Another post borrowed from the Blockhead mailing list. This time is twas about the 40th anniversary of reissue of the Rebel model. The reason I’m reposting it is because of the attached scan of a short newspaper article titled “Sierra College student skates into business.” It’s history. read all about it. I too wanted a job that was related to what I like to do.

There is confusion about these metal Roller Derby wheels. Roller Derby definitely made skateboards for a while. Some people think they are metal wheels used in (old timey) speed (roller) skating, while others think they might be for making the casting molds. The casting mold theory does not seem valid to me based on the shield already present (and worn) for the loose bearings. Holy cow, did you know you could still buy open bearing roller-skate wheels? From Sure Grip, of course. – Thanks to Dennis Allgeier for the pics.

Reposting this because I can relate to the story of starting a skateboard company out of a garage. I can relate to all of it, except the part where the company is successful… From Blockhead Dave: Wow! Has it really been 40 years since I screen-printed my very first batch of skateboards in my parents’ garage?  It was late spring 1985, I was fresh from a screen printing class at Sierra College, and had never printed more than 1 or 2 of anything.  I had 60 red Streetstyle boards manufactured by Uncle Wiggley and I was nervous as hell, but no choice but to just go for it. I pulled the squeegee over and over again, honing my skills as I went along, then I laid each board in the driveway to dry, since I hadn’t built any racks yet. Well, I made it happen, and there were 60 skateboards with my art and my company name on them and just like that I was in business!  You can get on elf the limited Streetstyles in old school or the new school hole patterns starting Wednesday (9/24) at noon PST

You should go check out Miguel Melo’s 60’s & 70’s Vintage Skateboard Collection. It’s a beautiful site filled with photos of his personal collection. There are some of the usual suspects in there, but there are also quite a few lessor known decks, including some from well known brands.For instance, I can’t ever recall seeing the Cat by Nash, or even a GT Coyote III. I’m a longtime lurker.

The magazine that bummed out a generation of skaters… I’ve added all the adverts from issue #1 of Action Now magazine, labeled as Volume 7, #1 published in August of 1980. It’s a pretty thin issue and only has 30 ads total. In a few issues the magazine gets beefy again, I’ll bet they thought they were going to be able to pull it off… We’re just 47 ads shy of breaking the 1000 mark. Check them out.

I just added 23 ads from the issue #30 of German skateboarding magazine Monster to the Vintage Skatemag Advertisement gallery. It offers a bit if a break from the same old ads you probably saw run in multiple issues of USA based magazines. The content of the magazine is in German, but the ads are mostly in English for some reason. Bi-monthly at the time, this is labeled December 87 / January 88 in the masthead, and includes a 2 page spread on a then 10 year old event, the 1977 World Champions as held by the “World and United States Skateboard Association.” Check it out after the jump. Includes a bonus photo of Christy McNicol.

Thanks to longtime reader Will Heespelink who was cleaning out his closets and sent me the August 1987 issue of Transworld. So now there are 900 vintage skateboard magazine adverts in the gallery. Incredibly, with the doubles already posted this came out to exactly 900 and I didn’t have to pad it any. A few of my favorites from this batch include JFA for Kryptonics, Del Mar Skateboard Ranch t-shirts, ol’ Steve Rocco for Vision Street Wear, SLAM! wrist guards, and Radicool!

91 adverts from Skateboard! magazine #10 ( June 1978 ) brings the total vintage skateboarding magazine adverts in the gallery up to 801! Skateboard! was a UK publication and as such, features some distinctly British ads, companies and slang in addition to the the usual fare from the USA. Half the ads seem to brag about products made in in England, while the other brags bout being made in the USA. Did you know helmets were sometimes called “Bump Hats?” Now you do. Someone in ad sales gave Uniroyal Corp. the hard sell, because they took out two, 2-page spreads in this issue. Check out the gallery.

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

There are rabbit holes and then there are all engulfing black holes of time wasting. I Had an idea to do a quick post about a clear plexiglass skateboard from Huffy from the 70’s that I thought was interesting. Huffy sure wasn’t the first bicycle company to get int o skateboarding (probably ACS,) and wasn’t the last one (Haro) either. My buddy Shawn still has his first skateboard, a wooden Huffy Quick Thunder. I asked him to send me some pics for the post and decided to dig up what I could in the meantime. It turns out they made a host of plastic and wooden skateboards (some in the 80’s), and even a fiberglass model, not to mention some prepackaged accessories. I had over 80 photographs, so I’m going to break them in to 3 or 4 posts by category, starting with the plastic boards.