Posted on 08/14/2014 1:37:41 AM PDT by lee martell
About twenty years ago, I began seeing a return of the skateboard. Suddenly, the kids of today were using a hobby tool I had grown up seeing during the 1960s. I know how particular the kids of today are, how jaded they are about having access to the latest in movies, music and sporting events. They usually expect these to be made available free of charge or at a low cost. I was surprised that such a simple, low tech item would be acceptable, let alone popular. This latest wave of skateboard popularity has gone on for years, long enough to produce 35 year old men who still use their skateboard as transportation. I saw that very thing happen today, with a guy in a sport jacket and levis, speeding on the winding sidewalks near the lake as he chatted on his cell phone. Always the ubiquitous cellphone. If Dante's Inferno was rewritten today, the writer Dante Alighieri would have to include a cell phone within each of the Nine Circles Of Hell that he described so long ago. Many skateboarders spend almost as much time painting resurfacing, and lacquering their boards as a surfer spends on his surfboard. Some have a deep relationship with this 'magic carpet' this Private Pegasus that they have ridden during their formative years.
The popularity may be due to the fact that many schools, too many, have sharply reduced activity time at schools. So, unless you belong to one of the sport teams, you won't get very much exercise outside of walking from the computer laptop in the bedroom to the computer tablet kept on the kitchen countertop. Another possible reason why so many young people are reluctant to discard their skateboards is personal risk. For many people, the higher the risk of injury, death or social embarassment, the more exciting or 'fun' the activity will become. Many of today's playgrounds appear to have been designed to with lawyers and psychologists making at least 80% of the decisions on what will be built where. Some don't even have dirt on the ground, instead they will have ground up wood chips or sawdust. All this is presuming little Bobby and little Susie are too stupid to know not to eat Daffodil bulbs or dead sparrows along with their Michelle Obama approved lunches. So that may be it, people invite some measure of risk into their lives to spice up the priveledge of living, to accentuate the fact of their glowing health.
Interesting comments.
I had a steel wheeled board in the 60’s - oooh! it hurt to ride it on anything other than fresh concrete...
In the mid-70’s I got a new one with neoprene wheels - had a lot of fun on it until it was stolen while on vacation in Palm Springs.
Then I picked up a new one in the early 80’s - it has high quality German bearings and great wheels. I still have it.
I bring it to conferences (as a organizer) and occasionally place multiple boxes on it to move them from place to place...works like a hand truck, sans handles. And I can get from point A to point B very quickly when I need to.
I saw a kid on a long board last week - five feet or more long and at least a foot wide. He was using his board like a paddle board - he had a pole to push himself along...looked odd.
How nice it would have been to have had the skateboard technology of today back in the early 70’s instead of that Bakelite, shopping cart type wheel material that stopped dead on every small pebble there was.
Head over heels was a hell of lot of fun but grew old at times.
An answer to your question: Nothing gets the adrenaline going faster than challenging speed and balance at the same time.
I’ve still got my board from the ‘70’s. And I hated the pebbles too. Lots of skinned elbows back then. I tried to always ride next to the grass so I could make a sort of “controlled” spill.
I agree with you on principle, but I'm struggling to think of a society in which young men haven't done dangerous things their parents considered stupid.
The 80s/early 90s style skateboards were the best. I got turned off in the mid 90s when all of the sudden the only board you could get had the tiny wheels that made you feel like you were having a seizure if you tried to use them on the street and were much slower on the half pipe. I did buy a long board about a year ago and used it primarily as a dog sled and would let my dog pull me for a couple of miles every night. Dog passed away in June and I haven’t used it since. I guess I got too old.
d’oh!
Kung fu, well that was one of my good ones
Well what’s a few broken bones when we all know it’s good clean fun
Skateboards, I’ve almost made them respectable
You see I can’t always get through to you, so I go for your son
Joe Jackson - I’m the Man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSEUlh-UGdo
Sounds like Skateboard Ski Poling. Maybe it’ll catch on.
You’re right about that attraction skateboarding has to teens who prefer more solitary sports, or sporting events they can control. My Karate Sensai is about 20 years younger than I am (58), and he says skateboarding was a great comfort to him after his parents divorce when he was about 11 y/o. He wanted to think about the changes, but at the same time, he didn’t necessarily wish to be separated from everybody all the time.
More specifically, ours c.1960 were 2x4s (now that's inflexible!) with metal shoe-skate wheels nailed on. Every single sidewalk crack was terrifying! After giving them a good try, we bandaged up our elbows, knees, and chins and pretty much went back to our nonstop baseball/tackle-football/basketball/track-and-field/boxing/rockfights.
Libs would go nuts (more than they already are) if they saw us having our BB gun fights in the neighborhood.
My dad used to pay me for every bird I shot that was trying to eat his tomatoes. I became a darn good shot and went on to be the series high shooter in boot camp. Ten bull eyes out of ten shots from 500 meters!
Yeah, BB guns got a bad rap among our parents on our street early when Mike shot Don an inch from his eye.
Well done, Sgt. York! Looks like the profit motive worked just fine in your case. I'm guessing your dad had other motives himself besides just protecting his tomatoes.
If you didn’t have a caballero or Powel Peralta board you were nothing.
I still ride my longboard around and I’m 41.
To answer the question of the poster. BECAUSE IT’S FUN?
“The first wave of popularity of the skateboard might have been in the 1950s and 1960s - with heavy, inflexible wooden boards and metal wheels.”
Not metal. We used old wheels from skate rinks.
Can’t remember which one it was, but I heard on the radio a Preacher defining masculinity this way:
Masculinity
1. A battle to fight
2. An adventure to live
3. A beauty to rescue
I wrote it down 10 years ago on the white board in my garage, and it’s still there.
“The first refined skateboard came out around 1963 or 64. It was a hard, inflexible board and the wheels were stone (or something like that) on an axle that allowed the wheels to turn in response to the left or right weighting on the board.”
We made our own boards. Laminating them for texture and color. Stained and varnished ... NEVER painted. We got our wheels from the local roller skating rink. I don’t remember what the material was but it was not stone.
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