Friend of the site and undervalued hero of the skateboarding and surfboarding historical community, Scott Starr passed away some time this month. Scott put a tremendous amount of effort and his own money into collecting and preserving old skateboarding and surfing films, which included having them professionally digitized when his finances permitted. His numerous accounts on Youtube wouldn’t last long due to obscure, questionable or pointless copyright claims. The only thing that seemed to matter to him was preserving these films and TV appearances, some of them dating back to the 60’s. I used to email him fairly regularly about things I’d seen or heard about, and he was a willing fountain of knowledge. I also bought a handful of 60’s era comic books from him that featured skateboarding content, you can find many of these on S&A. Scott had some health and anxiety issues he battled with, keeping him out of the public eye and probably contributing to that fact that he is not more widely known to later generations of skateboarders. I consider him an important person in the lexicon skateboarding in popular culture. I don’t know that there is anyone else out there doing the kind of work he was, and I hope that his library is received with the proper amount of respect that it deserves. A Scott Starr memorial collection in the Smithsonian perhaps… There is a celebration of his life happening this Friday, including the appropriate paddle out.

Hunter Simms emailed us about a Skircle he had just acquired, and agreed to share the images with us. When I tried to search for more, Skate and Annoy (big surprise) was the site that came up with the most frequency. I did manage to find a couple new (old) images and have compiled them into this post.

About nine years ago I discovered (online) a magnificent plastic 6-wheeled skateboard, and the since then I have been looking to add this exquisite wacky board to my collection of oddities. I even have an Ebay alert set up for it, but it’s never returned any positives. As is the case for a lot of barely documented skateboard ephemera, Skate and Annoy is sometimes one of the few results that come up. Such was the case for Don Brown (Yes, that Don Brown) who recently acquired his own Cami Tres Assi and tried to find out more about it. After reading his comment I reached out to him and he obliged to send us some photos… and here we are. Don got his from a friend in Italy. We know nothing more than we originally did, except for the fact the wheels are quite brittle and prone to breaking. Enjoy!

Go around! Go under! Develop skill and style with Skateboard Derby. The professional action course! This is an extremely rare find from 1977. It’s new in the box and never used, and priced accordingly at $499. To be honest, I’m more interested in the packaging and instructions than I am the actual contents. Although the contents are basic pieces of wood, some hardware and vinyl flags, it’s easy to imagine how exciting this would have been to open and set up as a kid in the 70’s. Our plastic banana board-riding crew used chalk and plastic cups for our slalom course. This would have blown our minds… There is one advantage to using chalk though. We used to draw oil slicks, flames, pillboxes with artillery installations, and other assorted hazardous obstacles all over our courses. Skateboarding war is hell.

Oh the things I find to buy when I’m actually looking for something else. A positive balance on a PayPal account does not last long when I’m scrolling through skateboard related ephemera. This is the September 1975 issue of Sports Illustrated, with a feature called “Wheeling and Dealing.” Scanned and ran through the OCR for your enjoyment. File it under Things I buy so you don’t have to.

Once again proving semi interesting things come to those with OCD who wait… While updating the Vintage Skate Magazine Advert gallery I thought I recognized this Top Line ad for a “Do it Yourself Skateboard Kit.” I was the subject of a post 4 years ago, and now we know it dates to 1975 since it appears in the Fall 1975 issue of Skateboarder magazine. Check out the advert and/or the original post.

The Vintage Skate Sticker Gallery has just reached 250, and we’re about at the end of Kilwag’s collection. If you’re interested in contributing, we’re accepting high resolution bulk scans if they are 600dpi.) If you have a sizable collection contact us to make other arrangements. Send a pic before you start scanning and we can let you know what we already have waiting (about 200) to be processed.

We’ve added 73 ads to complete the April 1976 issue of Skateboarder Magazine, bringing the total in the archive to 447! There are other galleries out there, some of them are really good, but this one is ours, and it’s the only one that filterable by magazine, issue, year, decade, brand/company, product type, country, and even photographer and featured riders when present. Check out the Vintage Skateboard Magazine Ad Gallery.

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.