed to fight this problem.  If we all work together we can make Washington hear our voice.  Let’s end the abuse of Lost mittens and Gloves in our life time.  Thank you.

                                                                                    Not so Sincerely,

                                                                       

                                                                                    Timothy S. Hecht