Half a century ago, under the amused stare of the golden Prometheus statue, Robyn Roth-Moise would rip around the Rockefeller Center skating rink like hell on ice.
“I was one of what they called the ‘rink rats,’” said Roth-Moise, 63. “I was that little obnoxious kid, darting in between everyone and skating backwards.”
For the past six decades, she hasn’t missed a single winter season on the Rock Center ice. And she has the photos to prove it.
Roth-Moise, now a Manhattan photographer and mother of two, has posed for skating pictures at the rink every year since 1959, when she was just 3 years old.
A color print from that year shows her smiling on the arm of an elegantly uniformed “Rink Guard.”
“Back then, there were no Zambonis,” Roth-Moise said. “During the intermissions, the Rink Guards would hose down the ice with water and then squeegee the surface ice with squeegees on poles — while skating.”
Roth-Moise grew up on West 86th Street, the great-granddaughter of Emery Roth, an architect who designed such masterpieces as The Eldorado and The San Remo apartment buildings on Central Park West.
As a kid, she spent 12 to 20 hours a week skating at Rockefeller Center, getting lessons after school and blasting past tourists on weekends.
Robyn still indulges her passion of skating despite her physical injuries handicaps.“By age 5, I was figure skating. I was spinning, I was jumping. If you walked by . . . you would see etchings in the ice where, for a half-hour, someone like me had worked on their figure-eights,” she said.
At age 11 or 12, Roth-Moise decided she didn’t want to give up regular school and devote herself full time to a professional skating career, “though it was discussed.”
But she kept skating at Rockefeller Center, never missing a winter season even when she was studying at Syracuse University, spending a year abroad in London, or enjoying a year of married life in Boston.
Her husband, a tax attorney, and their two daughters had little choice but to follow Roth-Moise onto the ice.
Although a knee replacement and various other surgeries mean Roth-Moise isn’t as fast as she once was, she still hits the ice almost weekly during the season. She’s also a regular at rink events, many of them hosted by the adjacent “Today” show studios, and her skates have been signed by ice stars including Dorothy Hamill, Nancy Kerrigan and Scott Hamilton.
“At this point I can skate forward and backward, but I’m not doing spins, I’m not doing jumps,” she said. “But I’m still on the ice!”
“I usually try to avoid the holidays,” Roth-Moise advised. “My biggest fear is those hotshot kids. I’ve gone from being one of them to being afraid one of them is going to knock me over.”
