A Personal Skateboard History
Michael Muir
In the early 1960's surfing became a cultural phenomenon in Southern California, even reaching inland to the foothills of the San Fernando Valley. Although there was a cowboy culture firmly ingrained in the valley where we lived; it was slowly loosing its influence with kids. Many families owned horses in our area, and although we rode a lot with friends and were somewhat meshed with the western culture with its clothing style, rodeos, and country music; to kids like us there were two cool styles and country wasn't one off them. Socially, a self respecting kid had to be aligned with either the Greaser or Surfer style. As a young kid in 1960 I looked to the older kids in the area for style. On one hand there was the Greaser style with its James Dean look of blue jeans, white T-shirt
(standard with cigarette pack rolled up in the sleeve if a bit older) and
slicked back duck tailed hair. In the Sunland - Tujunga area the older
teenage Greasers were definitely the coolest and most noticeable. Their hot
rods gleamed and rumbled as they cruised the streets. The car club members,
like the Tujunga Angels, hung out at the park and mesmerized us kids with
tales of rumbles and gang wars. They held a corner on the market of
respect with a major degree of fear thrown in as well. Surfers on the other
hand, represented a more relaxed and fun loving Southern California style.
The dress style was similar; Levis and T-shirt, although they were worn
looser and accompanied with Huarache sandals rather than black boots as
footwear. Surfers began wearing their hair longer, oftentimes flopping down
on the sides and parted in the middle. My brother Steve and I weren't
allowed long hair of either style and ended up with the crew cut and butch
wax style of the 50's carried over into the new decade. Although there were
very few actual surfers in our area (I bet three quarters of the kids didn't
even go to the beach more than a few times a year) kids began classifying
themselves as Surfers or Greasers. Since my brother, Steve, and I spent
many of our weekends at the beach we tended to lean more in the Surfer side
of the cultural image pickings and choosings.
Surf music began to make its mark on Southern California culture.
Although we were die hard rock-and- roll listeners since 1956; when at a
young age we were turned on to Elvis by the older kids in our North
Hollywood neighborhood, by the time we moved to Shadow Hills early in 1959
rock had suffered some seemingly fatal blows. We were still mourning the
deaths of Buddy Holly and Richie Vallens. Elvis was heading off to the Army,
and the good rockers were being replaced by pop top 40 musicians and dance
music. We still woke up faithfully to KFWB's ditty - Wake up Wake up get out
of bed, start the day feeling great....on K-F-W-B ...channel 98 - Color
Radio. The station still played a lot of Fats Domino, and Chuck Berry, but
its days were numbered also. Our favorite DJ's were soon hauled off to jail
for payola and a new station KRLA started up. It played surf music.
Surf style changed over the first few years of the 1960's. Baggy white
jeans replaced blue Levis and Madras shirts replaced t-shirts. Surf was
coming into its own style- that similar oversized look it still prevalent
with skaters.
Surfing at the beach took off also. While there were only a handful of
surfers at Malibu in the mid 50's on any given weekend, by the early 1960's the
beaches were crowded. Not having enough money for surf boards, my
brother and I worked hard perfecting our body surfing
skills. We were pretty avid body surfers, and by the time we were ten and
eleven we had surfed many of the beaches from San Diego to Santa Barbara.
It helped having parents who loved going to the beach on weekends and having
warm weather most of the year. Even when we got older and had the money to
buy boards, we preferred body surfing and would rather spend money on good
swim fins. After college, Steve headed to Costa Rica for a while then
Haleiwa on the North Shore of Hawaii to spend ten years body surfing the big
waves including the Pipeline. His idea was to retire early in life, live by
the beach and surf while he was still up to it physically, (and supported by
a nice settlement from a motorcycle accident) and then head back to
California to get working on a career and life.
Surfing was in our minds and that feeling of taking off on the back of a
big wave, dropping weightlessly over the top, and sharply turning cutting
across the face before cutting out or tucking under was one of the most
awe-inspirning and powerful feelings a little kid can have. It was only
natural that we wanted to capture some of that excitement where we lived.
