Since my next post will be about quitting skateboarding, I thought now would be the appropriate time to give the people what they want, that is, a big dump of old photos from roughly 1986-1988. The image quality varies pretty greatly, sorry.
1986 everybody.
Team P.E.B.
Your author doing some suburban street skating, ie. jumping off a wall into a banked driveway.
Me sliding a picnic table bench at the old Lutherville.
Ed, launch ramp backside air in front of a dramatic sunset.
Ed sliding a curb.
Brian ollieing out of Jeff B’s launch ramp.
Brian airing off some skinny ledge. Look at that Rob Roskopp.
Brian, night skating.
Ed and Brian watching a street contest.
Jeff B getting super extended off his launch ramp.
Jeff B at Lutherville when the metal ramps were brand new. I don’t know if this was just super tweaked or a 180.
Someone I don’t know with a nosepick on the box at Lutherville.
Some random with a bent knee Christ thing at a contest during the height of the launch ramp era.
Closed gas stations. The natural habitat of the suburban skater.
An unknown with a FS wall ride transfer at a contest in Ocean City, MD.
More random shots of people I don’t know. Some guy with a nice FS 5-0 at the old Ocean Bowl vert ramp.
Kids at the Ocean Bowl. I don’t think this was a make.
Paul Wisniewski with a layback grind to tail on the steep bank at the Save Lutherville contest.
Paul Wisniewski with a FS rock on the Lutherville mini. Texture courtesy of beginners B&W photography experimentation.
Below is the video that I’ve excerpted parts of for previous posts in its entirety. When we actually recorded this video is unclear. It was either the summer of 1990 or 1991. I have been saying that it was filmed in 1991, the summer before my senior year, but I am now beginning to suspect that it may have been filmed the previous summer, when I was sixteen. I say that because there is a brief bit, around forty-six minutes in, where we are skating Dookie Ramp 2.0 without a masonite layer, just raw plywood. That would have been just after Jeff R built the ramp in 1990. That and rails, I think we’d stopped using rails by 1991, but that is just speculation.
The title is Don’t Panic because I used the opening sequence of a BBC broadcast of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy as a title card.
If you have not watched any of the previous excerpts, the quality is horrible. I had borrowed Jeff B’s video camera to make this video. The camera was already slightly damaged so the original recordings weren’t great. There was an audio “clunking” and visible tracking lines at the bottom of the image from the start. I then edited the video by dubbing from VCR to VCR. I dubbed on to a used tape. That tape then sat around for twenty some years before I finally digitized it. It’s watchable but just barely, hence the Historical Documents tag.
Here is the breakdown of spots and people for those that are interested:
00:40 Jimmy’s Ramp, Hampton, MD. Jimmy and me. Ed filming.
04:52 Street skating, Timonium, MD. Ed and me.
08:02 Street skating, Timonium, MD. Ed, Jeff R and me.
10:17 Rip the Lip, Reading, PA. Marc, Jeff B and me.
24:46 My quarter pipe, Timonium, MD. Marc, Young, Ed and me. Jeff R filming.
26:26 Dookie Ramp, Cockeysville, MD. Ed, Marc, Young, Jeff B, Jeff R and me.
36:53 Lansdowne skate park, Lansdowne, MD. Jeff B and me.
46:40 Dookie Ramp, Cockeysville, MD. Jeff B.
46:49 Street Skating, Ocean City, MD. Marc and me.
Unlike the rest of my blog, this post is not about one specific spot, like the Ditch or Lutherville, or even thematically grouped, like launch ramps or mini ramps. It is instead about two very different places, Towson and Lansdowne, and two very different styles of skating, street and concrete flow parks. I had considered splitting this up in to two separate posts but decided to keep it together because I find the juxtaposition of these two places interesting. While they are quite dissimilar, what they have in common is that, in my last two years of high school, both of them were frequent destinations. Once we were old enough to drive many more spots opened up to us. We visited other backyard mini ramps, as I talked about a couple months ago, and took day trips to indoor ramp parks, such as Rip the Lip and Cheapskates in Pennsylvania. More often than not though, when we wanted to skate something besides one of our ramps, we drove to Towson or Lansdowne.
