By 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 losing 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 on 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 1964, 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 we'd 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 we'd 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 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.