We moved to Shadow Hills of Sunland from North Hollywood. My folks had
picked out a partially completed house; the first of many new houses that
would be carved into the hills the the coming years. The house was ready for
us in the first few months of 1959. Although many of the rural roads were
still dirt, the new developments were preceded with freshly paved roads and
driveways. Some looked as steep as ocean waves. We had the steepest
driveway in the area. From the flat shelf that the house had been built
into on the top of a hill, the driveway dropped straight down and gradually
leveled off into the road running down the valley. It was so steep at the
top that my dad has to have a good running start at the hill or our car
wouldn't make it up.
I'm not too sure when the idea of putting a skate to board first came to
mind. I do remember a kid on our block in North Hollywood, aptly nicknamed
Scooter, who had a homemade wooden scooter that was ridden on the sidewalks.
I think it had a 2X4 base with a 2X4 riser and a T handle across the top. On
the bottom was nailed a pair of steel skates. I had a set of skates that
strapped to my shoes to ride on the sidewalks. I never really using them
much when I was younger because I kept falling on the sidewalks, but these
were brought along in the move with the rest of our toys. Luckily we kept
them because they became the base for our skateboards.
Shortly after we moved, my new friend Phil's father traded their old
shack of a house, which was on the same ridge top as our new house, and all
the land he owned that made up the little valley and surrounding hills to a
developer in exchange for a brand new big house and pool to be built on a
hill across the valley. Once the deal was made the bulldozers came carving
out new building sites around the valley, leveling Phil's barn, corral and
other traces of the ranch. Being young and easily impressed, my brother and
I were excited to see the excavation, paving and construction of new houses.
It only took a few years for us to come to deeply resent further terracing
of the hills with seemingly mindless abandon. Our admiration turned to
anger as we thought of jamming wrenches in the treads of the big machines
and putting sugar in the gas tanks. The bulldozers had done way more damage
than necessary; and although some of the lots in the valley quickly we were
built on, the terraces on the hills to the north of us were left unbuilt on
for years. One good thing that came from that series of excavations was a
beautifully paved dead end road with a nice grade and a sweeping curve.
The new houses being built supplied us with an endless amount of wood
and nails. We weren't allowed to snitch nails out of the carpenters wooden
nail barrels, but after they quit for the day we went down and picked up all
the dropped nails, nickel sized electrical box slugs (that could be scraped
down to size on concrete to vending machine acceptable size) and scrap wood.
There was a lot of framing wood and plywood.
I vividly remember one day sitting in front of our garage on the asphalt
driveway figuring out how to put a skate on a board. I don't think we
flattened the skates for the first skateboards. The skate was just taken
apart and nailed onto the 2X4 at the ends making it like a long shoe. I
wanted to make a scooter but I just couldn't make a sturdy handle. The part
of building that I felt most proud about was figuring out how to measure and
center up the skate without a ruler. I eyeballed the placement of the skate
on the board, then put a large nail across the board to the edge of the
metal skate. I pinched the nail carefully at the edge with my fingers
touching the edge of board, then reversing my hand checked the length of the
tip of the nail to the edge of the board on the other side. After some
adjustment and going back and forth a few times I had it centered exactly.
Nails were pounded through the holes in the metal on the bottom of the
boards; then nails were pounded through the front and back of the skates
that curved up where they used to cover the heel and toe of the shoe.
It must have been one of those seminal "Eureka" type moments that
influence one's life. Its funny to remember those moments being in that
measuring process after all these years, but it was the beginning of a life
full of building, inventing, and creating with my hands. That process gave
me the confidence to build in the future many skateboard designs, skim
boards, a surfboard, slot cars and tracks, mini bikes, rebuilding
motorcycles, and building a house and a school. And, even to this day I
find myself using that simple way of measuring and centering despite all the
tools I own.
Building skateboards with my own hands was equally as satisfying as the
thrill of riding them. The lessons learned and the attitudes gained from
working on and experimenting with skateboards is something missing from not
only skateboarding but many things kids use today. Most things are ready
made, and if something isn't too technologically complicated for an
individual to make or work on; it soon will be.