Despite all of the ramp and park skating I’ve written about previously, I skated street just as much. That was how I started skateboarding and I never stopped doing it. All that changed was that, as I discussed in my first post, where I skated expanded as I aged. I started by tic-taccing on my patio. I progressed to the banked driveways on my street and then the curb cuts in front of Eddie’s house. Next was the loading dock at our elementary school and then the small steps and ledges at the middle school. After that were the painted curbs, parking blocks and manual pads at the office buildings and strip malls on our side of York Road. As a teenager, I began to venture over to the other side of York Road. There was a small business district and industrial park on a service road back there. The fronts of these businesses had more curbs and parking blocks as well as small stair sets. The rears had more interesting features, including a number of different loading dock and bank configurations. I became familiar with this area in a way that only skaters can understand. We explored it daily, aimlessly wandering around looking for new things to skate. There weren’t any real “spots”, nothing that you would skate for any length of time, just a variety of random obstacles that you would hit and then move on. For example, early on one of the best “spots” was a bunch of plywood stacked against a dumpster behind a Dunkin’ Donuts. That was probably the first ramp-like thing I ever skated. It only lasted about a week but Eddie and I skated it daily. Another favorite was a large slanted rock that sat in grass, a foot or two back from the entrance to a parking lot. I would ollie up on to it, do something like a rock ‘n’ roll and then pop back off. I loved that stupid thing. It’s what I had, just small steps, red curbs, propped up wood, loading docks and rocks. There weren’t even any good ledge spots, none that slid anyway.
Young boardsliding a bench at our high school. 1991-ish.
During middle school and the first half of high school, this is where I normally skated if I wanted to skate street. The fallback spots were always different schools. There would always be at least one stair set or bench to skate at a school. During the summer, my father used to umpire for an adult baseball league and I would often accompany him to the games. These games were frequently held at some of the nearby colleges, which were always great fun. These campuses always had some interesting plazas to skate. They were empty in the summer, large and exciting to explore. Yet, besides various schools and colleges, there wasn’t very much else that I skated. There were several nearby parking garages, with slick curbs, that were our rainy day spots. I occasionally skated in Cockeysville, the next neighborhood to the north, but it was a bit too far for me to skate to regularly. The only spot of note there was a short steep handrail, one of the very few I could boardslide.
Once we old enough to drive, we skated a much larger variety of street spots. That sounds odd, driving somewhere to skate street, but what it normally entailed was checking out a spot someone had heard about or simply exploring another nearby neighborhood. Despite being so close, I never skated Baltimore City itself very much. I was in the city all of the time, for punk shows, art events and record shopping but I didn’t really skate there. I don’t know why that is. It may be because a lot of the city sucked for skating. I know now a bunch of Baltimore street skaters are going to find this, call me a poseur and tell me that the city was great for street skating. Maybe it was? Maybe I just didn’t know where to go? There didn’t seem to be that much. The hip neighborhood at the time, Fells Point, was unskateable. It had a skate shop, a punk record store, a coffee house and a bunch of bars. It was where all of the “alt” younger people hung out, but the streets were cobblestone and the one main plaza was made of chunky brick. If that plaza had been smooth, it would have been a different story. As it was, there was no localized place to skate. All of the decent spots were scattered about the city.
