Union Surfer skateboards “The Monster” collection photo courtesy of Stanton Hartsfield.

Portland is famous for 2 things in the skateboarding world; Burnside, and these weird, smiling, fez wearing blue poops that somehow learned how to kickflip on skateboards with backward facing trucks.

– Thanks to Colin for the pic.

Enjoy these mediocre photos (except for the drone shot, which is not mine.) of what is now my favorite skatepark. You’re looking at a semi-new a park in sleepy little Vernonia, Oregon, built by Evergreen Skateparks. About an hour outside of Portland, Vernonia has less than 3000 people. The axe on the left side is a nod to its logging history. You can tell you’re riding an Evergreen skatepark if it’s got that moonscape feel with bits of coping sticking out of what might otherwise be a tribute to the best parts of 70’s era skateparks. This version features the usual connected low bowls, bumps, and berms with the addition of a pump track round the outside. But again, they’ve improved on the traditional pump track with subtle variations on either side, so you can ride the track multiple times in various combinations, hitting (or ignoring) obstacles along the way, reversing course without losing speed. So many combinations for fun. There’s also a medium sized, mellow bowl in the middle. I can’t tell you enough how much love this park. I can’t wait to get back there.

Some unusual skateboarding history from 1970’s South Africa. The Mother of all kicktails. Thanks to Mark Tulleken for the pics.

I just added 62 advertisements from Volume 2 Number 6 of Skateboarder Magazine (1976) to the Vintage Skatemag Advert Gallery, bringing the total in the gallery up to 674 ads! 1976 was a good year for skateboarding.

The Huffy Skateboards extravaganza continues in part 3, which focuses on non-wooden and non-plastic skateboards. We’re talking glass here. Plexiglass and fiberglass. This whole series started out as what I thought was just going to be a quick post about the clear model seen top right, but quickly ballooned out of control. Thunderboards!

Walt Disney’s The Beagle Boys #37, published by Gold Key in 1977. This issue does not feature any skateboarding stories or illustrations outside of another sales club advertisement with a Huffy 24″ Action Tail that you can earn as a prize for selling stuff, thus ending the mystery of what boards were in those illustrations, thanks to the plate-of-shrimp lattice of coincidence and my current lack of freelance work.

It’s never simple. I’m already wasting a lot of time compiling a Huffy skateboards resource, and in the process I find an 80-ish skateboard that looks like someone accidentally included the Instructions or marketing materials on the actual graphic. It’s absurd enough to warrant its own post, but then I find another wonderful example. No board manufacturer is visible, but some well crafted googling unearths two more models in a couple different color variations, as well as the manufacturer “American Sports Services. Barry E. Smith.” You’ve heard of them before, right? Giants in the industry! But what, there’s more! Update: Most , if not all of these decks can be seen in a catalog for Athena International.

No, it’s not Tony Hawk in a Depend commercial, if only… Can you imagine? “When you need Extreme®! bladder control…” Nope. It’s just a couple commercials for Qnol health supplements. The commercials are short and to the point, with very little skateboarding. Both shot on location in his warehouse. The marketing materials are amusing in that they quote Tony’s lines from the commercials as if they were casual statements of his and not a script written for him.

As promised, here’s part 2 of the series on Huffy skateboards. I’ve got 11 different models to show you from the 70’s and 80’s, plus a couple of weird ones. Some of these were hard to track down because Huffy had the annoying habit of using the same model names for bicycles and skateboards, so trying to find better pictures is next to impossible when you have to wade through a thousand bicycle pictures because Google thinks it knows what you want to see.