In the photo, a bouffant-topped Sowinski is clenching her jaw, bracing herself, and winding up to deliver a roundhouse right to the angelic face of Judy Arnold, the fair-haired skating star of the old Philadelphia Warriors.

"They called me the Queen of Mean", Sowinski, now 67, said, with a chuckle. "But let's put it this way: The more obnoxious I could be, the more money I could put in my pocket."

These days, the Queen of Mean is back at it, teaching the fading sport to a new generation of four-wheeled women on the Penn-Jersey She Devils, an amateur team that began practicing recently for its March 22 opener.

Those players - married, single, mothers, ex-athletes, novices, most in their 20s and early 30s - must buy their equipment and pay for their rink time. They skate on hard floors instead of forgiving banked tracks. And they don't get the television exposure Sowinski and her raucous sport got in the 1960s, when broadcaster Elmer "Elbows" Anderson made Warriors games a Channel 48 staple.

But, according to Sowinski, they're every bit as spunky as she was.

"Sometimes they get their dandruff up," Sowinski said, pride evident in her smoky voice. "It's gotten brutal at times. There were a couple of games that even were called because of [fights]. They're really into what they are doing and into winning games."

That would have summed up the long career of Sowinski, a tall and athletic Chicago native who skated for the Warriors, the New York Bombers and other roller-derby clubs from 1959 through the early 1980s.

Though others saw it as pro wrestling on wheels, she took it seriously. With her size, agility and temperament, Sowinski quickly became a star. But when roller derby got too theatrical for her taste, something she recognizes in many of the other amateur leagues that still exist, she quit.

"It got to be more theater than skating ability," she said. "Back then we thought we were skaters first. It wasn't like pro wrestling and, with these [She Devils], it's even less so. These kids don't want no theatrics. They want to skate. There's no [fooling around] going on."

Sowinski's career began when an aunt took her to a match at the Chicago Coliseum in 1959. There she heard about a tryout, and before long she was skating for the San Francisco Bay Bombers.

She began at $100 a week, plus $25 for food, but eventually earned as much as $1,000 a week plus 1 percent of the gate for match races with rivals like Arnold, videos of which are still floating around the Internet.

"Take a look at this," Sowinski said, displaying a photo of her younger, uniformed self in a tame cheesecake pose. "They made us do everything back then."

Elected to the sport's Hall of Fame in 2004, she was perhaps the Roller Games' most famous female villain and the dark foil for the blonde, ultra-popular Arnold.

"Arnold's sneering opponent and arch-rival," is how one Roller Derby Web site recalls Sowinski.

Ironically, it was when Arnold decided to retire in the late 1970s that the Warriors' owners, in desperate need of an attraction, asked Sowinski to play for them.

"I agreed," she said. "Arnold stayed on a few months before leaving, and I stayed. But the whole thing only lasted another few years."

Roller derby, which once drew healthy TV ratings and attracted 52,000 to a 1972 match at Chicago's Comiskey Park, began to decline in the mid-'70s.

Pro wrestling's new popularity bit into its UHF-TV audience. Boys and young men who liked to roller skate turned to hockey when that sport expanded in the United States. And success had created far too many teams and splinter leagues.

"The market was saturated," Sowinski said. "It hung on in Los Angeles and San Francisco for a while. Most of us quit because it wasn't what it used to be. It was more showmanship. . . . We were skaters and not clowns. That's how we looked at it.

"Plus, by that time, my body and legs didn't want to do it any more. I'd wake up in the mornings, and my back and knees would ache. You do something for so many years, it catches up with you."

Retired for a quarter century, Sowinski lives in a dark but immaculate South Philly rowhouse with her blind, wheezing dog.

She always kept busy, but there were many days whose highlights were the cigarette breaks she'd take, sticking her head out the front door to disperse the smoke and observe the neighborhood where she has lived for three decades.

But a few years ago, a man named Ken Sikes called. He said he was starting a league for women roller-derby players in the area and wanted Sowinski as an instructor.

"It was better than being a couch potato," she said. "I enjoy moving around and working with the younger kids."

The She Devils practice in the Northeast, play their home games in Mount Laurel, and compete in the Old School Derby Association, a league that attempts to recreate the style of play in which Sowinski, Arnold and such male stars as Buddy Atkinson Sr. and Little Richard Brown thrived.

"Personally, I don't like this new style. It's more of a speed race. To me, there's no body contact, no strategy," she said.

So, like a wizened baseball coach, she teaches the fundamentals to the She Devils - endurance, jamming, blocking, and how to fall.

"We skated on banked tracks, and there was give when you fell," she said. "We had Hollywood stuntmen teach us how. But these girls are skating on hard floors. There's no way to teach them a technique to make it hurt any less."

Once a year, Sowinski and some Roller Games survivors gather in Laughlin, Nev., for a reunion.

"A lot of them are gone now," she said. "But I had a good time in my life. I had the opportunity to travel all over the world. I tell the girls, 'If that's what you want to do, do it.' "

With that, she walked to the front door, propped it open, and lit a cigarette. The old dog wheezed.

"Beautiful day," she said, her eyes scanning the block, "just a beautiful day."