[rlmorel]

See? Every guy has one of those stories.

Back in the mid-sixties, I wanted a skateboard, but...that wasn’t gonna happen. So I took my sister’s metal roller skate, separated it, hammered both sides flat then screwed one at the front and one at the rear of a piece of a board.

We were using a downhill section of sidewalk and putting cans and stones in the sidewalk to use as an obstacle to skate around. The problem is, the skateboard was so primitive with limited capability, and the sections of the sidewalk were not even, so when those metal wheels hit the seam between two sections and the one you approach was higher...the skateboard would just stop.

I fell, and fell, and fell, ripping flesh off of my elbows, until the last time I wiped out and hit the pavement with such force and so painfully that I think I screamed at the top of my lungs for about 30 seconds out of pure frustration and pain.

[xrmusn]

I fell, and fell, and fell, ..etc etc
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Best part of story.

SOMETIMES persistence pays off.

BUT small wheel, big crack makes for interruption when going from point A to B.

Just how many stops did it take before you figured it out or did an adult show up? (And probably save your life)

[Charles Martel]

Yeah, the clamp-on roller skate - turned skateboard. I think that idea goes back to the pre-WWII years and although California is likely the home of the first such contraption, they seemed to spring up in any port city that handled citrus fruit. There's a picture of my dad with a citrus crate scooter (orange crate, label and all, nailed atop the skateboard as a "handlebar") near the river in New Orleans, where he grew up. Some woman that lived up the street would scatter gravel on the sidewalks to keep the noisy metal-wheeled scooters away, but they figured out how to attach an angled board to the front, skimming low over the sidewalk, that would shove all the gravel off of the concrete.