Skip to main content

Frick & Frack

Image
By
One of the more popular genres of touring entertainers of the 1930s were professional ice skating shows.  They still exist today, but at one time they were far more popular, and a number of professional ice skating companies would tour the United States regularly.  There were the the Ice Cycles, Holiday on Ice, the Ice Capades, and the Ice Follies, among others.  They would tour from city to city, and drew audiences as well as any other form of live entertainment of the day.  The Ice Follies were even popular enough to be featured in the Joan Crawford film The Ice Follies of 1939, produced by MGM studios as an answer to the popular ice skating films of ice skating star Sonja Henie.

The Ice Follies featured large, elaborate productions, pooling the talents of numerous ice skating stars of the day.  It followed the structure of circus shows, with large, impressive numbers punctuated with smaller acts.  One of the smaller acts was a novelty skating team from Switzerland that combined the talents of Werner Groebli and Hansruedi Mauch, popularly known as Frick & Frack.

Publicity photo of Frick (right) & Frack (left) from the 1930s.
Their stage (rink?) names were their own inventions.  Frick is the name of a small village in Switzerland; Frack is the Swiss German word for a frock coat, which he wore during the early days of his performances on ice.  The pairing of the names was explained by Michael Mauch, the son of Frack: “They put the words together as a typical Swiss joke.”  (Humor does not always translate very well from one language to another.)

The two skaters operated as a team until Frack’s retirement in 1953.  Frick continued to skate professionally as “Mr. Frick”, though he skated with other partners throughout his career.  Frack died in 1979, and Frick was forced into retirement in 1980 by an accident.  Frick died in Zurich, Switzerland, in 2008.

The duo’s names have made their way into the English language.  The term “Frick and Frack” is often used to describe two people who are always together, sometimes to the point where you can’t tell one from the other.  The expression is still widely used by people who have never seen the pair’s performances, or who are even aware that it’s a reference to real people.

Read more about Mr. Frick in this book, available on the website of your favorite massive online retailer.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How the Lemon was Invented

By
Lemons How do you make a lemon?  Silly question, isn’t it?  You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right?  That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy.  Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow.  You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true.  The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma.  (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar .  I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.)  The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years.  The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits.  One f...
6 comments
Read more

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

By
Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”.  It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice.  Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes.   I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult?  Yes… and no.   The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult.  It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser .  Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word.  One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game...
1 comment
Read more

The Whoopie Cap

By
What can you do with your father’s old hats?  If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.”  Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right.  Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s.  In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats?  The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style.  Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice.  But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too.  When that happened, you’d ju...
Post a Comment
Read more