Roller derby was born on Aug. 13, 1935, at the Chicago Coliseum. The story goes that Leo Seltzer, an event promoter who had cut his teeth on walkathons, was looking for something a little more exciting to draw Depression-era crowds. After reading in a magazine that more than 90 percent of Americans had roller-skated at some point in their lives, he decided to put his show on wheels.
Twenty-thousand people came out for the first Transcontinental Derby to watch two-person teams, each consisting of a man and a woman, skate 57,000 laps around a flat track, Keith Coppage writes in “Roller Derby to RollerJam: The Authorized Story of an Unauthorized Sport.” Small lights on a large map tracked the skaters’ progress as they took turns whizzing around the ring, their mileage blinking along the route from New York to San Diego. The first team to complete the roughly 2,700 miles from coast to coast was declared the winner. On average, a single marathon took more than three weeks.