1960’s & 70’s

Robert Norman “Badger Bob” Johnson, coach of Team USA at the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics owes some of his success to the Ice Hockey Camps he held every summer in Aspen in the late 1960’s and into the 1970’s.

The Brown Ice Palace, later known as the Aspen Ice Gardens, was home to Coach Johnson’s summer camps.   Coach Johnson started the camps while he was the head hockey coach for Colorado College, a position he took in 1963, and even after he moved to the University of Wisconsin (Madison) in 1966 he continued to hold his summer hockey camps in Aspen.  Some of his students, including his son, Mark; who attended the summer camps went on to be members of Team USA and were part of the miracle on Ice.

The Hockey camp had to share the ice with a Figure Skating Clinic which also attracted talented figure skaters from all over the United States every summer.  The ice sharing arrangement was tenuous at best and was the cause of many verbal disagreements between the two camps throughout the summers.  Disagreements aside, the skaters themselves found a convenient dating service out of the two programs.  The participants knew that they would all go their separate ways by summer’s end so the usual commitment issues were never a problem. 

I worked upstairs at the refreshment stand at the Brown Ice Palace for a number of summers and got to know Coach Johnson and many of his players.  They were a good group of guys and would willingly let a number of the local boys skate with them and pick up pointers.  Most of us that worked for Lefty Brinkman, manager of the Ice Rink, played in the local hockey programs.  The pointers we learned from Coach Johnson and his players made the local Aspen Teams tough to beat throughout the years.

Little did we know we were skating with a bunch of guys that would go on to make history?