I spent quite a bit of time at Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art. I took evening and weekend art classes there. There were two spots nearby, a three block monument near the Lyric Opera House and some killer banks at the Lyric itself. The three block was frequently skated, the Lyric was unfortunately almost an instant bust. Nearby on Charles Street, there were a few parks and office buildings with smooth ledges but it quickly became hilly and hard to skate. The rest of the spots I knew about were downtown. There were some nice banks at the Legg Mason building and a huge courtyard of black marble at another office building across the street but those were also quick busts. You couldn’t skate most of the Inner Harbor either. The southern side of the harbor was not as built up back then. By Federal Hill it was largely empty and safe to skate but all that was there were some big steps and rough concrete ledges. Beyond that, I can’t think of very much else. Large sections of the city were frightening and we only braved them for punk shows, so instead of skating the city, we skated Towson. That was our safe suburban version of city street skating.
Towson is one neighborhood to the south of where and I grew up and the Baltimore County seat. It is much more of a town than the suburbs surrounding it. It is also home to a large university. I went to that university often, to use the library, see bands play and also to skate. It had some huge stair sets that always looked tempting but were way outside of my ability. Besides that, there were a couple brick plazas with stone benches and ledges, none of which was particularly good to skate. Towson, the town, was much better. Our skating there was similar to my earlier local street skating. We would park and wander around, skating various, not particularly noteworthy, things. What made it so good was that it was dense enough that there were numerous places to skate within short distances of each other. You could easily spend a whole weekend day there; there were that many different minor spots. There were a couple of office buildings with small stair sets and ledges. There were some mellow banks, loading docks and small gaps in the parking lots behind the college bar. One of the parking garages at the mall had adjacent curbs to banks at its entrance. It also had a paved to smooth transition jersey wall up top. For a while, our local skate shop, Denny’s store Island Dreams, was in Towson as well.
Jeff B with a boardslide on a mellow rail. It’s similar to the Towson courthouse rail but I think this one was at a church. Notice Young looking ’90s stylish in the back with his bucket hat. Again, 1991-ish.
When we skated Towson it was rare that we would run into any other skaters. The only place this happened was at the Burger King. That parking lot had a small curb to tiny bank to curb thing by the drive in window. You could skate it like a bank, a gap or slanted manual pad, getting tricks up and down it. It was annoying because you couldn’t skate it if there were cars in the drive through, so there was a lot of waiting around. My group of friends never spent much time there but, for some reason, this was a very popular spot for other kids. Years later, when that Burger King closed, it looks like it became a steady spot. You can see some footage of many kids skating it here. In my opinion though, the best spot in Towson was the courthouse. It was the central attraction for me and was surprisingly safe to skate if you went after work hours or on the weekends. The interior plaza was lined with marble ledges and there was a small fountain in the center. The ledges also ran parallel to the multiple stair sets on the sides. You could bomb and ollie off of the bigger of those banked ledges or grind and slide down a set on the smaller ones. The main interior entrance to the courthouse had a long, mellow and square handrail as well. Jeff B was the only person I know that ever skated that. He boardslid it, though I think he may have caveman-ed in to it. Back then, any rail over four or five steps was complete madness, nowadays I can only imagine the tricks that kids could get down it, but looking at pictures on the internet it appears that it may now be knobbed. The best part of the courthouse was the “front”. The front faced a big, six lane bypass road that swung around the center of Towson and connected to Towson University. There was no street parking on this road so no one ever used that entrance. You could always skate there. No one would ever kick you out. The marble ledges here sloped from barely curb height up to about two feet, and, most importantly, those ledges flanked the small stair sets, so you could get grinding or sliding tricks off of them. It was by far the best spot I knew of. Looking at video of it now it appears that, post 9/11, they put in some large spherical security sculptures that are in the way of the step ledges. Despite that, it still looks fantastic.
My “holy grail” spot in Towson was one that I only able to skate a few times. Behind a mechanic’s garage was a small parking lot and the back walls of that lot were two high, steep banks. On the rare occasions that cars weren’t parked there you could ollie the curb up in to those banks. If you got enough speed, you could try to bash through the nearly 90-degree transition from one bank to the next. That was it. It was tight, awkward and hard to skate. It was a fairly shitty spot. I think I liked it so much because it was so hard. The challenge was to simply see if you could skate it, not do any tricks. That appealed to me.
