The year was 1978 and disco music was at its peak of popularity.
Songs like the Bee Gees' "Night Fever" and “Stayin’ Alive” and "Boogie Oogie Oogie” by A Taste of Honey colonized the Top 10 charts.
In Napa, there was one place where disco music — and people — not only rocked, they rolled.
The Wheelhouse roller rink.
Opened by a young couple named Charley and Janet Duckworth, the brand-new indoor skating rink was located at 1375 W. Imola Ave. in Napa’s River Park Shopping Center.
Charley Duckworth said his wife, then Janet Farnham, was the inspiration.
Back then, Janet Farnham was a national-level champion roller skater, Charley Duckworth recalled during a 2023 telephone interview. Both were in their early 20s when they started dating.
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He worked as a carpenter at the time.
“I used to tease her all the time (saying), ’Someday I’ll build you a roller skating rink,’” said Charley Duckworth.
In 1978, that jest became a reality. Over nearly a decade, the Wheelhouse became an iconic Napa hangout for both kids and adults, a home away from home for dozens and dozens of locals.
Launching the Wheelhouse
Certain circumstances helped the Wheelhouse get rolling, explained Charley Duckworth.
For example, Duckworth worked for his dad, Paul Duckworth, who was a contractor. At the time, River Park Shopping Center was about half the size it is now, and only included the section from where Goodwill is today to the former Vallerga’s Market (now a Planet Fitness gym). The east section was not yet built.
Another Napa roller skating rink, the Glidrome on Juarez Street, had operated for years, “but it had seen better days,” he said. “The community needed this.”
As Duckworth explained it, “my dad struck a deal with the developer” of the River Park center. “We built the skating rink at cost.”
In exchange, the Duckworths would lease the rink space for up to 20 years. They paid about 15 cents per square foot, or about $1,500 a month.
“It was a win-win for everybody,” said Charley Duckworth. “Things just snowballed from there.”
In a November 1978 story in the Napa Register, reporter Kevin Courtney described the scene at the newest Napa hangout.
“The Wheelhouse is changing the way a lot of Napans spend their afternoons and evenings,” wrote Courtney at the time. “Now three and four hundred people at a time go around and around to the beat of pop music washed by a spray of fractured light.’’”
“‘Roller skating is the latest craze,’” proclaimed rink owner Charley Duckworth at the ”gleaming” 10,000-square-foot facility.
Inside, the walls were painted so that it looked like the skaters were on the deck of a riverboat, with Napa-like scenes on either side. Accents were decorated with the kind of paint that glows under black lights. The name “Wheelhouse” was a play on words, he said.
A new Napa hangout is born
Charley Duckworth recalled the early days of the Wheelhouse.
“It was nuts how popular it was. It was crazy,” he said. “On our opening night, we didn’t know how to handle the crowd. People had been waiting in line for hours.” With all 600 pairs of roller skates in use, “we had to turn people away.”
“It was earth-shattering for us. We did not dream that we could sell out every weekend for months, and then our weekdays were great too … more than we could have ever dreamed.”
During that first year Charley Duckworth worked at the rink daily, while Janet Duckworth gave lessons. Their kids, Dana and Jake, would essentially grow up on wheels. Neither one can remember when they didn’t know to how to skate backward.
“We had a very, very busy life,” Charley Duckworth recalled. The family ate many meals at and near River Park, including Steins of Napa, Shakey’s Pizza and Foster’s Freeze. The roller rink was open daily, and on weekend nights you could skate until midnight.
During its busiest years, the rink employed about eight or nine staffers, Duckworth recalled.
When the Wheelhouse opened, roller skating was taking off across the country. According to Roller Skating Association International, today there are about 900 roller rinks in the U.S. but back in the late 1980s, that number topped 1,300.
Duckworth said the roller rink created a real family environment. Dozens of kids and families joined the Wheelhouse skating teams, which hosted competitions and trained skaters.
“When you are skating competitive, you are there every day, practicing," he recalled. "Some people were there every Friday or Saturday night. That was their thing. That was what they did.”
Seasonal Follies events were very popular, with many skaters participating and in costume. Skaters would also perform at the Napa Town & Country Fair every summer.
'Disco sucks!'
The Wheelhouse had practically become a Napa institution when the tides began to turn.
First came the backlash against disco music.
Radio stations began promoting "Bee Gee Free Weekends" devoid of all disco. A parody group called the HeeBeeGeeBees mocked the genre with its single "Meaningless Songs (in Very High Voices)." A 1979 Chicago White Sox doubleheader sold out the stadium with a Disco Demolition Night in which a large crate of disco records was detonated – touching off an on-field melee that forced umpires to cancel the second game.
“Disco sucks!” became a common sentiment at the time, Charley Duckworth remembered.
Disco music and roller skating were closely intertwined at the time, he explained. “When disco died, it died a hard and sudden death and it took skating with it.”
“We went from skating 400 to 500 skaters to a weekend night to 50," said Duckworth. “But we still had a lot of good people there, our regulars. They were loved and cared for and we were a family.”
“The '80s was tough,” said Jim McMahon, executive director of Roller Skating Association International, an Indiana-based group.
“A lot of rinks were closing in those days,” said Charley Duckworth. “Everybody had the same problem. Disco had died. It wasn’t just in Napa.”
Rising real estate costs made it expensive to open new rinks, said McMahon. “You almost couldn’t even get liability insurance” by then, he remembered.
Some rinks that had been originally opened by financial investors weren’t really in it for the long run, added McMahon. “The reason we lost a lot of rinks in the '80s was a lot of people that got into the business didn’t have a background in roller skating,” he said.
