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!”

I added 3 new ads from the July 1977 issue of Wild World of Skateboarding, including some Lan lovelies on a sailboat, dog paw themed gloves from KIP, and one from Torque skateboards hyping a new downhill speed record and the advent of the first Skateboard Supermarket. With these additions, I have cracked the 300 threshold in the Vintage Skateboard Mag Gallery.

Alright, we’ve got special behind the scenes access to Skateboard, the movie, courtesy of this July, 1977 edition of Wild World of Skateboarding magazine.  The article seems hastily written, and does not really offer much behind the scenes action outside of some photos from the set. However, it’s got lots of  poorly written press release action. It also offers an interesting glimpse of the state of skateboarding at the time, such as the lack of “established rules of Downhill in organized competition due to the infancy of skateboarding as a spectator sport.” Apparently, all the competitions in the film were staged. I haven’t seen it in a very long time, but I recall as a kid I thought this was a sort of hybrid of documentary and drama. The tone of the article is amusing in retrospect, as it treats the movie as, well, a film and not the kitsch time capsule it turned out to be.  Pics and full article text after the jump.