While you can divide skateboarding up like a sport, into various disciplines, I like to think of it as being much closer to an art. Seen this way, I consider skateboarding to have two major forms of expression. The shorthand for these would “tricks” and “style”. I’m not completely happy with either of those terms, they are both somewhat limiting to what I am actually trying to talk about, but they are close enough for now. The best skaters have both of these things. They can do hard tricks and look good while doing them. I’m sure anyone reading this who skated has seen people with just tricks. You will find one at every skate park. There is always a kid who can do some insanely technical tricks but otherwise looks like he has never stood on a skateboard before. All style is the opposite, someone who looks good and comfortable on the board but can’t do even the most basic tricks. I was never that good and I am never going to be good, but I aspire to a happy balance between these two things. Similarly, this concept applies to the various disciplines I dismissed earlier as well. I think it is important to be able to skate all different kind of terrain. To have, what in sports would be called, “the fundamentals”. I think the street kids who can do insane flatground tricks but can’t kickturn on vert are doing themselves a disservice and the same holds true for the bowl rippers who can’t ollie up a curb. I think it is important to be well rounded. Of course, this is all a matter of personal preference, anyone can skateboard however they please, but that is a rather adult and enlightened opinion. As a teenager, it “mattered” how you skated.
Source: Skately. Goofy Boy from Big Brother Magazine.
What happened at the dawn of the ‘90s is that the focus in skateboarding became almost solely about tricks and street to the detriment of all else. Freestyle, the red headed stepchild of the skateboarding world, had clung on through the ‘80s. We all had a grudging respect for freestyle, mainly because the tricks that Rodney Mullen invented were so incredibly hard. It was not cool though and there was only one Mullen. There were many other people in short shorts and high tube socks, doing tricks straight from the ‘70s. It was lame compared to the high speed aerial assaults of vert skating or the bad boy image of street skating. At the end of the ’80s both vert and freestyle died. The whims of skateboard fashion shifted to pure technical street skating and, ironically, that style of skating involved adapting many of Mullen’s freestyle tricks to the street. The pogos and handstands from freestyle went away but the flip and spin tricks were now what all skaters aspired to. It was freestyle skating, just with the short shorts and tube socks replaced by big pants and small wheels. If you didn’t skate in the early ‘90s it’s hard to explain how ridiculous the fashion was. We would go to thrift stores or big and tall shops and literally buy the largest pants we could find. We belted them on with shoelaces or twine. You would cut off the legs to fit, so they hung over your shoes, and, not being hemmed, these, of course, would quickly fray. It was especially cool if these pants were mustard yellow or acid green or some other ridiculous color. This look was colloquially known as the Goofy Boy. Granted, the worst of this was around 1994, after I had all but stopped skating and was flirting with rave culture, but I still, briefly, dressed like this. The same went for wheels, well… not exactly. With wheels, it was just as extreme but in the opposite direction. You bought the smallest wheels possible. There was a race to the bottom. There was no reason to it. There were some rationalizations made about smaller wheels giving you a lower center of gravity and that may have had some miniscule difference in making pressure flips easier but it was really only fashion. What this meant was that now skateboarding was a bunch of guys in clown pants rolling slowly around in a parking lot, staring at their feet and trying complicated technical tricks for hours on end, rarely landing anything. It was an important point in the progression of skateboarding, but in actual practice, it sucked.
This style of skating was too technical for me. I couldn’t do most of the tricks and I thought they looked bad so I didn’t put any real effort in to trying to learn them. I picked “style” over “tricks”. It was not the kind of skateboarding that I wanted to do. In the tribal manner of high school, I identified as a skater but I was so immersed in the skateboarding sub-culture that that alone was not enough. It was important to me to further distinguish myself, as to what ”kind” of skater I was. It was clear that I was not a technical street skater. Though I largely skated mini ramps what I had always wanted to be was a concrete transition skater. I felt more comfortable on concrete walls and it just seemed to me to be somehow cooler. I had grown up with the magazines full of images of the old California parks, pools and bowls. We didn’t have anything like that in suburban Maryland. We didn’t have Del Mar. What we did have was Lansdowne.
