Tommy's New Block Skates

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Young Tommy is a typical boy growing up on a small farm in 19th-century
Nova Scotia. Every night, he dreams of skating and playing hockey with
his friends on the pond near his farm. Unfortunately, his parents do not
have enough money to buy him skates. One spring day, Tommy’s father
asks the local blacksmith if he is willing to make a new pair of skates
in exchange for a cartload of fence posts. The blacksmith agrees to the
barter and for the rest of the year, Tommy and his father cut posts to
pay for the skates. By the time the pond freezes over again, Tommy has
his new skates and he is all set to play hockey ... if only he had a
hockey stick.

This is a charming tale told by a man who knows his hockey. Vaughan is
the creator of the Windsor Hockey Heritage Museum in Nova Scotia and the
author of The Puck Starts Here: The Origin of Ice Hockey (1997). With
his descriptive prose, he whisks the reader back to the earliest days of
hockey, when ice skates were, for the average person, a luxury that
required a lot of discipline and hard work to obtain. The theme of block
skates made of iron and wood would likely be of interest to young
readers who have been raised on modern plastic/polycarbon boot skates.
Gorgeous colour illustrations depicting 19th-century rural life in the
Annapolis Valley and showing how the skates were made are provided by
well-known sports artist David Preston Smith. Highly recommended.