t was the year when there were no defending champions, when a mother came out of retirement to compete, when a 12-year-old boy made the men's world team. The 1962 US Figure Skating Championships, the last held in Boston, were like none before or since.
The entire American team - skaters, coaches, judges - had been wiped out a year earlier in a plane crash en route to the World Championships in Prague. In a blink, the sport reverted to childhood. So it was symbolic, even fitting, that skating should return here for its renaissance.
Boston was where the ''international style'' had taken hold, where the country's early champions were groomed, where the first ice carnival (now the Ice Chips) was staged, where the US association was based. The Skating Club of Boston, the country's third-oldest, was celebrating its golden anniversary.
Boston was the proper place for a rebirth, for the next generation to lace up and step up. ''It was a fairly upbeat event,'' remembers Ben Wright, the longtime skating official and historian from Belmont who served as assistant referee that year while recovering from a car crash. ''All the new people were coming and determined to do their best.''
If the plane crash (the event program referred to it as the ''air tragedy'') was downplayed, it may have been that no reminder was necessary. The ill-fated champions in three of the four senior events - Laurence and Maribel Y. Owen, Bradley Lord, and Dudley Richards - had been members of the Skating Club. ''I don't remember that there was much made of who wasn't there,'' Wright says. ''They were not there and everyone knew they were not there.''
There were subtle reminders in the program. A paragraph explaining the absence of the usual pictures of the reigning titlists (''a unique set of circumstances finds us without defending champions this year''). Simple photos of the lost local skaters. A mention of the Vinson-Owen scholarship fund at Radcliffe. A page soliciting contributions for the association's new Memorial Fund honoring the 1961 team.
''We recognized what had happened, but didn't make a big thing about it,'' recalls Wright. ''It was typical Yankee low-key stuff.''
Mourning was eventually overtaken by mystery. With the top three places vacant in four events, who would the new contenders be? There were only six entries in the women's competition and just four in the men's. Most were just up from juniors. ''There was a whole new crop of unproven skaters,'' says Wellesley attorney Paul George, who won the junior pairs title that year with his younger sister Elizabeth.
''MANY LOCAL YOUNGSTERS STRIVE TO BRING U.S. BACK TO WORLD DOMINANCE,'' was the Globe headline over a feature on the up-and-comers a fortnight before the championships. ''There was a lot of publicity given to the junior and novice skaters,'' says Tina Noyes, a 13-year-old junior that year who went on to make the 1964 Olympic team. ''There were a lot of high expectations, a tremendous amount of pressure.''
There were so many rookies in the senior field - Lorraine Hanlon of Boston, the top senior ladies contender, was 16 - that the US Figure Skating Association asked Barbara Roles (by then Roles Pursley) to come out of retirement to compete.
Roles, who had won the Olympic bronze medal at Squaw Valley two years earlier, was married with a 7-month-old daughter. ''Her coming back was really huge,'' says Noyes. ''I remember when she came into the Skating Club to practice. Everything just stopped. It was almost like looking at a ghost.''
Roles was only 20, but she was the veteran in a field of teenagers. Hanlon, who would have been on the doomed plane (as the invited junior champion) had her school not discouraged her from making the trip, was her top challenger.
As it turned out, Hanlon came within a few minutes of winning the title when Roles was nearly defaulted on the day of the school figures. ''They changed the time and called all of the other competitors but me,'' Roles recalls. ''I thought I was getting there an hour early, but they were already starting the competition.''
Back then, winning the school figures - which counted for 60 percent of the scoring - all but assured victory. Skating's aerial age, with 14-year-olds ripping off triple-triple combination jumps, was still three decades away. No woman did anything tougher than a double axel. Until that year, no man landed a triple lutz.
The sport was still essentially as it had been during Sonja Henie's day. The top contenders came from private clubs that were as much about socializing as they were skating. And the national championships were still primarily a gathering of the clan. Most of the spectators skated themselves.
Though Boston was the country's top skating city, there wasn't enough public interest to hold the 1962 event at the Garden (which was occupied by the annual B.A.A. meet that weekend anyway). So the school figures were held at the Skating Club on Soldiers Field Road, with the free skating at Boston College's old McHugh Forum, which seated roughly 4,200.
''I was probably the most nervous then of any of my national competitions because it was at home,'' says Noyes, who lived in Arlington. ''There's nothing harder than competing in front of people you know.''
Had the plane crash not happened, those championships would have been a Skating Club showcase, with the Owen sisters, Lord, and Richards all defending their crowns. Now the local spotlight fell upon Hanlon, upon Noyes, and upon the Georges, who came from Watertown. ''The Herald story said I was a `graceful stevedore,' '' George says, chuckling. ''I've never forgotten that.''
It was the oddest of Nationals in an extraordinary year. There were no defending champions, and the victors - Roles, 17-year-old Monty Hoyt, Dorothyann Nelson and Pieter Kollen in pairs, and Yvonne Littlefield and Peter Betts in dance - never won again.
Roles, who skated with her baby daughter at rinkside, went back into retirement. Scott Allen, a 12-year-old who weighed 97 pounds, ended up second and made the world team. Two years later, he was Olympic bronze medalist.
Allen was the poster boy for the renaissance, which began on a February weekend in the city where modern skating was born. The Americans were back on the ice again, bound again for Prague and the world championships that had been canceled the year before. But this time, they went on different planes.
