In the early 1960s, my family was living in Hermosa Beach and our friend, Don Guild, owned the local drugstore. Appearing one day in his front window was an 18-inch piece of wood painted red with a roller skate nailed to the bottom. On the top in big bright, white letters it said “Bun Board.”
A friend of his had been trying for six months to get Don to sell them in his store. Finally, Don took six of them on consignment. The boards were all gone in three days. I am not saying this was the first commercial skateboard ever built and sold, but it was my first experience with one. However, as a 10-year-old kid, when the wheels began to wear out on my roller skates I nailed them to the bottom of a 4-foot long 2 x 4. On the front end, I nailed an upright 1 x 4 piece and another piece of 1 x 4 as a handle across the top so I could steer it around the cracks in the sidewalk.
When those first skateboards appeared in Hermosa, every kid in town was getting their hands on one and they began to get sophisticated when someone invented the skateboard wheel and gave the rider more control.
It didn’t take long before the government took control of skateboard riders. At 11 o’clock, the lifeguards made all of the people get out of the water with their surfboards, so the few swimmers could swim. Naturally, the surfers started riding their skateboards at 11:05, and then immediately started getting hassled by the local police. It was a win-win for the government and a lose-lose for the surfers.
About a year or two later, word began to spread that there was a storm drain in nearby Torrance with steep sides and skateboarders could carve graceful turns along the sides. They also found unoccupied homes with empty swimming pools and rode their boards to a new level of high performance.
About this same time, the skateboard explosion occurred in Venice and Santa Cruz.
Within three or four years, someone opened the first commercial skateboard park in the world, located between San Diego and Oceanside. They tried to operate it like a ski resort by charging riders by the hour or selling them an all-day ticket.
Ed Siegel from the ski resort management business was able to nail the job as general manager and had to improvise the rules. A lot of kids tried to ride for free when the park had closed.
One of my company salesmen went down to the commercial park for the weekend and managed to break his leg. Almost immediately his phone started ringing with calls from attorneys that wanted to sue the park for untold millions of dollars. Fortunately, he didn’t, recognizing that he had to take responsibility for his own actions. It taught whoever built the park to have adequate insurance.
Around 2000, I decided that Orcas Island needed a skateboard park as I watched the kids ravage the grocery and drug store parking lots. I was fortunate when the superintendent of schools gave us a quarter of an acre and so all we I had to do was raise the money to build it. In the next couple of years, we managed to raise $64,000.
One day, Paul Garwood, who owns the local lumber yard, and I were sitting where the park would eventually be located and decided that if we dug the hole the money would start showing up. And it did, in big numbers.
We hired Monk Hubbard and Grindline Builders of West Seattle to build the park. Next was the job of convincing potential island donors to support the park and we were able to secure donations of $250,000, $50,000 of which went into an endowment for upkeep.
In 2004, a Skateboard Magazine editorial name it “one of the three best in the world.”
Halfway through the summer, we purchased two sets of bleachers so that families and friends could watch the skaters destroy their bodies when they crashed.
During the summer, vanloads of young people with skateboards come across on the ferry and camp in nearby Moran State Park for $5 per night.
A month or two after we finished it, I watched a young man learning to skateboard while he was wearing a Spiderman Halloween costume. Though it was evident he was lacking in social skills, most of the older kids helped him. His mother told me that he was adopted, but they didn’t find out until later that he had been badly beaten as a baby. He was 9-years-old and had never spoken a word, cried or uttered a sound of any kind.
She told me later that on the way home after a week in the skateboard park, they were driving through Sacramento when from the back seat came, “Dad, can I have a hamburger?”
I believe the cure for his being beaten as a child was in the freedom he found in the skateboard park.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller. Read more of Warren’s stories at TheTahoeWeekly.com.
