88-year-old speedskater and ice dancer from White Plains seeks more ice time
KATONAH — He doesn’t go backward.
That’s his rule.
A hard and fast rule when Richard Veron skates.
But the rule seems bigger than that.
A reflection maybe of Veron's move-forward, embrace-new-challenges approach to things.
Forward. Improve. Live. Enjoy.
A formula to follow — age be damned.
Joy in skating
It’s Friday morning and Veron is working on improving.
Music from his phone is playing through speakers at the Maxwell Evarts Rink at Harvey School in Katonah.
Veron is on the ice with Jaclyn Klein Walker, his ice dance instructor and skating partner.
There’s nothing new about this. It happens weekly — usually on Wednesdays, though — and has for about 13 years, minus the months Klein Walker took off to have two children.
Like every day they’re together, the pair will spend half an hour working on multiple dances, each with a unique pace and series of steps.
As much as Veron likes challenges, he’s also a man of routines.
On Sunday at Ebersole Skating Rink in White Plains, he’ll put on a much different pair of skates with longer and thinner blades and do only one step, but over and over again.
It has its own rhythm, one, that despite the repetition, he finds devoid of monotony. Instead it provides, in a sense, a form of mind-release. Almost therapy.
Right skate over left.
Right skate over left.
A million times now?
The actual number is unknown but a million or even more might not be stretching things.
After all, Veron, who recalls trolley car trips to skate with his dad and younger brother as a young child in Brooklyn, has been on ice for about eight decades, 75 or so of those years as a short-track speedskater.
Veron is 88 years old.
He's 88Eighty-eight -and-three-quarters, to be more precise.
Because of his age, what he’s doing has drawn notice.
Through a family/business connection, several years ago he received a call from 1976 Olympic figure skating gold medalist Dorothy Hamill, wishing him a happy birthday.
When he turned 87, 2002 and 2006 Olympic short-track speedskating gold medalist Apolo Ohno sent him a video in which he suggested they get together, skate and share stories about speedskating.
Klein Walker isn’t nearly as high-profile as either Olympian.
But the Bedford resident was once a national-level competitive ice dancer.
Both with February birthdays, she’s half a century younger than Veron.
But on the ice, her age and his age seem irrelevant, if not invisible, as they glide and step in unison, doing, among many dances, the Dutch waltz, canasta tango and the upbeat hickory hoedown.
She alters prescribed steps to ensure Veron’s rule of not going backward is followed. This isn’t about a lack of ability. It’s to reduce his chances of falling, since he takes blood thinners for AFib and a bad fall could cause excessive bleeding. Probably 99% of the time, he skates wearing a helmet for further protection.
But if the no-backward skating tweak is a concession to his age, it’s the only one.
When Klein Walker skates with Veron, she’s not skating with some old guy. Rather, she's skating with someone she calls a “real athlete,” and she treats him as such.
Theirs is a shared love of skating. Looking at Veron, Klein Walker talks about how special it is to find “joy in sports as an adult.” Veron speaks of the “lovely feeling” dancing on ice provides and how different but special speedskating is, its repetitive motion, now when he no longer races, relaxing.
Coaches like athletes who are enthusiastic, willing to learn and have a certain fearlessness to them.
Klein Walker, who once coached multiple skaters but now, as a busy attorney and parent, only coaches Veron, found those things in him from the outset.
Of his ability to ice dance, Klein Walker said, “I’m not surprised at all. Speed is key and he’s not afraid of speed and his coordination is excellent.”
Veron, who noted he got comfortable on speed skates “pretty fast” as a kid, but “to get comfortable on figure skates took me forever,” downplays his accomplishments. But he has pleasantly surprised himself in one way, saying, “I never thought I’d be able to do all the dances (I have).”
Klein Walker won’t put limits on what she'll have him tackle, explaining, “as he gets stronger and stronger, it will get more challenging.”
The Cornell bond, early years in Brooklyn and the future
Ice dancing wasn’t some long-held idea Veron, who worked as an attorney into his late 70s, had for his later work years and retirement.
It is, rather, an outgrowth of a chance meeting at Ebersole.
Ebersole has been Veron’s speedskating home since he and his wife, Sheila, moved to White Plains in 1966.
It was there that he spotted Klein Walker wearing her Cornell University skating jacket.
