I recently purchased this colorful old decal on eBay, for a Memphis establishment called Rainbow Rollerdrome. Maybe that was the actual name of the roller-skating rink, but the entire complex on Lamar will forever be known as Rainbow Lake, which also included a huge outdoor swimming pool, fancy restaurant, picnic grounds, and more.
Rainbow Lake was opened way back in 1936 by Leo Pieraccini, when that stretch of Lamar (at Dunn) was on the outskirts of town. In the early years, it was mainly a place to swim; the skating rink wasn’t added until 1942. Memphis kids had a great time at Rainbow Lake over the years, but brother, the place was plagued by trouble. In 1947, it made all the newspapers when more than two dozen sailors from the Naval Air Station at Millington staged a bottle-throwing, drunk-punching, free-for-all with a group of civilians. It finally took a Naval Court of Inquiry to sort out all the mess and clear most of the charges.
In 1957, a rock-and-roll dance party held in Rainbow’s famous Terrace Room — and hosted by two of the most famous disk jockeys in Memphis history, Wink Martindale and Dewey Phillips — got out of hand when many of the kids (some of them just 15 years old), got rip-roaring drunk. Rainbow lost its beer license after that.
