Edward
Bartender
- Messages
- 25,084
- Location
- London, UK
You are exactly right.
The skate key tightened the clamp-on steel skates (old-style) to the bottom of your regular shoes. The skates were oversize so you used the key to make them fit each person's shoes (adjust inward).
Maybe the ones in England worked better, but here they were a major-scale nuisance since you could tighten things up to the best of your ability and the flexing and vibration of the skate and shoe combination led to one skate soon and suddenly falling off.
One skate on one foot rolling and one skate being dragged along by the ankle strap was a formula for near-disaster. I do not have fond memories of those type roller skates.
The boot-skates were a different matter and worked well. Going skating was a great early-teen-age dating opportunity.
(Skate keys were sorta/maybe phallic in shape.)
The ones I had in Ireland were adjustable for length, but what he;d them on was the ankle strap at one end, and a lace-up leather band over the toe. I well remember the sensation of one of them coming loose like that!