This advert for Vision skateboards V6 concave came from the 1989 July issue of Thrasher. It’s hard to tell from the tone of the advert in this time period whether or not they were being facetious. It’s essentially the precursor to today’s modern popsicle boards, only they took it a little bit further. The ad copy says it’s completely symmetrical and evenly balanced. How is it that Vision could have been a good three or so years ahead of the curve and still manage to disappear by the time everyone caught up?

This is an old decal, you know, the kind you put in water and slide it off onto a plastic model. I found it on eBay, but there wasn’t any information on it other than “vintage”. I would have guessed 60’s but The name Aaron Loyd turned up a surfboard shaper who was in business in Pismo beach in the early 70’s. Whenever it was, it’s pretty obvious this came from a different time. I don’t think this type of racial stereotype would fly nowadays. Loyd Surf is now a father-son operation. I’ve got an email into them to see if that was the case, and maybe find out a little more.

Ben Cannard sent in some pics of his old Alphonso Rawls model on Evol, that features Janet Jackson. There is some confusion about this on the Interwebs™. Some people remember it alternately as a Droors ad or a Fuct advertisement. I don’t remember it at all, which would place it in the early 90’s. I find it hard to believe that it’s not photoshopped. I guess Janet Jackson was slumming it trying to get some street cred out of skateboarding. If I’ve got the story wrong, by all means fill me in. I plead ignorance.

Just like House of Neil, I have a major issue with people who cut up old skate magazines (or Life, or anything else, really) and try to sell the individual ads out of context. Plundering history for a modest monetary gain is needlessly destructive. Frankly, it pisses me off. Then again, I have been known to get bent out of shape about stupid things. You might expect me to be similarly upset with Solitary Arts and their Traveler Deadstock boards, but instead I am green with envy. The folks at Solitary arts managed to get their hands on a limited quantity of NOS 70’s era wooden plank style skateboard decks. They’ve gone ahead and hand routered the bottoms so they could mount their own inlay in place, then fitted them with new trucks and their own retro styled wheel to make a board that is half reproduction, half NOS, and all genius. It doesn’t violate my anti-desecration of history policy because these unnamed plank boards are a dime a dozen, from a time when the technology of skateboard decks was easily accessible to anyone with a jigsaw and some sandpaper. Nobody wants to buy them on eBay, I know because I’ve tried selling a few before. You might as well ride them. While you’re at it, check out the rest of the Solitary Arts site. Their aesthetic doesn’t really jive with my personal tastes, but I find the spirit of the work to be infectious. Christ, I sound like a hippie.

[Source: Mumble] (Note: Link removed, original site is gone and appears to be malware now.)

This might be your last chance to get a Nash skateboard with graphics that aren’t an absolute pile of shite. This 80’s era Nash Nightmare auction ends at 8:47pm, Baltimore time. They must have hired someone from outside their usual talent pool for this graphic. To be fair, they had some really cool graphics in the steel wheel era, followed by a 15 year drought. I swear the Nightmare is on par with some of the Creature stuff…

February 2009. Much as in January, the economy might suck, but you wouldn’t know it on eBay. There were some BIG auctions that went off this month, and a lot of cash thrown around. Tax refunds really come to bear at this time of month, with collectors throwing their “free money” at any grails that happen to come up.

And there’s something else I want to repeat from my January column, and this is dedicated to 2 sellers in particular: “classicadsfromthepast” and “vintagogaga”. ENOUGH ALREADY! Stop cutting up old mags and selling the individual pages on eBay for $10! Nobody is buying your crap, so just stop! Your crap is overrunning EBay! Do a search fro Steve Douglas. You might find one deck, but I can guarantee that you will get about 5 ads come up in the search; all ripped out of 80s skate magazines. One of the sellers has very little feedback, and all that there is is from the same buyer that apparently can’t get enough of Tony Hawk ads, and who hasn’t figured out that he could buy the original mags and do the cutting out himself. Fuck me! This is as lame as all of those ads for the Yocaher aluminum decks from a few years ago!

Epicly Later’d is dissecting the Lakai Fully Flaired video. I picked up on this segment that mostly concentrates on Guy Mariano over at Mumble. Lot’s of people think of different things when they hear his name, for me, I can’t get past the “High Guy” Garbage Pail Kids knockoff graphic. This section of video even has an interview with Stacy Peralta, as he was the “guy” who put Guy, Rudy Johnson, Gabriel Rodriguez and Paulo Diaz on Powell, their first major sponsor. It’s fascinating stuff that should appeal to older and newer skaters alike, and is really only incidental to the Lakai video. What strikes me is mutual respect and general lack of shit talking that usually accompanies the history tales from that era. You can watch the first part of the Guy Mariano focus after the jump. If you’re keeping track, it includes a lot of outtake footage that never made it into the old videos. If you really have some time to kill, watch the whole series up to now over at VBS.tv.

[Source: Mumble] (Note: Link removed, original site is gone and appears to be malware now.)

Swell! It’s 60’s week over here… or at least 60’s couple of days. I save these tidbits on a whim and then sometimes a few of them will bump into each other and make enough meat for a post. First up on the left is a shot from Max Schaaf’s 4Q Conditioning, some vintage hang 10 action. It may be early 70’s though, hard to tell. In the middle we have one of James A. Turners personal photographs from when he was an architecture student at the University of Michigan. This shot is in Detroit, circa 1965. “If life could have been all yo-yos and skateboards, I would have been King.” Turns out he’s a professor of architecture there now. He’s no king, but that’s not too shabby either. Last up, Life Magazine has released some photos into the public domain of sorts, for personal use only. There’s a set of skateboard shots from the 60’s that I found through the Wesleyan University blog. It turns out that Wesleyan University was the host of the first intercollegiate skateboarding championships in 1965, probably the last one too. The Life shots are available at a decent resolution if you click on them. They aren’t all campus shots either. If you are going to follow one link in this post, make it this one.

That’s right, “Skurfing.” This is a short clip from a 1965 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation piece on skateboarding. The reporter interviews a gal who says she had to form a “Sidewalk Skurfing Association” to keep from getting kicked off campus. It’s got lots of Peanuts-esque light jazz piano and the soon to be archetypal reporter flailing on a skateboard. Best line, hands down:

Do you think this will be obsolete in time, like the hula hoop?

There a short excerpt on YouTube, but to see the whole thing you have to go to the CBC Digital Archives. At the end there is a gratuitous shot of the original skateboarding dog with a dire voiceover about the current skateboard sales trends in major Canadian cities. Love the visual quality of that vintage video tape. It looks like it’s ready to catch fire.

– Thanks to Curtis for the tip.

Surf and Skate historian extraordinaire Scott Starr turned me on to this clip from Green Acres that originally aired in 1967. There’s a community play production of The Beverly Hillbillies that Oliver and Lisa have to step in at the last moment when the leads get injured. Jethro finds a skateboard by the “cement pond” which was what the hillbillies called their pool. This is probably the first time a skateboard was ever used as a plot device on a TV show – the inevitable “unsuspecting tv character gets injured on a skateboard.” I believe there were earlier skateboarder appearances on talk shows and game shows such as What’s my line?, not to mention some ABC sports action, but if this aired in 1967 it was probably after the skateboard fad had died a seemingly overnight death. According to Starr, 1965 was the big commercial year for skateboarding, and Christmas catalog research seems to validate this. Watch the skateboarding segement after the jump.