Lansdowne was on the south west side of Baltimore, in a small field wedged in a corner between two highways and an apartment and townhouse complex. I credit Young with first telling us about it. He had lived nearby and skated it before moving to Cockeysville. To get there we would drive west on the Beltway, around the city, and get off at the exit after the Colt 45 brewery. We would park in one of the many nearly identical parking lots of the housing complex. Drab plain brown brick and relatively nondescript, these homes didn’t look all that different from similar developments in my wealthier section of Baltimore County. To get to the skate park you would walk a dirt path back between two of these apartment buildings. This is when then the poverty and neglect became more obvious. The chain link fenced backyards bordering the park were not manicured lawns. Instead, they were filled with trash and standing water.
Lansdowne 1990-ish. That’s me seated in the front. Marc is in the background, behind the kid on the BMX.
Cousin to other similar parks like the Dish, the Bro Bowl and the original Ocean Bowl, Lansdowne was one of the few ’70s parks left in the country. It worked like this, at the top of the hill, by the entrance path, there was a flat circular starting area. From there two snake runs branched out. They both started as small tight drainage ditches. The outer one looped out around the end of the park, widening as it turned. The interior one dropped more quickly and widened as well where it made the sharp turn around the hip. Both snake runs emptied into a large, flat rectangular section with banked walls. This area had a few random humps and bumps spread around the flat. An extremely mellow saucer of a bowl was attached to the outside of the longer snake run, right before it met the flat area. Large areas of “deck” along the top were also paved, but poorly. Up there it was cracked, rocky, bumpy blacktop, almost like gravel. A typical run at Lansdowne would normally go like this, you would carve down the outside snake run, swing high up on the wall around the turn, try to hit the wall opposite the bowl as high as you could, come back down into the snake run and bounce over the other side into the bowl. A long frontside or backside carve around the bowl would leave you with barely enough speed to make it back up over the hump again and into the flat rectangular section.
Nothing had a lip. Everything was rounded in that ‘70s style, so unless there was a parking block set up somewhere, lip tricks were out of the question. The two best places to skate were the hip and a small oval bump in the flat section. This bump was named the Smurf because it was painted blue. We would push across the rough gravelly flat at the top and ollie the hip or air out of it. We did similar tricks, on a smaller scale, on the Smurf. That was it besides skating the flat section like a ditch. If you were “good” at Lansdowne, it wasn’t because you were doing many tricks because there were very few places to actually do those tricks. The terrain had an equalizing effect. Being good at Lansdowne just meant that you knew how to skate. It was my style of skating, just carving walls and doing ollies. I enjoyed that much more than the boredom and frustration of trying flip tricks in a parking lot. While I appreciate the discipline it took for kids to work endlessly on those tricks that wasn’t my way of learning. I just wanted to have fun and let any new things I learned develop much more organically. Now that everyone is so good, I’m sure kids can bust some amazing tricks over that hip. Back in 1990, everyone was still struggling to do those tricks on flatground, so the best skaters at Lansdowne then were the ones who could skate the fastest and ollie the highest. Even Natas, one of the best street skaters in the world at the time, only got an ollie or two here in his part from Speed Freaks in 1989. There was always a legend that someone ollied out of the small snake run by the hip, over the wide channel of the outside one and in to the bowl. I’ve found video of a guy, Matt Dove, attempting it and breaking his leg. He wasn’t even close. It’s a huge gap even by today’s standards. I wonder if it anyone ever made it or if that was all just childhood stories.
