SASKATOON -- At the Canadian figures skating championships this past week, you had your kiss and cry area, where all manner of tears are shed.
On the other hand, you had the Golden Oldies as they call themselves, six former Canadian figure-skating judges with 325 years of experience on the hot seat, and a whimsical approach to life, now that they don't have to look serious and important in front of the world.
Together, they are a scream. All week long, they've been giggling and joking and along the way, making others around them laugh, too.
Approaching them at breakfast Sunday morning, with a polite entreaty to write about them, the apparent director of the group, Joyce Hisey, looks sternly from beneath her brows and says: “You wish.''
Of course, you know she doesn't mean it. Not really. We take it as an invitation to sit down and natter with them.
Laughter follows, of course.
They've been told that they haven't changed a bit. Another growl from Hisey. “Does that mean I was a wrinkled teenager?” she says with a glint of mischief.
Four of the judges are from the WCM. In other words, the self-proclaimed West Coast Mafia. They are westerners: Margie Sandison of Regina, Rosemary Marks of Edmonton, Audrey Williams of Vancouver and Anne Doherty of Winnipeg.
Graciously they allowed two easterners into the group: Hisey, of Toronto, and former world pair champion, judge and costume designer Frances Dafoe, who lives in Florida but still calls Toronto her home.
“We finally let the east filter in,'' Sandison said.
The group has kept in touch with each other over the years, and get together at some cottage or other in the spring. “Joyce was so anxious to get into the group, that she offered up the farm,'' one laughed. In the spring, they will meet at Hisey's farm north of Toronto.
Somehow Hisey has become the team leader of the group. “She talks louder and faster than the rest of us,'' Sandison says.
They've returned to Saskatchewan to celebrate the competition at which most of them met: the western Canadian championships in Saskatoon.
Marks won the competition, while Williams was second at that event 58 years ago.
They also went up against each other at a Canadian championship in Oshawa in 1952. They had to get through a blinding snowstorm to get there. Dafoe and her partner, Norris Bowden were late getting to the city, and the hotel had let out their rooms to somebody else.
They were invited to stay at the Samuel McLaughlin home in Oshawa.
The next morning, Bowden announced that he and his partner should go for a little walk. But when they returned, the McLaughlins had left and locked the house, with all of their skates and costumes inside.
She and Bowden had to pry open a window to retrieve their equipment and get onto the ice to do their business.
Also Hisey, competing in the dance event as Joyce Kornacher with William de Nance, Jr., actually won a silver medal (behind Dafoe and Bowden, who also competed in pairs) but didn't get to collect it until a month later, the result of an “accounting” bungle, all too common in those days when all you got was a person with a sharp pencil and a piece of paper to decide the winner, maybe a day or two later. Hisey got the medal in the mail, but never got to stand on a podium.
Marks had a similar experience. After a competition, she was told she was seventh, but a month later, she was told she was second, because the accountant had written a two on the paper that looked, somehow, like a seven.
But now, never mind. “Medals tarnish, but friendships have the depth,'' Dafoe says profoundly.
Hisey led many of them to their judging careers. She coached Sandison, and like many others, they did their first judging trial at an Obertsdorf competition in Germany. Sandison remembers Hisey leading her to the judges' room and saying: "You're on your own now."
