Skatey...The life of Les Skate

Skatey
The Life of Les Skate
We built our first home from scratch in Croydon. We had the two girls first, Lynne and
Julie. Then five years later we had the two boys, Roland (Rol,) and Timothy (Tim.) Two
pigeon pairs. It worked out good. When Julie came along, she was just ideal with Lynne. A
really good pair. And then we had that lapse of five years, then it was the same with the
two boys. They became good mates, went through scouts and so forth together and are
still good mates.
We had the two girls first,
then five years later we had
the two boys. Two pigeon
pairs. It worked out good.
Joan has said that we should have spent more time
together during those years. I was heavily involved
with the football club for many years. I always felt that
if you were involved in doing something, you do it
properly or get out and don’t do it at all. There was
always so many things to look after, and I felt that I
just had to be there to do it. I was there for twenty-five years. As a player and a coach and
a committee man. And building the buildings. It became part of my life … I was deeply
involved in it. We lived very comfortably and I don’t think my family suffered because of it,
but as Joan says, perhaps a bit more time together in those years things might have been a
bit better. I don’t know, they’ve all grown up alright.
I always felt that if you were involved in doing
something, you do it properly or get out and
don’t do it at all.
Some early holidays
While the kids were little, we had the chance to take them on some holidays. One time
was just before Lynny started school. We knew we had to go then or it would be another
ten years, so I hired a caravan and off we went.
At about that stage, the main holiday area in Queensland, the Gold Coast, was just getting
going. They were starting to carve it out of the sand and the bulrushes and stuff. There
were all these pink, blue and yellow cement sheet buildings all the way along the coast.
Oh, it was weird! We went up there and stayed at Miami Beach which was nothing, just
tussocks down to the sand. At that stage the big corporations were just starting to get in.
They’d built this twenty-storey building right in the middle of the sand and the tussocks!
You couldn’t believe it! Not too many years after that they opened up all the canals up
there, inland. They built the area all up around the waterways and the area just boomed.
We saw it in a very early, raw stage. We had a great time there.
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