Skateboard slaat aan in Vlissingen – Skateboarding is catching on in Vlissingen, according to the December 4th, 1980 edition of the Dutch newspaper Provinciale Zeeuwse Courant. Check out the photo of that skatepark. Even though it’s low res black and white newspaper photo, it’s clearly one of those fiberglass ramps that was part of the Skate Ball system, and possibly the same blue fiberglass ramps used in Thrasherland. It’s hard to know for sure, could there have been more than one manufacturer of blue fiberglass skateboard ramps? There are similarities and differences between the two if you compare, but it’s conceivable that there were a few minor iterations over the product lifespan that would account for that. This is the only photograph I’ve seen showing the incline, full pipe parts (only half here) and the Skate Ball ramp. I’m just shocked that some of them made it all the way over to Europe. The article comes courtesy of S&A reader Jeroen who rode this thing in the Netherlands. His crew actually found abandoned parts of the park and reassembled them in their own configuration and rode them in 1985.

Life Magazine covers skateboarding in Florida courtesy of photographer John Falls who went down to Florida to cover the Florida Bowl Rider’s Cup in Kona. And holy cow, that looks like some more artifacts from Thrasherland-style parks in those photos. It’s at this point that I’d like to remind Rick that I still know exactly where your Thrasherland slides are, you know, the ones you loaned me 5 years ago… – Thanks to Seth Levy for the tip.

Ultra Flex. I’ve never heard of this company before, but they made skateboards and Primo brand wheels. The parent company was actually Special Products, a division of something called I.I.I., located in San Diego. I couldn’t find anything definite for them via google. They must have spent some cash on this brochure though. In the 70’s you couldn’t get a 1000 full color brocures for $100. First you had to have a photo shoot in a studio. The you had to pay for professional film developing, type setting, ad layout, and mechanical color separations. Plus there was stat camera graphic work too, none of this scanning and resizing in Photoshop, and then emailing a PDF. It was all done mechanically, and this would have been expensive. UPDATE: Added pictures of an old Ultra Flex board.