The skateboards that I first made were not made for standing. The
thought of riding the hills standing up on a board was a bit too scary. I
took a piece of plywood, nailed it to the top of the 2X4 skate board and set
off to ride down the hills sitting down. What a thrill it was. The thing
rattled like crazy, but on smooth newly paved roads it would hum until it
hit a pebble and skid with a grinding screech. The center of gravity was so
low and the degree of leverage of the plywood sticking out on the side was
so great that the board ran very stable and handled well even if I hit a
rock. I don't think I ever got tossed off. I was also amazed at the
control I had with the board cutting zig-zag on the hill, racing full speed,
and then stopping on a dime. It could spin a neat little broody stopping at
any time by applying all my force pushing one side down to grind while
pulling up on the other side. It left huge wood splintered tracks on our
neighbor's perfectly dark black asphalt. The thrill of riding seemed too
good to be true. I made another board for my brother and soon we were booth
zooming down the hills and sharing them with the kids in the neighborhood.
My brother remembers his seat being triangular in shape. He said he'd
use it till the points were all ground off. The seat then would be scrapped
and a new one nailed on.
There came a point when we decided to leave the seats off and ride the
boards standing up. Whatever the inspiration, (although probably from
watching surfers at Santa Monica and Malibu) there came a time when we
decided to leave the seats off and ride the boards standing up. I remember
using the bottom of our driveway to practice. The driveway was about a
hundred feet long. The top fifteen feet to us seemed nearly vertical and
way out of the question. From there is gradually tapered off until it hit
the main road leading up the bottom center of the valley. It was there we
started; working the last ten feet or so and gradually making our way up as
our skills increased. We learned quickly how any pebble would make a wheel
skid and pitch us off. We got good at bailing off but with inevitable falls
we began accumulating the beginning of a long run of road rashes. We
cleared that hill and practiced for months. I remember getting quite high
up the hill and flying down at a fast rate of speed rattling along, but I
don't know if we ever rode it from the top all the way down.
As our skills increased and our balance became better, we began taking
the boards to other streets to ride. My brother also remembers inventing
skateboard games. He said we padded the boards with carpet pieces and rode
at each other trying to crash the boards together jumping off at the last
minute.
Our favorite road was one built for a few building lots that never got
built on. it gave a nice ride with a sweeping turn. The road was fast, but
we didn't feel out of control like on our driveway. It was a dead end,
never used so we didn't even have to worry about cars. This road, though,
put an end to our skateboarding for a while.
Living up in the hills there were lots of things to do. We were always
off hiking, building forts, playing baseball, among other things. Every
once and a while my dad, who was a scientist, brought home a fifty five
gallon drum made out of thick cardboard. After dumping the residual
chemical powders out, we take turns climbing in and rolling fifty or sixty
yards down a grassy hill into a field scrambling our brains silly. We'd be
so dizzy we couldn't walk, crawl, or lift up any part of our bodies for the
longest time. We'd just lay on the ground looking up at the sky spinning
around - like our head was the center of the universe. The barrel was
always shared with the kids in the neighborhood and we would ride it until
it disintegrated. My brother and I were always a bit competitive with the
trio of brothers who lived down on the other side of the valley. I'm not
sure how the set of events or dares escalated, but to outdo us one of the
brothers took the barrel to the other side of the valley to a really steep
hill. It was a crazy dare and sure enough the barrel went so fast that the
younger brother's head and shoulders bounced out and banged won the hill
breaking his collar bone and messing his face up a bit. Needless to say
they blamed us for the mishap.
A few days later Steve and I were racing down that dead end road on our
skateboards. Steve was out in front cursing pretty fast. He swept around
the bend at a good clip and then went flying off hitting the ground hard. I
bailed and went to check on him. His arm was broken and hurting pretty bad.
I helped him back and after a stint in the emergency room getting the arm
set and put in a cast we went back to see what happened. There across the
road right where we least expected it was a neat row of pebbles stretched in
a line from one side of the road to the other. The Whitacher brothers had
exacted a toll of revenge. It took a while but we evened the score and then
some.
