I randomly found an old message with link to a bendy Gabriel toys figure of Horshack riding a skateboard. I’ve got the Donald Duck version from the same company somewhere buried in a box, and I’ve posted on the Goofy version before. “What the hell is a Sweathog?” you may be asking yourself if you did not watch TV from 1975-1979. The Sweathogs were the gang of high school kids that were the man supporting characters in the show Welcome Back Kotter, the same sho that made John Travolta famous before Saturday Nigh Fever, Scientology, and arguably his finest work on celluloid, Face/Off…. But I digress.. In doing my due diligence looking for the best pictures I could find I discovered this post had obviously already been done better by Beach Party Attitude. I should have known better, but hey, that’s the online world of skateboarding toys from 1977 for ya… – Thanks to Tim Jamison for the vintage tip.

I bought another issue of Skateboarding Industry News and included in the auction was an issue of something called Skate & Surf which I had never seen before, and didn’t really pay any attention to it. Glancing at it I thought it was an early 80’s mini mag or pamphlet or some sort of insert or giveaway. Turns out it was the 2nd issue of a new (at the time) trade publication dated March/April of 1978. Contrary to Skateboarding Industry News, the art direction of Skate & Surf made it look closer to something like Action Now than a stodgy industry magazine. Flipping through it you might think it was aimed at skateboarders and not skate shop owners. The huge bonus to me was finally finding a full page ad fro Skate-ball, some 14 years after I found the first one online, and here it is, freshly scanned and transcribed., starting at $25,000 in $1978, and a perfect business opportunity for the absentee owner.

Thanks again to Nathan Kipnis we’ve got even more pictures of the fiberglass Skate-Ball ramps at the Rainbo Skatepark in Chicago, Illinois circa 78-79. Includes a bonus shot of Jay Adams and Dave Hackett.

We are stoked to take your money. Check out these reproductions of an old 70’s skateboarding sticker graphic available in a combo life size sticker and larger than life size embroidered patch. Believe it or not, this project has been in the works for over a decade. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Get yours from Skate and Annoy.

When heros rescue history from the trash! Check out these photo of the Ocean Bowl from 1976 shown here by permission of Marc Emond: The photos on this post were pulled from a dumpster behind The Beachcomber weekly newspaper in the early 80s. The box they were in contained piles of surf and skate photos. Whoever found them gave them to Jack Crosby at BB Bombers surf shop. Jack gave me the skate park photos. Pure fate that they ended up in my hands…  If you’re in the mood for more vintage Ocean City, check out this Rolling Surf action.

Oh man, I’m old. This is how and when I first started skating. Hanging around with a crew of grade school kids cursing around on plastic boards with loose bearings. Good times. Nobody worried about whether they were doing a trick correctly or if they had bad style. Besides, how much style does a tic-tack take? I found these 70’s photos in some clickbait article. The mentioned that the photographer Anthony Catalano had passed, but they didn’t link to the original source so I’m not going to bother to credit them. There are a ton of photos taken in Brooklyn in the mid to late 70’s, and only a few of them feature skateboarders but they are a great glimpse into the past.

It’s a Pink Panther jumbo post! – Thanks to Cool Steve for 99% of this.

This is a 1979 advertisement for the MicroNOVA MP/100 computer from Data General. This machine came with 32 kW of memory, and no, that’s not a typo. kW stands for Kilowords. How much memory is that? 2.44e-1 Bytes. Contemplate that while you read this post on your phone. It looks like they mounted the skateboard trucks directly to an empty case. It’s got a pretty small wheelbase. This is what passed for a microcomputer in 1977, when this machine first came out. [Source: Reddit] – Thanks to Tom Koehl for the tip.

Branding it as a DIY Kit is a genius way to cut costs by making the consumer put everything together, but the display packaging on this is is why you’re seeing it here. This isn’t just any fiberglass skateboard kit, it’s “Top Line.” It even comes with an instruction book, which most kids probably needed in order to figure out how to put together those open bearing wheels. UPDATE: Found an ad for this product in a 1975 issue of Skateboarder. – Thanks to David Maes for the tip. [Source: Ebay]

Today’s installment of vintage skateboard mag adverts includes 3 more from the July, 1977 issue of Wild World of Skateboarding, with Pro-Am wheels, California Free Former, and Santa Barbara Skateboards, promising handcrafted skateboards that are not “pultruded, molded, stamped, or a dead log!”