The Broad Street Bullies’ reign of terror in the NHL was coming to an end, punk rock was still in its early gestation phase and current North Vancouver-Lonsdale MLA Bowinn Ma was a decade away from even being born.
Flashback to 45-plus years ago and Don Bell was a year away from being elected mayor of the District of North Vancouver, while Bill Bennett was poised to begin his decade-long stay in the premier’s chair.
These were the heady days of 1975, when big hair, ultra-flamboyant disco tunes and muscle cars were all that and a bag of chips.
A movie about a particularly peckish shark would forever change how many of us viewed jumping in the ocean and the Number One song of the year was "Love Will Keep Us Together" by Captain & Tennille. It was a tune that no doubt reverberated through the Stardust Roller Rink, a North Vancouver cultural staple and rite of passage from the mid '60s to the early '80s.
The vaunted rink was in its hey day by 1975, attracting thousands of all ages to strap on the roller skates and whip around to the coolest tunes of the day.
In an effort to celebrate, relive and reconnect with those halcyon days of yesteryear, the North Shore News has recently launched a commemorative shirt to rekindle that spark of 1975.
Sold exclusively through the North Shore News’s Vintage Shop, the shirts range in size from small to 3XL and designed to weather and fade with each wash to give you that truly vintage look.
The Stardust logo, of course, is prominently featured front and centre. The Stardust shirt, however, is far from being the only way to connect to the North Shore’s past.
Five different collector totes are now available online that feature art and insignias dating back to the 1960s. Those totes include artwork featuring the B.C. coat of arms; The Seven Seas Floating Seafood restaurant; West and North Van Varsity throwback designs and a fifth design proclaiming “I Heart North Van.”
Each tote is 100 per cent cotton, with 20 1/2" self-fabric handles and a 9 1/2" handle drop.
And with more municipalities across the region banning single-use plastics, they’ll be particularly handy for any trip to the grocery store.
Outside of those totes, numerous other shirts are also available on the Vintage Shop. More than a dozen in a range of sizes and colours will instantly transform you back to your youth, or to a time when your parents were young. Long-time community fixtures featured on those shirts include the Lions Gate Tennis Club, the Garibaldi Lifts, Lynn Valley and the Norvans hockey team, among others.
And that’s just the start - the Vintage Store’s roster of cool and quirky collectibles will be ever expanding in the coming months.
As for tracing the now iconic Stardust logo, that’s a story that begins in 1963, when West Vancouver neighbours Mel Ross and Bud Allen decided to go into business together.
Neither Ross nor Allen knew anything about roller-skating, so they drove across the border at 7 p.m. on a Friday night to visit the local roller rinks.
“We got down as far as Edmonds (Wash.), there was a half a dozen of the rinks in the area but we went into the first one,” Ross told the North Shore News in 2014. “We got in there, we opened the door and the place was packed. I mean you couldn't move there were so many people. I looked at him, he looked at me and then that was that.”
The pair eventually came up with the name Stardust from a hotel sign they came across in Las Vegas, Nev. and purchased one and a half acres of land off Bewicke Avenue and Marine Drive on West 14th Street for $12,000.
The Stardust would eventually open in 1964, and as the old saying goes, timing was everything. The emergence of disco music in the 1970s gave way to roller rinks, and those roller rinks were having a pre-Internet viral moment that spanned more than a decade.
Simply put, it was the North Shore’s happening place to be.
"It was a facility that attracted a lot of young adults, a lot of teens, families," former general manager Noel Hardy told the News in 2014. "There were days - Saturdays - where there were over 1,000 people there."
The exclusive Stardust Roller Rink shirts can be bought online at shop.nsnews.com.
