Surf Ohio and Cow Skates

Whenever Jyme (Jymie?) George used to come in to travel with the Surf Ohio crew, he always had stacks of stickers and t-shirts to give away, printed by the guys at Graphics Lab, who were just starting out at the time. Jyme let me enter the first big amateur contest in Dayton even though I didn’t have a sponsor, under the condition that I had better not embarrass him. I actually made the first cut, but I basically blew my wad and didn’t have anything else left to show. Lacking any reserves in my bag of tricks, I decided to repeat my first run on a plastic toy skateboard. Needless to say, I didn’t advance again. I must have accumulated 5-10 different Surf Ohio shirts in a few short years. Instead of hoarding them all, I only hoarded half of them, and gave the rest away to a bunch of friends.

Some people are pack rats, thankfully. I ran through my stash of Surf Ohio shirts over the years, cutting the sleeves off some, wearing them out pretty thin, losing one or two to the odd girlfriend now and then, and they’d have to be odd to date me… Eventually I had none. When I moved to Portland I ended up buying a house that was coincidentally about four blocks away from a college friend and roommate who I had given a Surf Oho shirt to at one time. A couple of months ago he decided to clean out the depths of his closets, and asked me if I wanted this shirt, which is 20 years old and still in great shape, if not a little musty smelling. No matter, it’s mine now!

Jyme was a real scenester in the Midwest skate world in the 80’s, and I mean that in a positive way. He had the Surf Ohio skate shop, Cow Skates distributor, and he was responsible for bringing a pro streetstyle contest to the Midwest (Dayton, Ohio of all places) for the first time. The first year was a pro demo and am contest. Subsequent events were pro contests. One of the members of the Surf Ohio entourage was none other than Rob Dyrdek, who was known as Minishred at the time. He was something like 12 years old at the time. I can’t help but think that the skate scene in Ohio and maybe even outside the Midwest would not be the same today without his influence. Sadly, I heard a rumor that he passed away in a motorcycle accident some time ago.

Surf Ohio – sticker gallery.
Cow Skates – sticker gallery

Ohio Skateout

Rich from EPM has a feature from one of the Surf Ohio contests. He’s also embedded some NSI video of one of the contests. If you know what I looked like, you can see me dorking around with my camera in the background. We were both there at the time, but didn’t become friends until we met as expatriated midwesterners in Portland.