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.

Well, by pure luck I was able to find a 15 year old scanner so I could scan these 30 year old stickers. What am I talking about? LED backlit scanners cannot capture neon inks, and big surprise, there were a lot of neon stickers in the 80’s. Shout out to Diesel Fuel Prints for letting me borrow this compact fluorescent backlit artifact. Diesel Fuel is where Skate and Annoy get’s all their stickers printed BTW. The sticker gallery is currently at 151 stickers with about another 100 in my collection alone left to process and add, and another 200 from contributors! Until then, check out these 151 vintage skate stickers. And yes, the post title is a reference.

I revived the Vintage Skate Sticker Gallery, a feature that hasn’t been live on this site in almost 2 decades after we switched from static HTML to Wordpress. Unfortunately, most of my old scans were similarly in 1999 resolutions so I had to rescan them. So far I’ve got 80 up there, with another 80 that have been scanned but not separated yet. In a strange turn of events, consumer scanner technology has changed to LED backlighting which doesnt play nice with neon stickers. They look like they’ve been in the sun for 2 decades. So I’ve got about 90 additional stickers to scan once I get my hands on a vintage scanner with CFL backlighting. While digging through old hard drives I found about 50 sticker scans from various contributors. On top of that, While cleaning my basement this weekend I found a CD-rom that someone mailed to me (when???) that has about 130 mostly high quality scans of stickers from the late 70’s and some “official dealer” stickers that are rare. so thats’ what… 350 more stickers to add! Until then, check it out.

Just uploaded 4 new issues to the 80’s Skatezine Gallery, bringing the total to 42, with plenty more to come. These latest 4 have a Midwest focus, Skate Straight (#8 and #9) from Dayton Ohio, featuring lots of Surf Ohio / Cow Skates action, and Chi-town Shred (#3 and #6) from Chicago. Still trying to figure out who sent me the scans of Skate Straight, email crashed over a decade ago and all I have are a couple corrupt PDF’s.

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.

It’s been a long time since I’ve added new zines to the 80’s skate zine gallery. Chipping away at the backlog, here are Skate Edge #2 from New Jersey, circa 1983, and Raw Zine #8 from Connecticut, circa 1988. That’s 32 ages of photocopied nostalgia from the collection of Kevin Johnson.

I must have sent away for a catalog from Action Sports in 1984. I just found the postmarked envelope with full color one sheet and photocopied price list. I think that tagline is supposed to read “The 1 Ultimate High.” Aside from the vaguely Celtic typeface, it’s an interesting choice for a time when any given correspondence with a smaller skate brand seemed to have about a 50% chance of including a short handwritten a religious message. I’m not sure why I sent any for this catalog in 1984, since I never really rated the Action Sports brand. I think it might have been because the Invader had a sly look to it.

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.

Girl is Not. 4 Letter Word has a good read on Stephanie Person, a female black professional skateboard from the 80s. I could not recall her specifically appearing in mags in the 80’s but she did, and I do remember the featured “Sugar and Spice” article in Thrasher. Her experiences as a black female skater in the 80’s are unique even to other female skaters in the 80’s and not all for the reasons you’d expect. It’s notable that her career and sponsorships were result of her smart thinking and persistence. I only wish this had been a little more in-depth. One amusing side note: The editors’s note has to explain what a Swatch is for younger readers. – Thanks to Jason Lilly for the tip.