Here's a picture of my first REAL skateboard, after I ditched the Variflex POS that my parents thought was a decent skateboard. This board right here is probably the #1 gift I ever got as a kid. I remember opening it up on Xmas morning like it was yesterday. Got the shirt to match too... View attachment 11442 View attachment 11444
also during that decade the longboard was dead, buried, and everybody had gone home from the funeral.
Anyone else here that was skateboarding in the 1960s? Man, I was thrilled when they came out with a board that had some kind of rubber or polyurethane wheels, with Ball Bearings-- suddenly you could get these super fast smooth rides down the hills in New England. Course the boards and the sport changed alot soon after. But we would skate for hours on those hills after school, make our own tricks. The boards looked like today's longboards, but shorter. Saved up three months to get that sucker
I started skateboarding in about 1975. My first board was a "Rainbow Rider" I paid $35 for at JC Penny (they only had 2 boards top choose from. The other was a nash "Hot Foot", but it was a little cheaper and I wanted the best). It was about a year before the kicktail was invented and very reminiscent of the 60's boards. It had "Chicago" trucks, which where apparently the only skateboard trucks available because every skateboard had them (pretty sure chicago was the same company that made those disco roller skates). The board actually had a graphic on it that included the words: "with urethane wheels!"...so yeah, not much had changed in skateboards since the 60's. Good thing was skateboarding got ultra popular within the next couple years and the technology improved by lightyears.
My idiot friend out west was born and raised in Orange County. One christmas, his mom got him a pair of webbed gloves. This dude meets me down at Sunset Cliffs, mid winter. We are about to go out, and he breaks the gloves out of his truck. I will never forget the terror I felt, followed by the hysterical laughter. "So, what exactly are you going to do with those?"... "My mom got them for me for christmas"... "And why did she do that?"... "She thought they would keep my hands warm".... "Yeah, okay bro... Please pack your sh** up and never come back down here again. Or you can put your gloves away, meet me out there and don't scrape up your vagina on the walk down the trail."
reminds me of the first time I surfed sunset cliffs. I was standing on the rock where you paddle out, with my back turned to jump in that little pool, and a small swell (wasn't even a wave) washes over the rock and takes my feet out from under me...pretty sure I did a complete gainer. No apparent harm, so I paddle out, catch a couple waves and realize my fin broke off on the rock. Sucks because my friends father, a pro photographer, just happened to be taking pics of us...the one time I'm surfing like a dork.
Haha. Yeah, usually takes a couple of waves and then you realize, something just ain't right here. I was surfing OB, beach break about 10 years ago. I was on a beat up old 6'2 sharpeye that I had done a ghetto repair job on. There was a rip about 8 inches below the nose on the bottom, that went from rail to rail. I patched it up and took it out a couple days later. Went on my first wave, got a couple turns and then the board just crapped out. Didn't think anyting of it. Took like two more waves and I would just got locked on the face and the waves were pitching me, like I had an anchor on the board. I flip the board over, and the glass from nose to tail had ripped clean off, about a foot wide the whole way down the board. So I was out trying to surf a board that had nothing but a strip of exposed foam on the bottom. That board landed in the trash can that day, but I was super frustrated out there, like why the fu** am I surfing so bad right now....
When I was a kid in SoCal in the early 70s, wearing boxers under Hang Ten trunks was common. The boxers were longer than the trunks. It looked ridiculous, but it was a style back then. But it appears this practice was going on well before that, judging by the guy in the foreground in this 1964 photo taken at Palos Verdes CA (Bluff Cove). http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RmP6oJJhM...alos+Verdes+Cove%2C+1964+by+LeRoy+Grannis.jpg
Shaped my very first board from that book... with a Craftsman planer on sawhorses in my driveway, with blank and resin and cloth from Dan Heritage Sr.'s original shop.
