It’s weird 1920’s swimsuit evil landlord villain surfing on a skateboard. He first made an appearance on the packaging for Trickray wheels. This time it’s a fiberglass Mark IV skateboard deck, large enough to make out the artist’s signature – Pfister. I’m not sure if this Mark IV is another Trickray product or if this illustration was just passed around. I seem to recall posting another instance of it but I can’t find it.

Aldens was a mail order catalog based out of Chicago from 1899 (not a typo) to some time shortly after 1982. This is a page from their 1978 Christmas calendar with three skateboards. I can’t ever remember seeing an Alden’s catalog despite living in the Chicago suburbs during their last gasp. Two of the models are familiar plastic boards, the Free Former (forerunner of the bidirectional popsicle stick!) and the GT Coyote II. There’s got to be thousands of Free Formers in landfills across the country. The Spinner is made from oak or kapoer [sic] which might actually be kapur. Good luck finding anything about Spinner Skateboards on google.

Based on the name I would have thought this 70’s skateboard patch was French, but the emphasis is LEO-motif and not Le Motif. Turns out it was made in Leeds, England. This guy looks like a hastily drawn villain in the background of a Speed Racer cartoon. Speed must join forces with the Skate Acrobatic Team to sneak onto the Mammoth Car and retrieve the GRX engine! It’s either that, or some sort of disco football player illustration grafted onto a skateboard. Grandpa, is that you?

– Thanks to David ODK for the tip.

It looks’s 60’s art direction and the seller says 70’s, but you never can tell with a button. Halftones in the image makes it look like was offset printed instead of digitally, so it’s likely it’s of the pre-desktop printing era. Simpler times in some ways, but then again making this button would have been more costly in that era. The “Badge-a-Minit” stamp on the back has a LaSalle, IL location and now these they are located in Oglesby, IL. Badge-a-Minit has been around forever.

Gross… right? I couldn’t resist. That’s what she said…. OK, Stopping now. Check out these four stickers for Concord Skateboard Lubricant. Concord Lubricant will allow you to go faster, go smoother, jet down the pipe, and slalem [sic] with ease. 70’s era judging by the equipment, although could even be early 80’s. The lot sold for the very reasonable equivalent of $5.

– Thanks David ODK for the tip

You’re looking at a hand carved figure of a girl riding a skateboard, or at least, sitting on it while breaking in some new bowling shoes. It dates back to an undetermined point in the 70’s, and was carved for the highly collected Swiss company called Anri. Actually, it’s hard to tell where the company is located. There’s no address listed anywhere, and the history page talk of the Swiss Alps and a region of Austria-Hungary that was annexed by Italy. So maybe it’s Italian. The ANRI history goes back to 1919, so that might explain why this carving sold for $65.

This is a curious product. I imagine it came into being via a discussion about the quickest way to cash in on a fad while spending the least amount of money. They must have thought the very clean design and sharp top graphic would fool an unsuspecting customer into thinking this was an actual skateboard, and if you glance at it sideways and squint your eyes, it look s good. The strangest thing is that the Starter Skate allegedly comes out of England in the 70’s. We’re talking England in the 70s, not Soviet Russia in the 60’s. I asked Neil about it, he said he’d never seen one before. The UK had much better crappy skateboard technology, so this one is puzzling. I’ve seen boards with fixed wheels passed off as skateboards before, but never with such presentation. This one sold for about $50, and the fact that anyone bought it at all is no doubt in large part due to the very nice pictures the seller provided. This looks like a prop from a Back to the Future movie if McFly traveled to Nazi Germany.

New Deluxe Flex-o-thane Super Grip Sport Fun! I’m surprised they didn’t also work the word “surf” into the packaging. I will never tire of skateboard accessories mounted on the blister packs of yesteryear. It’s a replacement skateboard (excuse me, skate board) wheel with built in bearings. I’m not sure what you were supposed to do with the oversized bolts though. They are way too long to be used as kingpins and wouldn’t work as axles.

I was honored to be asked to contribute some of my old skateboarding photos here on Skate and Annoy. I grew up in the seventies and eighties in Arizona skating the legendary Desert Pipes, tons of empty pools, the Love Bowls, and lots more …

I now live in Seattle, I have been up here in the Northwest for 20 years. I still skate as much as I can, I love all the amazing skateparks we have here, but sometimes I miss the good old daze …

So here is my first contribution, a gallery of pipe photos I put together awhile back, enjoy !!!

For more: Desert Pipes

I’m trying to decide how much retouching and color correcting to tackle in the Vintage Skateboard Magazine Advert Gallery. Here’s a comparison for this Zephyr skateboards ad from 1975. Not surprisingly, the forty year old pages are discolored with age. Do you prefer the scanned image with minimal color correction, or the adjusted version that is closer to what the page originally looked like but has a slightly artificial look to it? There’s an enlargement to compare after the jump, but really this is just an excuse to get you to check out Zephyr Skateboards: Young dudes in heavy spots.