Steve's broken arm put a damper on skateboarding for a while. But bones
mend and kids spirits soar - as ours surely did at the sight of new
skateboards for sale with wide clay wheels. The boards just looked so much
better than our home-made ones, that we set our minds on getting some. Now
getting things was a whole lot different then. We got no allowance and the
going wage for two kids like us was twenty five cents a hour. The work we
hired ourselves out to do was back tiring pulling weeds out of people's
yards under the hot Southern Californian sun. I remember one day picking
and talking with Steve, our heads filled with dreams of riding ten speed
Schwin bicycles; when the brutal reality set in of how many miserable hours
we'd have to work to buy a new fifty dollar bike. Those long hours in the
sun taught us a valuable life lesson. We resolved not to piss away our
lives working for something that could be easily done without. Deciding to
make due with our way out of date balloon tire bikes was the only way we
could get out of endlessly picking weeds. The bikes were a pain riding up
the hills, but as we found out when going on long rides they rode well
across the sand in the wash going over to Hansen Dam. although they looked
like crap they were way better than the other kid¹s newer bikes in the dirt
and sand.
I'm not sure how we came up with the money to buy the new clay wheeled
skateboards. It might have been some of the bike savings or money got in
some more creative ways. We became very adept at horse-trading and setting
up money making schemes persuading the neighborhood kids to part with some
of their money on games of chance. Wherever the money came from we did find
a way to get some of the new skateboards.
Like other things in life, the promise generally exceeds the reality.
The new boards felt better, were more stable, produced less teeth rattling
vibration while riding down hills, but those wheels weren't immune to little
rocks; and like the steel wheels they would toss us off regularly. The
other thing about the clay wheels that was disappointing was their
unreliability. I remember going on a long day's ride with a friend only to
have to walk a long way back home with a broken wheel.
We were glad that we didn't throw out our old steel skateboards. We
experimented and refined the board shape to make them look more like the
store bought ones. With increased carpentry skills we were able us use
screws instead of nails to fasten the skates to the boards. The skates were
flattened out and set a bit further in from the front and rear of the board.
We used both kinds of boards for different kinds of riding.
We moved to Northern California in the middle of the 1962/63 school
year. I was dropped mid-year into Covington School in Los Altos.
There was an immediate culture shock- country bumpkins move to
suburbia. Gone were our wild sagebrush and cactus covered hills; replaced
by neat block after block of suburban ranch house neighborhoods. The kids
dressed differently too with slacks and button down shirts. It was a much
more upwardly mobile middle class dress than our faded button front
shrink-em-yourself Levis and white t-shirts. We were soon wearing Madras
and Pendleton blue and green plaid shirts - two more upwardly mobile surfer
basics.
Since we wouldn't be caught dead on those old 1940's balloon tire bikes
in our new neighborhood, skateboards and walking became our main mode of
transportation. We did a lot of skateboarding at Covington after school
hours and in the summer. The outdoor hallways were high gloss cement with a
variety of slopes which made for great riding. We showed the kids in the
neighborhood how to make the boards and some began riding with us. The
tennis courts would be a place we'd go after dinner and spend hours hanging
out with friends skateboarding around and chewing the fat.
Besides being fun, skateboarding was a practical means transportation
and socially something to do when hanging out. We didn't dint do too much
with working on tricks. In those days, just going down hills and staying on
was challenge enough. In the school's outdoor hallways we'd slalom around
the steel pillars and work on sharp turns but that was about it for skills.
We also did not identify ourselves as skaters. In 1963 and Œ64, around the
bay area, there was not a skating culture that we knew of. We never even
ran into other kids skating; it was just something my brother and I did for
fun. The only other kids that we ever skated with were kids in our
neighborhood that we taught.
One thing that I did notice once other kids started skating with us was
the difference in our styles of riding. I always stood on the board with my
right foot on the back of the board and pushed with my left foot. Once
underway the left foot could be brought up and placed cross wise on the
front of the board. Then the right foot could be adjusted sideways for
longer runs. It seemed natural to me but not many other kids ride that way.
I remember working on different skateboard deck designs - even trying
to make a pocket mini -skateboard; that was about eight to ten inches long-
just long enough for most of my back right foot to push and balance on and
an inch or so for the tip of my left toes to slide up on the nose. It was
fun to ride, but too unstable for daily use. And soon, it was taken apart
for another board design.
We thought up some new ways to use the skateboards. By 1963 I had a
mini-bike equipped with a two and a half horse power Clinton two stroke
engine. Its aluminum megaphone exhaust opened up to a gloriously loud three
inch diameter trumpet which, sometimes to the amusement of all, blew
perfect smoke rings. We would ride it up around the Catholic Church parking
lot and sometimes around the back of the Nunnery. The bikes raunchy wail
would inevitably bring the screeching black and whites racing after us and
shouting for us to get the hell out of there or something in that vein. Of
course that little bike was pretty fast and most of the time we made out
exit from the area before the real black and whites came cursing around with
a little more muscle.
