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Breaking the ice: the Mabel Fairbanks story - includes information on three helping organizations for aspiring Black competitive skaters

American Visions, Dec-Jan, 1997 by Ronald A. Scheurer

Children's tales can be so sweet and simple, and the story of figure skater and coach Mabel Fairbanks begins no differently. During New York City's cold winter days, she watched other youngsters skating on a small pond not far from Central Park's Harlem end. It looked like such fun, gliding gleefully and gracefully across sheets of ice--so much so that it prompted her to buy a pair of cheap tubular figure skates. Never mind that they were two sizes too big!

Exactly when Fairbanks first put on skates isn't clear--maybe somewhere between 1925 and 1928--but the struggle she had on that little pond reportedly prompted an onlooker to suggest a larger, smoother ice surface in Central Park. Fairbanks walked there in the skates, and by the end of that season, she had taught herself the essentials of figure skating.

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Years later, inspired by Sonja Henie's performance in the 1936 romantic comedy One in a Million, Fairbanks armed herself with new skates and headed for a nearby public rink. A persistent cashier kept telling her that colored people weren't allowed in, and a just-as-persistent Fairbanks kept returning to the rink. One day the sympathetic manager, who was standing nearby, told the cashier to let the kid in.

Well, Fairbanks wasn't exactly a kid by this time, but she was small, and packed inside of her warm clothes, she could pass as one. Over the pedestal and onto the ice, she ignored the stares and ridicule of others, skated her own way, and soon caught the attention of the all-white staff. Maribel Vinson (nine times U.S. Ladies Champion) recognized Fairbanks' talent and started offering her advice on technique. Howard Nicholson, another well-known coach of the era, joined Vinson in contributing to Fairbanks' development. Fairbanks also benefited from watching and listening while the white children received formal instruction. She copied and practiced their moves.

Fairbanks' rapid progress motivated her to pass each of the required competition tests, even though Vinson had quite candidly told her that she would never be allowed to compete in the white events. Undaunted by racism, Fairbanks continued to practice at various rinks in New York, earning money by skating for black community benefits and charities. Soon, she was producing her own programs and presenting them at the Gay Blades Ice Arena to a mixed, but mostly black, audience.

People who forge great change often come from the most humble beginnings, and whether their paths be easy or arduous, their work endures. They become legends. For African-American figure skaters, that legend is Mabel Fairbanks. She was born in the Florida Everglades in 1910, of mixed African-American and Seminole ancestry. There are conflicting stories about when and why she left a broken and economically deprived Florida family to join her older brother in New York City. One story has her orphaned at age 3. A second tale reports that her father abandoned the family when she was between 3 and 5 years old. And a third reports that she was sent to the city to escape an abusive home. (Fairbanks, semiretired now but still an active observer and promoter of skating in the Los Angeles area, is reluctant to discuss her early years.)

In any case, her new Harlem home flashed with excitement, and dreams welled up to challenge her spirit. The ensuing struggle enriched not only her own life, but the lives of many who followed.

Disappointments were numerous, but Fairbanks persevered. The producers of the popular Ice Capades, Holiday on Ice, and Ice Vanities were reluctant to sign her for their shows, because they doubted the public's readiness to accept black performers in their acts. However, by 1946, Fairbanks' own programs had attracted enough attention that she was invited to Hollywood by a movie studio. No film was ever made, but in 1947 she landed a job performing with George Arnold's "Rhythm on Ice," an otherwise all-white production that toured the southern United States and Mexico, and in 1949 she toured Cuba with a large cast of well-known skaters in the "Rhapsody on Ice" production.

Fairbanks returned to Southern California in the early 1950s with high hopes of skating in one of Sonja Henie's productions. It was not to be. Henie's disposition and desire to remain at center stage, surrounded by handsome young men, wouldn't permit it.

Now in her 40s, Fairbanks studied coach ing from 1950 to 1955, and then taught through 1970. Though accepted by other coaches as a colleague, she continued to encounter racial tension. A sign once posted at the rink entrance to the Pasadena Figure Skating Club, where Fairbanks was coaching, stated that colored trade was not solicited.

Fairbanks made sure that the press was notified, and the Pasadena club's rival, Hollywood's Polar Ice Palace, seized the opportunity to upstage the competition. They suggested that this talented black skater, who was becoming Southern California's "problem child," might find a better working environment with them. And she did. Fairbanks developed a large base of students at the Polar Ice Palace from 1955 through the 1960s. In addition to athletes, she coached a who's who of Hollywood stars, including Natalie Cole, Tab Hunter, Betty Hutton and her children, Eartha Kitt and her daughter and Dean Martin.

Breaking the ice: the Mabel Fairbanks story - includes information on three helping organizations for aspiring Black competitive skaters

American Visions, Dec-Jan, 1997 by Ronald A. Scheurer

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