The Children of Murfreesboro Used to Have Their Birthday Parties at Dipper Dan, the Skating Rink or the Martin Twin

Since March is my birthday month, I thought we would take a trip down memory lane and discuss where we would go for a birthday party and where would we get our birthday cake in years past.

By the way, my birthday is March 2, 1966. I was born at the old Rutherford County Hospital that used to sit between Highland Avenue and University Street. Today, the location is an open field with a fence around it.

A little trivia: our beloved Rutherford County Trustee Teb Batey and I were born on the same day and same year. I am pretty sure I’m 45 minutes older than him. Teb and I played basketball together at MTCS. He was our starting center and I came off the bench.

Back to birthdays. One thing is for sure, I enjoyed birthdays, whether it was a friend’s or mine. I remember mother baking me a cake, unless she got me one from Sugar n Spice, which was a real treat. I also got to invite friends over for a party at the house and we would play basketball and Atari and my friends would get to spend the night.

One of the most favorite places I liked to go for birthday parties was Dipper Dan, located in the Jackson Heights plaza off Broad Street. Today there’s a hair salon there. The cool thing about Dipper Dan was all the different flavors of ice cream we got to choose from. My favorite was pink bubblegum ice cream.

Another really cool thing about Dipper Dan was they had a birthday room in the back. If it was your birthday, you got to be their king or queen, which meant you got to be at the top of the pyramid and all your friends were below. When it was my birthday it was so cool to be the special one. I felt like a king. It was a privilege to have your birthday party there or to get invited to one.

As I grew older the pyramid at Dipper Dan became obsolete. We had to move on to cooler stuff. So around sixth grade we started having birthday parties at the skating rink on West College Street. Today it’s known as Skate Center West.

I remember Jack Warren ran it and he was the man in charge. He was like a DJ, so to speak, because he had a microphone and he was up in what looked like a penalty box but was in fact the DJ booth. He could easily watch what was going on. He made sure the party didn’t get out of hand and turn into the James Caan movie called Rollerball, where skaters got killed chasing a steel ball.

I was not much of a skater but I do remember doing the Hokey Pokey a few times. Doug Warren, who is Jack’s son, would later take over for his dad, and that dude could skate. He could skate forwards, backwards, and stop on a dime. The big thing at the party was getting to drink a suicide. Still to this day I don’t understand why it’s called that. The word suicide is depressing, but the drink was so sweet, a mixture of all the sodas of the day.

The Warrens have a long tradition of entertaining the people of Murfreesboro at their skating rinks. The old skating rink sat closer to College Street and it was a white cement block building. There was another skating rink on the other side of town that was called Hot Wheels, and this is where the wilder and cooler kids got to go skate. I did not get to skate there that much. The cool and wild would come later in life.

One other thing we would do is have a pizza party at Sir Pizza, Pizza Hut or Shakey’s, and then go to a movie at Jackson Heights plaza. If we ate at Sir Pizza we walked over to the Martin Twin movie theater because they were next door to each other.

Martin Twin was owned by Joe Tomlinson, and later in life I worked there. Today it’s the Premiere 6 and is owned by local businessman Dave Gober. Still to this day I love watching movies at Premiere 6 and indulging in Sir Pizza.

We would also go to the Cinema Twin, which was located on South Tennessee Boulevard behind a Roses department store. Hal Christiansen owned that particular movie theater. Mr. Christiansen was a really nice man, known for his turtlenecks and his love for theater. The Christiansens lived on Main Street in a very cool ranch home that sat across from Davis Market at the time.

These are just some of my memories growing up here in Murfreesboro in the ’70s and ’80s. Wow, things have changed since then. We had ShowBiz Pizza; today we have Chuck E. Cheese, the Discovery Center or perhaps Go USA Fun Park, among the movie theaters and many other places, that can host birthday parties.