Above: homemade skateboard, metal shoe-skates, crate scooters, sidewalk surfboard, “Chicago” skateboard
My Real Memoir: The Year I Invented Skateboarding
Actually, untold thousands of other Stone Age kids did too. The idea was in the zit-geist, which is to say that acne-prone teens and their younger sibs all suddenly got the same idea in the summer of 1959. Since surfing was the coolest thing ever, we all decided to convert our skates into “sidewalk surfboards.” But how?
There Were Two Types of Skates:
1) Pro skates with smooth “clay” wheels that you could rent at the local roll-a-rama. You’d glide around the rink, and Hokey Pokey to the center, hoping to “put your left foot in” just as that cute girl in the poodle skirt did.
2) Metal skates, the kind you’d steal from your buddy’s kid sister, strap onto your sneakers, and rumble noisily down “Death Hill” in, hoping nobody stretched a water hose across the sidewalk.
Metal skates were cheap and flimsy, and the only kind anybody I knew had. But, hey, they had wheels, and any kind of wheels were better than no wheels. Plus, we’d discovered you could pull the skates apart, nail the wheels to the bottom of a board, then stick a fruit crate on the front and, voilà, you had a crate-scooter! Of course, these tended to disintegrate, sending splintered wood and body parts everywhere.
And Then I Heard…
…that surfers would sometimes build crate-less scooters and go “sidewalk surfin’!”
My buddies and I built one the next day!
Our homemade models were metal skate wheels nailed onto two-by-fours. They refused to turn, rumbled like coal cars, and stopped the instant they hit anything larger than an atom. Virtually every trip down Death Hill ended with hitting a rock or a speck of dust and becoming airborne. But, hey, we were sidewalk surfin’, and there was no going back!
We soon discovered that the sidewalks at our grammar school were smoother and featured virtually no cars backing out of driveways. Plus, they had tameable roller-coaster-like ridges and dips. So we surfed the hallways after school and every weekend.
Until One Day…
…my dad brought home a commercially made “Chicago” skateboard with better metal wheels and a thinner board you could actually turn! Sort of.
Then, a short time later, a surf company started making “pro” skateboards. They had wooden stringers and clay wheels that turned like a dream—and they actually looked like surfboards!
I got one that Christmas. A friend even got a “longboard.” It was so big that three of us could ride it, trading off roles as Captain, Engine Room, and Rudder Operator.
Skateboarding would eventually become an Olympic-level sport, leaving us cave dwellers in the dust. Or more likely splayed across somebody’s driveway. Still, I’ll never forget…
The year I invented skateboarding!
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