There were never any adults at Lansdowne, just hordes of feral children. There were no bathrooms and no water fountains. The closest convenience store was driving distance away. I know I’ve talked about the Ditch and Lutherville being lawless but they paled in comparison to Lansdowne. I was always a little on edge there. I’ve been trying to figure out why. It was in a rougher area and isolated but I think my fears were class based and largely unfounded. It wasn’t dangerous, per se. I never heard of anyone robbed or run out of there, like the stories you hear about the Dish or the Bro Bowl. I saw some minor squabbles and fights, but not anything particularly bad. There were always occasional fights at skate parks. The local skaters weren’t friendly but it wasn’t “blatant localism” either. It wasn’t like you were trespassing on someone’s secret spot. The place was crowded and frequently saw skaters from as far away as Pennsylvania or DC so the majority of kids there were usual not local. The non-skating locals would sometimes wander over in to the park and play at intimidation, but again they were normally outnumbered. Some of the edginess of the place was obviously a result of our age. Teenage boys tend to group together and look askance at anyone outside of that group.
Your author at the tail end of a one foot ollie out of the hip at Lansdowne, some time in the very early ’90s.
Largely though, I think the bad vibes were a product of the times. Much like big pants and small wheels, vibing was also in style. Skateboarders were hated. They are still hated but at least now people are used to them. We came of age during the birth of modern street skating. It was all new and no one knew how to react appropriately to it. The current solutions are to knob things and build skate parks. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s the solution was make it illegal, everywhere. The justifications were always the same, liability, pedestrian safety or property damage, but the heart of the matter was that dirty, sweaty kids repurposing the urban landscape for their own enjoyment violated some unspoken sacrosanct sense of order. It drove some people mad. Skateboards were banned at schools and, in some cases, entire towns. Cops arrested children for skating in empty parking lots, security guards overstepped their bounds and attempted to fight teenagers or confiscate their boards and random concerned citizens would verbally and physically accost young adults in public over their choice of leisure activity. All of this still happens to this day, but in the early ‘90s it was ever present. Skaters were viewed as public nuances at best, criminals at worst. Skateboarding was the physical activity of choice for weird, creative kids who weren’t afraid of getting hurt. Instead of being cowed by this negative stereotype, they chose to embrace it. The mellow, easier going surfer image of the ‘80s California skater was replaced by the much harder-edged, urban street skater of the ‘90s. The videos ceased being the goofy, lighthearted fare of the early Powell Peralta videos and began to include footage of all the varying bad behaviors, the drugs, alcohol and fights. The irreverence and anti-social outsider attitude that Thrasher had championed was taken to offensive new heights when Big Brother Magazine debuted in 1992. Being an asshole had come in to fashion and this bad attitude was democratic. It was evenly spread around. It wasn’t solely reserved for authority figures, it was applied to other skaters as well.
Lansdowne was one of the few places where we interacted with large groups of other skaters that we did not know. This made the vibing, shit-talk and snaking especially obvious. It really wasn’t that bad but I made an end run around it and decided to avoid it altogether by avoiding the crowds. I went really early on the weekends. I did this often enough that I took to keeping a push broom in the trunk of my father’s car. We would frequently be some of the first people there and would inevitably have to sweep out the broken beer bottles from night before. The skaters were the ones who took care of the place. While filthy and absolutely covered in graffiti most of the surface of the park, outside of the gravely deck, was in surprisingly good shape after years of neglect. There were very few cracks. Whatever drains it had must have still worked because there would sometimes be small puddles but it never filled with rainwater. It somehow, miraculously, stayed like this for more than twenty five years. I don’t know how that is possible. There were a number of other remnants of ‘70s parks in the area, all of which were virtually unskateable just a few years after they closed or were abandoned. Even more miraculously, Lansdowne is still there. Around 2004 the County began to clean it up. It was patched, the tops repaved and pre-fab ramps were put in next to the original park. It now has full pad rules and hours, which does seem to somewhat tarnish its legacy. I guess it exists now more for beginners, old men on nostalgia trips (this old man will probably skate it in the spring) and long boarders, than for anyone else. Still, I suppose it is cool that a living piece of skateboard history has been preserved.
