Neon Skateway owners working on upgrades, plans for the future

SOAP LAKE — Robert and Margy Rice have some plans for Neon Skateway.

“It has so much potential,” Robert Rice said. 

The Rices purchased Neon Skateway, 48 Moses Lake Ave. NW in Soap Lake, and changed its name in March. It was Hollywood Roll in its most recent iteration. Because it’s recently reopened it’s still a work in progress, but it’s open for roller skating five days per week. 

Neon Skateway is a Soap Lake fixture, starting out as an Army Corps of Engineers installation back in the early 1950s. 

“Sometime between 1965 and 1975, somewhere in there, somebody built it into a rink,” Robert Rice said. 

Margy Rice remembered coming to the rink, growing up in Soap Lake.

“I used to skate here as a teenager, actually,” she said. “Our church group used to bring us here, and our family used to bring us here.”

Robert Rice is a veteran inline skater, a skater at the old — and long gone — rink in Wenatchee. The rink was replaced with a hotel and restaurant in the mid-1990s, he said. 

“My entire life I was a rinker there,” Robert Rice said. 

The Soap Lake roller rink was new to him.

“I never even knew this place existed,” he said. “We came up here for birthday parties. And we just started coming in.”

He hadn’t skated in a long time, he said, but going to the rink reawakened his interest.

“The first time we came in, and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m just going to slap on a pair of the brown (inline) skates.’ And I was hooked,” he said.

The Rices have been working on the 10,200-square-foot building, adding new heaters and more insulation, working on a new deejay booth and a new skate storage room, and repairing the roof. Other upgrades and repairs are planned, but those will come over time, Robert Rice said. 

The Rices plan to expand the number of arcade games, and there are already people playing pickleball Monday and Friday. They offer basic skating lessons and an inline skater from Ellensburg comes over to teach that discipline. A local resident teaches lessons in roller figure skating. 

They’ve added some black lights to take advantage of the carpet installed a few years ago by previous owner Chuck Hendricks, which glows under black light. They also sell neon T-shirts and socks to highlight the new name.

“The kids love it, because they like to dress up in their neon. They glow,” Margy Rice said

Over time the Rices plan to expand roller rink times and activities. 

“We have a lot of big plans for the place,” Robert Rice said.

Neon Skateway reserves a time for homeschool families and hosts parties for community groups. It plays host to a lot of birthday parties, Margy Rice said, and family reunions. 

“We had an 88-year-old guy from for a family reunion,” she said. “(Family members) didn’t really want him to (go skating), but he did it.”

He used a training device to keep from falling, she said, but that was his only concession.

“He kept hold of that thing, and he was doing good. He asked Robert to race him and stuff, and he was going backwards,” she said. “He was one of the last ones off the floor, too. He loved it.”

“He (said), ‘If I had my normal skates on I’d be running circles around you whippersnappers,’” Robert Rice said.

The Rices offer a discount night on Tuesdays and will offer an adult session every other Wednesday starting in November. Open skating sessions are scheduled for Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons. A monthly schedule is posted on the Neon Skateway website, www.neonskatewayllc.com.

Robert Rice said he’s met people who remember skating in the rink as children and who are bringing their children. There are families coming for the online skating, children accompanying their parents. Robert Rice said he hopes to see more of that.

Cheryl Schweizer may be reached via email at cschweizer@columbiabasinherald.com.