So, in the eye of this ongoing ice-top maelstrom, the 54-year-old customer service manager for a Kitchener snowblower-maker settles into his Quiet Zone.

Armed with a silver whistle and school safety-patrol arm bands, he passes judgment from this serene spot where he can watch the world spin wildly around him.

All around him are losing their helmets and blaming him. It’s fever-pitch perfect.

“No matter how hectic my life gets, when I’m on the ice, it’s quiet,” Beatty said.

“For the next two and a half hours of your life, you are in control of what happens around you.”

This is what he loves about being a junior and university ice hockey referee, when he’s not circling the globe to officiate ball hockey championships or lamenting a warm winter’s melting effect on a cold business.

Beatty is in command after the first puck drops. His say is final until the final buzzer.

This is what he hates to give up after 30 years and more than 1,500 games in Ontario Hockey Association stripes — this serene inner sanctuary where he trusts in himself when all men — coaches, players, fans, his bosses — doubt him.

But he will not hold on when there is nothing to hold onto.

He’s done all the big games at this level. The NHL called others he’s worked with — Kevin Pollock, Greg Devorski, Stephen Walkom, Scott Cherrey — but never him.

“Disappointing? Yes.” he said. “But, I can’t complain. It’s been a great run.”

So this is Beatty’s No Complaints Farewell Tour.

Next Saturday is his final regular-season junior game at Galt Arena. And, the Friday after that, Feb. 22, he’ll take a bow at Stratford’s Allman Arena, the musty shrine on Morenz Drive which local officials call The Mecca.

Beatty knows how the opening act of his farewell performance will go.

He’ll step up the ramp to the ice-level. As he circles his Stratford stage and the crowd reads the name on the back of his sweater, the jeers will start. The boos will follow him around the theatre in a wave of affectionate scorn.

They love to hate him. He just loves them as he skates this Green Mile which may lead to a supervisor’s role above.

They yell “Hit him again, he’s still breathing!” after he collides with a player and falls. He gets back up and carries on.

He won’t give way to hating. He adores his Stratford hecklers behind the penalty box. They keep him honest. And once, when a wayward stick bashed Beatty in the teeth, some Stratford leather-lungs gave him whisky from their flask to ease his suffering.

Beatty, once chased around Stratford ice by a Brantford player intent on punching out a ref in his final junior game, is a man caught between eras now.

He’s too young to hang them up. But, he’s too old to hang on.

It’s almost closing time at the Snack Bar. Beatty senses it’s time for his Last Call.

The reflections in the end zone glass, the ones he consults to see what’s happening behind him, are fading into the distance.

He can still taste the hotdog and Pepsi he earned, along with 50 cents a game, when he worked his first game at age 13 back in his hometown of Barker’s Point, N.B.

The hotdog buns were steamed back then.

“I can smell them now,” he said.

His old hockey coach had asked him to whistle while he works and he became smitten.

Barker’s Point, the Fredericton suburb where he played Jr. B, is quite the place. They call it Hammer Town after two goons did in a taxi driver with a hammer back in 1949.

Stripes fit those thugs in prison, while stripes fit Beatty on the ice, long before he earned a business administration degree from the University of New Brunswick. They came west with him when he followed his college sweetheart, Wendy, his first wife, to Kitchener in search of work.

He was schooled in the No Blood, No Foul College of Officiating, when the game ran as a one-ref tyranny. He’s adapted to the modern-age two-ref democracy, where all that is seen is called by two sets of overlapping eyes.

Refs used to be the Falstaff of the production, all wit and wisdom and a little thick around the middle. Now, they are thin kids, just one-dimensional cardboard characters.

Beatty hears the Chimes at Midnight.

So he’s going now, before someone tells him to leave. Before someone stuffs paper in his whistle so it won’t blow, just like his pranking colleagues on the night of his first game in old Elmira Arena.

“No noise,” Beatty thought to himself as he tried in vain to whistle an offside that night in Elmira while his co-workers in stripes held their guts as they guffawed.

So he has met Disaster. Now, 30 years later, he greets that other impostor, Triumph.

Even the villain — arrogant and incompetent, say his detractors — gets a victory lap.

Beatty is taking his twirl in style, donning the same heavy-wool coat, silk scarf and fedora he liked to wear to his assignments when his career began. He wanted to look sharp, chewing on a cigar in a time when you could puff away in the tobacco-country barns. His gold-skate cufflinks are the crowning flourish to his Spencer Tracy pose.

Physical scars adorn him, too.

A university slapshot once blew apart his elbow. A player’s head butted him on the nose in Hanover. His three front teeth on top pull out on a plate.

The psychological scars run deeper into the offsides of soul.

His first marriage, which gave him daughters Courtney and Kristen, ended in divorce after 11 years. All those games, 50 a year for 30 years, kept him away from his young family. Maybe too often. He entered Quiet Zone at a hefty price.

Did his passion for refereeing cost him his marriage?

“It could have,” said Beatty, who remarried two years ago to second wife, Sheri.

Beatty is no Kipling. But has three words of advice for today’s young officials. “Family is first.” Beatty’s daughters used to sit in the crowd in Cambridge while he worked games until, one night, a loudmouth beside them ripped into their father.

“Leave him alone! He’s my dad!” Courtney yelled.

That was one of the last games they came to. Dad carried on without them. But both grown girls plan to show up in Stratford and Cambridge as he winds his work down.

Now, three decades of white-knuckle driving on the frozen back roads leading to every indecent rink in southern Ontario are nearly behind him.

You get there because there can be no game without you. You drive through Hades to get there and people crap all over you for your trouble.

A 30-year trail of roadkill — dogs, cats, raccoons — lay in his whistle’s wake. He’s just happy not to be one of the cadavers in the ditch.

“Safe Drive is always our motto,” he said, embarking for a playoff game in Wingham.

So forget the silly games, those 60 worthless minutes worth of distance run. They mean nothing. Forget blown calls and blowout scores, they disappear into the warehouse of time. Be safe. Keep the teenage players safe from themselves and each other.

Survive. Remember what matters. People matter most to Beatty.

That’s why he won’t use the drive-thru at the coffee shop. It’s not about the java. He yearns to find out who is inside, old friends or new.

“I get out of my car and walk in as you never know who is in there that might change your life or make it better,” he said.

Maybe, over 30 years at the rink, Beatty changed some lives and made them better.

He has talked with crowds, walked with Sugar Kings and kept his common touch — like when a coach demanded to see the notes he had taken during a donnybrook in Paris. So Beatty showed him the list he had made. It contained no player numbers, just items his wife wanted him to pick up on the way home.

“Milk. Bread. Eggs,” he said with a laugh.

That’s still Beatty’s shopping list as he nears Last Call. The stuff that matters.

Neither foes nor loving friends can hurt him now.

A career of Unforgiving Minutes is filled. All is forgiven. All are forgiven.

“It’s all good.”

NOTE: Bob Beatty will also be retiring from the sport ball hockey and has accepted the invitation to officiate at the 2013 World Ball Hockey Championships in Toronto. He has officiated in many Ontario Ball Hockey Association (OBHA) Provincials as well has been selected to national and international events over the past 20 years. Bob will continue to work with the OBHA Technical Committee and National Ball Hockey Association of Canada Board at various national events.

Jeff Hicks, Kitchener Record - Last Call