Turn back the clock for a moment to 1968, to a cold and blustery day in February. About 11,000 people are seated in the year-old Spectrum arena in South Philadelphia. They are waiting for a matinee of the Ice Capades.

But the skaters never took the ice that afternoon. Instead, the crowd witnessed an event that nearly caused the financial ruin of the arena and its creators, a group of private investors led by Eagles owner Jerry Wolman and a 35-year-old Eagles vice president named Edward M. Snider.

While the spectators watched in amazement, high winds ripped away a 50-by-100-foot section of the Spectrum's roof and sent it crashing to the ground outside. The building's fortunes soon followed: Three years later, the arena - built for the city by Wolman's group at a cost of $12 million - was operating under the protection of federal bankruptcy court.

"The Spectrum wasn't a very valuable property back then," Snider recalled. "The roof had made it a national laughingstock."

No one is laughing now.

In one of the bigger gambles in the city's commercial history, Snider - owner of the fledgling Philadelphia Flyers - stepped forward to pull the Spectrum out of bankruptcy court in January 1972 with an offer to pay its more than $8 million in debt.

He received in return a 50-year lease to operate the city-owned arena at a minimal rent - $1,250 per month - and without the burden of real estate taxes. In addition, he was guaranteed the lion's share of profits from an adjacent city parking lot. Example: The lot generated revenues of $1.2 million last year, according to city officials, and $757,550.02 of it went to Snider.

To say that Snider won his gamble is gross understatement. In 1974, seven years after he started the team with a $2 million investment, Snider's Flyers galvanized the city with the first of their two Stanley Cups. Driven by the popularity of the Flyers, the Spectrum's turnstiles spun at a rate that made it, by most accounts, the most profitable arena in the nation for its size.

And those successes in turn begat Prism, the regional pay-television network that Snider started in 1976 in a joint venture with Twentieth Century- Fox. By 1983, when Snider sold his interest in Prism, it had become the nation's most successful regional network with 355,000 subscribers on 87 cable systems. The sale price was never revealed, but some observers placed Snider's share in the tens of millions.

Today the silver-haired Snider fairly shimmers with wealth and influence. At 52, the former accountant now presides over an $84 million-a-year sports, entertainment and marketing empire built on the twin pillars of the Flyers and the Spectrum.

That empire is called Spectacor Inc. And even with the subtraction of Prism and the Maine Mariners, which Snider founded as a Flyers farm team and later sold to the New Jersey Devils, Spectacor remains a combination of sports and business that can be matched only by the likes of Ted Turner, Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss and Gulf&Western Corp., with its Madison Square Garden/Knicks/Rangers/cable-television network.

"Ed Snider has to rank as one of the most successful and imaginative sports entrepreneurs ever," said Phillies president William Y. Giles. "With the exception of the O'Malley family and the Dodgers, I can't think of anyone else who has made a lot of money on a sports franchise. Most people make their money somewhere else, then buy a team."

Snider, by contrast, has parlayed the Flyers into an ever-expanding corporate organization. He began the company as a private firm in 1974 and remains its only shareholder. But in addition to the Flyers and the Spectrum, the Spectacor umbrella has been spread to include:

* SpectaGuard, an ushering and security-guard service. ... * Spectacor Management, an arena management and consulting firm. ... * Showcase Stores, a ticket and sports-merchandise firm. ...

* Ovations, a private dining club at the Spectrum.

Spectacor does not normally reveal its finances. But during a recent interview at the company's headquarters at 15th and Locust Streets, company chairman Fred A. Shabel said the company generated total revenues of $84 million during the fiscal year ended June 30. It was the company's highest revenue year ever.

Those revenues represented a 33 percent increase over the $63 million reported in the previous year. And they marked a continuation of a five-year trend in which total revenues have risen by 60 percent - despite the loss of the cash-generating Prism.

As chairman and president of Spectacor, Shabel has directed that revenue growth on a day-to-day basis while Snider oversees operations from his post as chairman of the executive committee. Indeed, Snider 's delegation of power is such that he is able, as he did this year, to leave Philadelphia in early July to spend the rest of the summer at his vacation home in Maine. ...