Veron, Cornell Class of 1956, immediately skated over and soon learned she was from the Cornell Class of 2006.
As their conversation progressed, he mentioned not knowing how to figure skate but having an old. barely-used pair of figure skates in his basement.
She told him to dig them out and she’d teach him. With that, a friendship and partnership formed.
Klein Walker, who initially taught Veron at Ebersole and at Westchester Skating Academy in Elmsford, is the only skating instructor he has ever had.
He was was about 8 years old when his dad, Jacob, got him and his brother, Marty, ice hockey skates. When the weather was right, the three would travel by trolley car to frozen Prospect Park Lake to skate.
When Veron was 12 or 13, his dad got both boys speed skates and they’d go to the now-long-closed Ice Palace in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of the borough.
Veron was never a superstar. But he competed in the NY Daily News Silver Skates program at Wollman Rink in Central Park and vaguely remembers qualifying one year from there and competing at the old Madison Square Garden.
“I got my name in the paper once,” he said in a voice that remembered the pride he had in that.
He figures with his ability to ice skate and a roller hockey background (he and friends would construct wooden goals and play on a nearby dead-end street as children), he would have tried out for but likely not made the Cornell ice hockey team. The only thing holding him back from doing so was Cornell had neither an ice rink nor a hockey team when he attended. (A rink was built the year after he graduated.)
But that didn’t stop Veron from skating as a student. When on-campus Lake Beebe was frozen, he’d sometimes hit the ice in his ice hockey skates between classes.
After graduation, he earned a scholarship to Columbia Law School, where his classmates included future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. When time allowed, he'd skate at Wollman after class.
Immediately after finishing his studies, he spent six months on active duty in the Army (six years in the reserves would follow), and then began a career in corporate and securities law.
If he had a do-over button, he’d probably go a different route. He noted with a laugh that he was the only person who advised Klein Walker not to go to law school.
Of his work over the decades, he said, “It was 24/7” and pressure-packed.
Skating was an escape from that. When other attorneys went to lunch during winter months, Veron would often head to Wollman, skates in hand, and, soon, the day's concerns would disappear.
He bought his now well-used but once dust-gathering figure skates decades ago with the idea he and Sheila would learn to figure skate together.
But between his long work hours and the fact the couple of times they took lessons, the focus was on “boring stuff,” like figure eights, figure skating was quickly dropped.
Now he can’t imagine life without it.
Veron, who played intramural football and basketball at Cornell and played basketball and tennis as an adult until the pounding of jumping turned him off basketball and tennis was dropped because it was “mucking up” his shoulder, has found forever sports on the ice.
That's not to say Veron, a father of two, grandfather to five and, in March, a great-grandfather, is the same caliber speedskater he once was.
His decades-old skates, which have leather blade covers, may bear the logo “Built for Speed,” but Veron noted he takes the occasional break to sit down during the hour-45-minute ice slot he uses,. And when he’s skating, it’s not like he’s moving with Olympian-type speed.
“If you think I skate like Apolo Ohno, I don’t,” he said with a laugh, describing himself as 1/100th of the athlete who 20 years ago became an internationally recognized star in short-track, a sport previously little-known in the U.S.
But Veron, who sharpens his speed skates himself every other time he uses them, seems much younger than his years.
When he turned 75, his Ebersole speedskating buddies presented him with a cake that read “45," explaining he skated more like a 45-year-old.
“It really feels good that I can continue going around,” he said. “Guys at the rink say, ‘If I get to 88, I hope I can do what you’re doing.’ I don’t feel 88. I just keep doing what I’m doing.”
That, of course, means ice dancing, too.
And Klein Walker intends to be there for every step he takes, whether they occur during practice at Harvey or perhaps elsewhere.
“She has always been asking me for years to enter competitions with her. But, A, I don’t think I’m up to it and, B, I’d probably come in first if it’s 80-and-older because I’d probably be the only skater,” Veron said, laughing.
“It would be a kick but I don’t think it’s in the cards,” he added before chuckling and saying, “Maybe when I hit 90 she’ll persuade me.”
Nancy Haggerty covers cross-country, track & field, field hockey, skiing, ice hockey, basketball, girls lacrosse and other sporting events for The Journal News/lohud. Follow her on Twitter at @HaggertyNancy.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: At 88, White Plains man speed skates, ice dances, moves forward
