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ITEM 4 · THE ROLLER CENTURY TESTED AT CANVASS AND REGISTER STRENGTH
Skating is the checklist's first amusement test because it is the one that leaves buildings — rinks are big, named, and remembered — and for Walkerton no rink building's course is documented in any record this run reached. The test was run across the classes that would carry it: the directory canvasses (a rink is a listed business in every era of the craze), the banked set's amusement record whole (this history's register, the parks file's recreation furniture), and the present directory. No roller rink, skating palace, or ice-skating house stands at a Walkerton address in any of them; the town's skating, at the record's strength, was the unbuilt kind — the frozen pond and the river ice of the Kankakee country (winter's furniture, never an institution), and the school gymnasium's skate nights of the modern era, which leave no building and no course. The county's rink history — the big rooms of South Bend and Mishawaka where this town's skaters actually rolled — is those cities' whole, at boundary size. The item closes DUG as a negative at reached strength: a documented amusement absence, of the kind this section exists to print, because a kids'-history that only records what existed would never explain the Saturday drives to the cities' rinks that the town's memory is full of.
Principal sources: the directory canvasses; this history's register; the present directory — no rink at any date, November 2026.