Originally published Saturday, November 9, 1996

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

What goes around comes around, especially if it's on wheels, and especially if it's one of those Federal Way Pattisons.

The Pat Pattison family has operated a roller skating rink in the Federal Way/Redondo area since before World War II. Evie Pattison, who was to become Pat's wife of 56-1/2 years, was selling tickets at her father's Redondo Skating Rink when Pat Pattison moved west with his family in 1929, from Montana.

A whole lot of Federal Way history has rolled by since then. Her father's original rink burned in the early '50s, but the Pattisons today own or have interests in a half-dozen roller skating rinks around the state.

And Pattison's West, the roller rink at 34222 Pacific Hwy. S., is still the hub, still the place where Pat, 85, and Evie, 82, come to work at least two days each week.

"We don't live very far from here, down at (Redondo) beach," said the sprightly, gray-haired Evie. "When I was growing up here, there wasn't much of anything . . . woods, mostly, including right here, where we built this (new) rink.

"When we went shopping, it was usually all the way to Fife, or Tacoma. When the schools were consolidated, I was in the very first second-grade class at the new Federal Way School."

Back in 1898 her grandparents literally got off the boat from Tacoma to Redondo -- they pushed the horses off to swim ashore on their own. Her father was a successful merchant who decided to launch a roller rink on the second floor of the old dance hall at Redondo in 1936.

Pat, who "learned to skate back on the ice in Montana," was still a boy when his family moved to Tacoma. A friend introduced him to roller skating, and Pat took to it like he was born with wheels on his feet, soon winning local and regional skating competitions.

"I remember a friend told me about a new rink up here at Redondo, and when I walked up the stairs, there was the cutest girl you ever saw selling tickets." He was 21 then, and Evie was only 13.

"Back then, there wasn't a whole lot right around here," Pat recalled. "I remember there was a place called the Green Parrot Inn, which was known for its chicken dinners on Sundays. And there was a service station at Pacific Highway and 320th, where the Seafirst is now, and a feed and grain business at about South 312th Street. That was about it."

Of course, there was more to the Redondo rink for Pat than just skating. There was that cute ticket seller. "We finally got engaged when she was 15, and I even talked her father into letting her go to the nationals in Cleveland with me not long after that. We got married when she was 17."

Along the way, he continued to win national roller skating titles and they began teaching and managing the Redondo rink. Somehow, they had time to have the first of their four children before Pat went into the Air Force, where he served with Jimmy Stewart. "His autographed photo is around here somewhere," Pat said.

After the war, they bought a little house near the Redondo rink for $2,000, and they managed the rink and taught skating. "In '49, we built a new home right on the beach, and I remember the mortgage had 4 percent interest," Pat said. "There weren't many homes anywhere around here, mostly just vacation homes near the beach, and around some of the lakes."

The old Redondo rink burned mysteriously in 1951. After Pat finished giving a lesson, he remembered at the last minute to retrieve their young daughter Barbara, who'd been sleeping in a back office. By the time they went the short distance home, the rink was fully ablaze. Several other local rinks also burned mysteriously within months.

After a move to Spokane, where Pat managed a rink, the family returned to Federal Way and built the current rink in 1979. It might have seemed like a questionable business, especially out in what was considered the boonies, but it worked. "I always felt that if you build a good facility, 'they will come'," Pat said.

He did, and they did. By the thousands, including old-line skaters who first met at the old Redondo roller rink. Some of their skaters now, including more than a few older couples, have been regulars ever since meeting and falling in love while skating at the old Redondo rink. Evie confessed that she was so busy helping run the business and raising a family in those years that she "never actually skated on this floor."

Today, Pattison's West still draws skaters from miles around. Pat and Evie's children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, own or manage and work in six different rinks in Puget Sound, Centralia and Spokane. And some of their grandchildren -- now on competition in-line skates -- hold national speed-skating titles.

Pat Pattison, nursing a broken rib, sticks to the sidelines these days. "I've had a special pair of gold-plated skates here for years," he said, "But when I went looking for them the other day, I could only find one. I think my family hid the other one so I wouldn't get any crazy ideas about putting them on and skating again!"

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.