The end of an era
During the final years of the Wheelhouse, fewer and fewer skaters frequented the Napa rink. If a special event came to town, the number of skaters would plummet. To attract customers, “I was almost giving skating away,” said Charley Duckworth.
Wages were going up, and so were the utility costs. Employees dwindled to just Charley Duckworth and one other staffer. Janet Duckworth continued teaching at the rink, which was helpful. “It kept food on the table there at the end for us,” said Charley Duckworth.
Charley Duckworth said his family hung on for as long as possible.
“We were still trying to make a living in the hopes we were going to be able to keep it going," he said. "We had a lot of time and money invested. That was our life. But there just wasn’t enough money to go around.”
The Wheelhouse closed in June 1987.
“I was $50,000 in debt,” said Duckworth. “It was hard for me, hard for my family. My wife cried when I told her were going to close.”
Another tough moment was telling the skating club members and families about the decision to fold, said Duckworth.
“There were a lot of tears and talk about how to keep it open. It was a dramatic time for some of those kids,” he remembered.
Duckworth realized that his River Park landlord could re-lease the roller rink building to a new tenant, or tenants, and likely for higher rates than 15 cents a square foot. The Duckworths were able to “sell back” about 10 years of their long-term lease to the owners of that part of the shopping center.
Those future businesses would come to include a fabric/craft store and a fitness gym. Today, tenants occupying that former rink space include Coliseum Sports and Franco Fitness. No traces of the rink remain inside.
Wheelhouse friends keep memories alive
The Wheelhouse may be long gone, but Napans aren’t letting go of their skater memories.
A Facebook page called “Friends of the Wheelhouse Roller Skating Rink” has generated hundreds of posts, more than 150 photos from the Wheelhouse and skaters, and many, many comments.
Denise Pandey recalled working at the Wheelhouse from age 18 to about 23. She also taught the youngest skaters and was a regular in the roller skate follies.
“I loved the family community that I had there with the Duckworths and the other coaches,” said Pandey during a phone interview. “And I loved the music and I just loved being around the kids too. It was a good place to be.”
She especially liked learning new tricks and dances. “I like the competitive nature of what I was doing. And I loved doing the Follies dances and routines.” The Follies “were packed every night,” she said.
Now that she thinks about it, the roller rink might have been a little too popular, Pandey noted.
“I think a lot of parents used the Wheelhouse as a babysitter and just dropped off their kids, and some of these kids shouldn’t have been left alone,” she recalled. Yet “there were a lot of good kids,” as well.
The closure of the rink hit Pandey hard too. “It was a very sad thing because it was the loss of a place for kids to meet and congregate, something positive for kids to do.”
Former Napan Martin McDonald said the Wheelhouse was “a big, big part of my life” as a kid.
“The Duckworths took me in,” explained McDonald. “Charley is like a father to me.”
“I skated competitively there. I played my first video games in that place. They had Space Invaders, Asteroids, and the pay phone was a dime.”
McDonald also skated in the Roller Follies; “I was one of the Seven Dwarfs,” he recalled with a laugh. He remembers sneaking into the snack bar to eat candy. “I was a little towhead kid. I was very hyperactive,” and skating was a good outlet.
“I even kissed my first girl there,” said McDonald. “I would call her on the pay phone, ‘When are you coming to the roller skating rink?’”
The rink was like a second home, he said.
“Janet and Charley were our skate parents. I still have the (Wheelhouse) T-shirt I got with my name on it.”
After a young friend invited Debbie Bach to the Wheelhouse one day, she was hooked.
Bach, then Debbie Bise, became a serious competitive skater who would go on to compete in the state championships.
She would eventually train outside of Napa, but her first coach was Victor Hernandez, at the Wheelhouse.
Bach said she didn’t think of herself as particularly graceful at the time; she was only about 11 and felt shy. But she loved the freedom of “rolling around and doing routines and doing the jumps and the spins and being in the limelight” as a competitor.
Bach said she trained at the Wheelhouse at least four days a week, three hours a day.
“It wasn't easy by any means," said Bach. "Learning how to do jumps and the different spins and stuff — (it) was all a hard learning experience. I was up for the challenge and I just kept going. I loved it.”
Napa native Rachael Clark said she and her sisters had “the best times ever,” skating and meeting friends at the Wheelhouse. “We spent all day there,” and would call their mom from the pay phone when they wanted a ride home, she remembered.
“Our parents knew we were safe there. We had a great time,” said Clark. She mostly skated on the weekends, and disco music was a favorite.
When Chic's 1978 dance-floor hit "Le Freak" came on at the rink, she recalled, ”we’d get super-excited. The lights would be going and everyone would be going super-fast. And we’d jam-skate, in a group, in sync.”
The roller-fink fashions were just as memorable. “We wore bell bottoms, Dittos (pants), we had our combs in our back pockets and we had feathered hair,” said Clark.
Thinking of the Wheelhouse brings back to Clark “such positive, great memories as a child and young teen. It was such a spirited community. It was so much fun.”
“Lifetime friendships were built,” agreed Charley Duckworth.
But eventually, other changes were in the works as well.
“As the skating rink was winding down, I let it be known that I was going to start doing photography," said Duckworth. "I did a few weddings. Then I got into corporate executive photography.”
Today, Charley, 74, and Jane, who is in her late 60s, live in Sacramento. But Charley Duckworth's memories of his Wheelhouse days remain fond, decades later.
“I feel blessed. All of it was by the grace of God,” he said. “That’s how I feel about the skating rink and all those people in our lives.”