Skippy Baxter still skating 80 years on

<p>Nobody skates through life, not really. But Skippy Baxter has come pretty close.</p><p>Baxter, two weeks short of 90 years old, is the grand old man at the ice-skating rink that was built -- for him, you could say -- by his late friend and employer Charles Schulz.</p><p>Since the "Peanuts" creator died at age 77 in 2000, Baxter has been the Redwood Empire Ice Arena's resident celebrity. He hasn't sought to be idolized by multiple generations of skaters, but he's naturally charming and gracious and he's blessed with a smile that could melt ice. So adoration just happens.</p><p>A near-Olympian, Baxter is still skating 80 years after he first strapped on a pair of blades and decades after he performed in thousands of professional ice shows as one of the most precise, athletic and high-leaping figure skaters in America.</p><p>"Maybe the reason I've lasted is that I gave up smoking the day I was born," he said from a table at the arena's Warm Puppy Café. "And I gave up alcohol the day I was born."</p><p>He doesn't curse, either, though he confesses that he used swear words while serving with a U.S. Army mountain unit in Italy in World War II because too much polite language prompted other GIs to throw things at him.</p><p>Since he helped fellow World War II veteran Schulz open the skating rink near Coddingtown 40 years ago, Baxter's main pursuit has been showing kids, not simply telling them, how to skate. He's had to back off from the lessons as of late, after having both a hip and knee replaced after a fall on the ice last year.</p><p>Even so, the man who taught Peggy Fleming as a child and showed Robin Cousins how to do a backflip intends to resume teaching, even if he has to call on younger instructors to spell him should he grow tired before a lesson is through.</p><p>"I'm going to return (to teaching) in 2010. I don't know exactly when," said Baxter, a widower since his wife, Phyllis, died a year ago last August. Any kids who take skating lessons from him next year will be lucky kids, because the inductee into two Halls of Fame (World Figure Skating and U.S. Figure Skating) plans to retire before the end of 2010.</p><p>To be clear, said Skippy Baxter, who went by his given name, Lloyd, until friends impressed by how he skipped across the ice gave him a nickname that stuck, "I'm not going to retire from skating, just from teaching."</p><p>And he vows he'll also continue his regular visits with his friend Sparky Schulz.</p><p>"I sure miss him," Baxter said. "He was such a wonderful person. I go to his grave (at Sebastopol's Pleasant Hills Cemetery) at least once, twice a week."</p><p>Baxter met Schulz, one of the world's favorite cartoonists, in 1966.</p><p>A few years prior to that, Baxter and his brother, Meryl, had left Oakland and had come to Santa Rosa hoping the little city could support a new ice-skating rink. Skippy Baxter was then a bit older than 40 and had completed a demanding, exciting and successful career as a competitive skater and performer.</p><p>He'd qualified for the 1940 Summer Olympics, only to see them cancelled because of World War II. He'd performed in 5,532 ice shows with Sonja Henie and other greats, then he'd turned to working with young figure skaters eager to dance, spin and leap on the ice as he did.</p><p>After Baxter and his brother chose Santa Rosa as the spot for a new rink in 1961, they had one built on Santa Rosa's Summerfield Road. The building is now home to the Rialto Lakeside Cinemas.</p><p>Baxter recalled the night that Sparky Schulz and Joyce, his first wife and the mother of his five children, popped in. They'd had dinner up at the nearby Hilltopper restaurant, now The Villa, and had seen the blinking "Ice Skating" sign. Baxter said the Schulzes, formerly of icy Minnesota, took a look around the rink and said they'd like to bring their kids in to learn to skate.</p><p>The Schulz kids became regulars at the rink. They were disappointed and their parents were, too, when Baxter and his brother discovered in 1968 that the building's laminated roof beams were separating. They sadly announced they'd have to close the arena while the beams were replaced.</p><p>Then Charles Schulz phoned Baxter with a proposal.</p><p>"He said, 'Skippy, if I build a new rink, will you and your brother run it?' Without hesitation, I said yes."</p><p>Schulz had a new ice arena constructed on West Steele Lane and opened it in 1969 with Meryl Baxter as its manager and Skippy Baxter as the director of instruction. Forty years later, Meryl is retired in Pleasanton and his brother skates on at the rink he knows better than anyone else.</p><p>Skippy Baxter's blue eyes smiled when he said he hopes that when he dies somebody will put his skates on him and lace them up, "but not too tight. It might cut off circulation."</p>