We used that bike for a new kind of skateboarding. We tied a rope on
the back of the bike and take turns pulling each other on skateboards like
we were water skiers.
Around that time my best friend Ken, who lived across the street,
decided to get into surfing. We walked to a surf shop and bought a blank
foam board. Then he bought the fiberglass resin and some big sheets of
fiberglass fabric. We put the blank on some saw horses and got our first
experience working with fiberglass. After a lot of mistakes, bubbles,
sanding, and recoating it came out pretty well. After practicing in a
friends swimming pool, we got his older brother or somebody to drive us up
over the hills to Santa Cruz. There I got my first experience with board
surfing. It was fun but I was still a die hard body surfer and never got
around to making my own board. With that experience behind me though, I
started working on a new project. I had seen some kids at the beach using
skim boards. They were crude plywood boards covered with varnish. I
thought I could use the fiberglass experience to make a better one. I got a
large piece of plywood, cut it into an approximately three foot circle. I
filed the edges round and fiberglassed it. The board had a slight warp in
it which in real use, served it well. With the slight kick tail on it, I was
able to control and steer it more than the straight flat boards. It would
turn pretty well, raise its front lip and steer from a parallel ride on the
sand straight into the wave and ride up over it a bit to do a 180 or 360.
Steve and I soon make a second board, waxed them up like a surfboards and
spent endless days at the beach riding these boards. The water up north was
too cold to body surf for more than a half hour at a time before we got the
shakes. The rip tides were also pretty bad at Half Moon Bay where we
usually went. It was the closest beach up over the hills from Los Altos. We
remember driving past the Merry Pranksters place with the Ken Kesey painted
bus. Sometimes at Half Moon Bay we¹d take our skimboards down the beach to
where the cliff jutted out into the sea. At low tide we could carry the
boards over the rocks to the other side which was a nudist beach. There
we¹d zoom down the beach past all the nudists partaking in their idea of fun
in the sun.
The back-assward style of skateboarding proved to be ideal for
skimboarding. With good right leg balance I could take my left foot up,
lean back and shoot the board out ahead while on the move - then quickly
running to catch up with the board ahead of me. I could then hop on again
for a continuous long ride down the beach.
One of my last memories of skateboarding was around 1965. After living
in the neighborhood for a couple of years without realizing the fantastic
sub-world just beyond our backyards, we discovered the cement river that ran
through the town. It was only about a quarter mile away from us, but
completely hidden. The flood control river was about fifteen feet across at
the bottom with ten to twelve foot sloping sides that widened out to make
it about thirty feet across at the top. At the top edge six foot high
fences of people's back yards ran along both sides. The river ran for miles
and miles. We'd skateboard along together hidden from view. It took us to
the other side of town and then to a bit of the country where the fences
stopped as it ran through some vegetable farms. Most of the time it was
pretty level with minor grades, but in some place there were good drops.
One in particular was wild. it dropped down into a half mile long tunnel
under a highway. We'd ride into the darkness until we chickened out and
bailed. The cement river was our a secret skateboard way across
town. I remember using it before Halloween to make foraging raids to
collect tomatoes and other equally good throwing supplies to add to our
cache of eggs that were sufficiently ripening awaiting the big night.
The skateboards were a perfect means of transportation, a way for
getting someplace and back with friends - that is until I got my motorcycle
license. From that point I'm sad to say the boards were stashed in the
garage to make way for a new obsession, restoring and riding British Bikes-
one which is still with me to this day.
Those years of skateboarding, though, gave me my first taste of
engineering as well as just plain fun. Now years later, being introduced to
the unbelievable advances in skateboarding technology by my son, I'm back on
the board again. That old feeling of freedom is still there, floating a few
inches above the ground, feeling the pull of centrifugal force leaning into
a turn, and pushing to maintain speed. The balance and flow is like noting
else. If only I had one of these boards in the early 60's I probably would
have never stopped. We could have ridden up and down the cement river
walls, up and over obstacles, and learned an endless variety of tricks.
Well I guess its never too late to learn.