Below is some more awful quality video of Jeff B and I skating it in 1991.
Growing up I must have spent at least several weeks a year in Ocean City, MD. My family owned a condo there so we went to the beach often. This makes Ocean City an odd place for me to write about as my experiences skateboarding there encompass the entire period covered in this blog. I went from tic-taccing in the parking lot while still in elementary school to board sliding handrails in my late teens. Yet my memories of the place have largely merged in to one continuous blur and it is exceptionally hard to differentiate what happened when.
Saying we owned a condo makes my family sound wealthier than we were. My father, his two brothers and their mother (my paternal grandmother), all went in on the property together. The condo they bought was at the northern end of the city. For those not familiar with Maryland, Ocean City is the southernmost tip of a thin strip of land that dangles off the Atlantic edge of the Delmarva peninsula. Outside of the national park that is Assateague Island, it is Maryland’s only ocean facing beach. It is literally just a ten-mile long highway with a block or two on either side. This tiny town turns in to the second largest city in Maryland during the summer months. It’s not a quaint, quiet beach town of old Victorians nor does it have the seedy underbelly of some of the Jersey shore. Instead, it is the vacation destination of middle and working class families from much of the surrounding state. As such it is family friendly (though a little boozy) and filled with strip malls and chain stores to cater to its suburban guests. Back in the early ’80s, when my family purchased the condo, Ocean City was not as developed as it is now. This was especially true of our location, up at the northern end on the bay side. Much of the surrounding area was still marsh land. Our building sat along a canal, a block off the highway, and as a child it was one of the only buildings on that street. The dirt road that led back to the bay is now paved and lined with condos while the marsh was filled and converted in to a large public park.
Each year my father’s family would work out a vacation schedule between themselves. Other family and friends would rent the remaining free days. Both of my parents were public school teachers so we would always take at least two summer trips, one just after school ended and another longer vacation at the end of the summer. We also frequently made weekend visits during the off-season. Early on in its history, my family decided to keep a journal at the condo and have guests write in it about their stay. I culled the following skateboard related entries from that journal.
Source: Atlantic Skates facebook. Atlantic Skates circa 1988.
August 1986
Got a Tracker lapper, two copers, green grip tape, Ugly Stix and Mini Stix rails at Atlantic Skates.
– Patrick Eisenhauer
Translation: This is all skateboard parts and junk. Oh to live through another of Pat’s interests.
– Doug Eisenhauer
August 15-24, 1987
Patrick is still skateboarding. He bought a helmet, etc. and tried the bowl at 4th street for the first time. Kerrie is getting really good at miniature golf and she is still the UNO champ. We had a good week . A lot of fun and sun.
– Cheryl Eisenhauer
March 18-20, 1988
Dad, me, Pat and his friend Brian came down on Friday. Pat and Brian went to the Bowl on Saturday. Also saw the movie Police Academy 5. Played Nintendo all the time. Dad watched a lot of NCAA tournament.
– Kerrie Eisenhauer
May 27-30, 1988
We decided to brave the crowds and come to Ocean City on a holiday weekend. We came late Friday night and are leaving early today to avoid the bridge backup. The weather has been nice and the ocean cold. We did the usual things, including a movie (Crocodile Dundee 2), miniature golf and shopping. We can’t wait to come again for a full week after school closes.
Dad told me to write all that. What I wanted to say is that I learned ollie crail snatchers to tail. Invert blunts, ollie footplants to indy fastplants, etc….
That probably makes no sense to anyone, but, oh well.
– Patrick Eisenhauer
[Ed. Note: I’m not quite sure what I am talking about here, especially with that last one. I am assuming I was doing this stuff on a parking block.]
May 19-21, 1989
Dad, Pat, Jeff Brown (Pat’s friend) and I came down on Friday. On Saturday, Pat and Jeff skated the Bowl. Dad and I rode bikes up to Old Pro Golf and played their three golf courses. Dad won a free game. On Sunday, