1965 was a good year for skateboards in catalogs. Here’s a page from a Sears catalog featuring Sears branded skateboards, which are essentially Nash-style copies, some like the Spyder are so similar that the were likely made by Nash. The ad copy has some choice bits like “So sturdily built it supports an adult” and “Professional rink skate wheels of tough plastic.” The 35″ Hang Ten Surfer model has a Mahogany top layer. The Wipe Out Surfer has a walnut core with fiberglass rails (rails in the surfboard sense, not the skateboard, bottom of the deck plastics) Rubber trucks are listed as a selling point. We’ve seen plastic ones before… [Source: Ad – Skateboard]

In the second half of the 80’s I bought a barely used set of Pro Designed knee pads from local Champaign-Urbana skater Martin Pelequin. “The Mertster” as he liked to call himself, was a colorful character to say the least, almost a miniature version of Steven Tyler in appearance and behavior. Skinny, and around five foot tall and some change, he definitely overbought these double capped kneepads that he had custom made with blue denim and leopard skin lycra. They looked and felt like hockey goalie kneepads on him, so he sold them to me. I rode these kneepads until the early 90’s when I loaned them to a friend in Chicago, ironically to play outdoor hockey. He accidentally left one behind and so I never had a full set again. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of the remaining one. One of my cats peed on it at some point this millennia, and I’m still having a hard time sending it to a landfill. The cat has long since run away. I’ve got a couple pics of the Mertster after the jump.

I post a lot of crappy skateboards here, so it’s nice to have something really… pretty? I can’t say for sure if this was up to snuff when it came out, but it probably was, at least in some circles. The 70’s had a wide range in acceptable design and performance characteristics. This Whip True Glide model is a beautiful skateboard. The colors and the design really pops, though the flexible fiberglass deck likely doesn’t. It’s beautiful, but not $500 beautiful like the seller originally wanted. I like the top graphic, color combination that includes coordinated bushings, and the speckling visible on the bottom. Very sharp, very 70’s.

We’re all adults here, aren’t we? The Black Bear Bar in Brooklyn has a bowl. You can skate for free if you’re over 21 and haven’t already been drinking. This seems like an idea that would float well in any town of a reasonably large population. There are bicycle shops and bike parks with a bar, why not skateboarding? This is a little reversed in priority, bar first, skateboarding second, but it’s still a good idea, provided there’s ample circulation to disperse the stink of good session. You might notice a couple of corporate logos in the photo above. Levi’s and Huf both had a hand in this, possibly it was used in demo somewhere and this is where the wood found it’s final home. That’s pure speculation though. [Photo nitrohydro via NYSkateboarding. Source: Brooklyn Paper] – Thanks to Tallboycan for the tip.

Skateboard slaat aan in Vlissingen – Skateboarding is catching on in Vlissingen, according to the December 4th, 1980 edition of the Dutch newspaper Provinciale Zeeuwse Courant. Check out the photo of that skatepark. Even though it’s low res black and white newspaper photo, it’s clearly one of those fiberglass ramps that was part of the Skate Ball system, and possibly the same blue fiberglass ramps used in Thrasherland. It’s hard to know for sure, could there have been more than one manufacturer of blue fiberglass skateboard ramps? There are similarities and differences between the two if you compare, but it’s conceivable that there were a few minor iterations over the product lifespan that would account for that. This is the only photograph I’ve seen showing the incline, full pipe parts (only half here) and the Skate Ball ramp. I’m just shocked that some of them made it all the way over to Europe. The article comes courtesy of S&A reader Jeroen who rode this thing in the Netherlands. His crew actually found abandoned parts of the park and reassembled them in their own configuration and rode them in 1985.

You’re looking at a computer game called Skateboard Kidz for the Spectrum (Sinclair) computer. The game was released in 1988 according to World of Spectrum, which would explain why it came on a cassette tape. Yes, that’s right, you used to have to load computer programs on some home computers via a cassette tape deck. Skateboard Kidz was made by Silverbird Software in the UK, and as such, all the radical 80’s dialect has a distinctly English accent. You can hear it yourself because the program files are downloadable from several places on the web, and if you don’t have a 25 year old computer, you can run it in a web browser with a Javascript MESS emulator. (FYI – Emulator does not seem to work with Safari.)

Zine mail from 1991. Judging from the transcript on the back, I might have crossed paths with Pete D. from Clueless zine shortly before he sent those pictures, although it’s just as likely it was unrelated correspondence as nonsensical stories and rampant silliness were a big part of zine culture those days. I made the acquaintance of Pete through Dan at Contort. It’s been a long time since I’ve added any new (old) zines to the gallery, I’ll see what I can do in the near future.

Kevin Kowalski in Service For The Sick from Lifeblood Skateboards. Stick around till the last 15 seconds to have your mind blown.

I bought this vintage Russian skateboard advertisement some time before 2013, which is as far back as my Ebay history will show me. The stamps say 2009, but I don’t think it was that long ago. I wasn’t sure about the authenticity of this, but it did ship from Moscow, Russia, and the guy even had “SNA” in his name. I can’t even type in the Cyrillic alphabet to get an online translation. I’m not sure how old this is. It looks 70’s but it might be early 80’s. (1982) If you can help, please chime in. Maybe these guys know something. I remember at the time I bought it I felt like some sort of tomb raider, importing illegal cultural artifacts from the Eastern Block.

As a rule, if I decide to post a product release video, you’ll find it off the main page in odds and ends section known as Broken Kingpins. It has to have pretty bombastic footage or be highly entertaining to make to the font page. This 3 minute clip featuring Silas Baxter-Neal from Adidas made me laugh, and so here it is.