An ad in the paper the other day caught my eye: "Hurry in..." it urged. "Just in time for Spring - Save $20! Now only $59.99!" The ad was trying to sell a skateboard that normally sold for $79.99.
My first board was a length of 2-by-4 with a flattened-out, metal-wheeled, strap-on roller skate nailed to one side. (Do they even make that kind of roller skates anymore?)
"Hey Lou, what's this?" I remember asking my buddy some 40 years ago as we were stowing our wet suits in his car trunk after a day of surfing.
"It's a skateboard," Lou explained. "I've watched some of the guys from Newport riding them in the parking lot. It gives ya something to do when the surf's flat."
Lou gave me the second skate from the old pair he'd swiped from his sister, and I went home, flattened it out and nailed together a board of my own.
On my first attempt at riding the thing I thought I was going to bust my butt. Balancing on a skateboard has never been an easy skill to master.
Eventually I got better. But with the old-style metal wheels placed relatively close together, it wasn't very difficult to slide the wheels on the pavement and lose control.
Our range of tricks was pretty well limited to slaloming between a series of cones we'd set up and keeping the makers of Band-Aids in business.
By the time I moved to Michigan, the first of the store-bought "modern" skateboards had come on the market. The Makaha brand featured shoe-skate-type wheel trucks; the wheels themselves were a clay composition for better traction. The board itself was also wider than the usual 2-by-4, so we could "walk" around on it a little.
The local freeway ended about a mile away from my house, and an unused, blocked-off on ramp at the end of it provided a great place for us kids to ride our skateboards and show off. We be stylin'. (When you're the only surfer within miles and the Beach Boys were at the height of their singing popularity, you tended to show off.)
I'd only had my Makaha a few weeks before I started to modify it. When I remounted the rear wheels about 3 inches forward, I found out that I could do kick turns and propel myself across flat pavement without ever stepping off the board. Of course, learning that skill used up another box of Band-Aids.
When I went off to Michigan State, I took my board along with me. It wasn't long before I found the perfect hill on one of the campus walkways. I also found out that I was no longer one of the only skateboarders in the area. Spring days would find the skateboarding hill jammed with other sidewalk surfers, each trying to outmaneuver the next.
Skateboarding's popularity seemed to drop off during the 1970s, and for a while my old board in the corner looked like it was in danger of becoming a real nostalgia artifact, like Hula Hoops or Lava Lamps.
Then, one day, I turned on the TV and here was this 14-year-old gremmie being interviewed. He was making $40,000 a year as a "pro" rider for some skateboard manufacturer's demonstration team!
Skateboarding had gotten popular again. Kids are now wearing protective arm and knee pads, gloves and helmets, and they're not tearing themselves up like we used to, except when they attempt tricks that we couldn't even begin to dream of.
The boards are better, too; they feature non-slip decks, wheel trucks designed just for skateboards, high-traction wheels and a host of other performance additions.
And, with the renewed interest of the last few years, skateboard parks have sprung up in some areas. At least two national-circulation skateboarding magazines are on the newsstands now.
We've probably all seen pictures of boards being ridden in empty swimming pools and on specially constructed skateboard ramps, not to mention an assortment of tricks that can only be labeled "awesome."
The only words of advice that I'd have to pass on, as an ol' sidewalk surfer myself, are these: Wear your protective gear (you're talking to a lot of road-rash experience here). And remember, a loose helmet isn't going to do you any good; pick an uncrowded, traffic-free spot where you're not liable to run into anybody or have anything run into you when you're starting out.
And then, get radical!
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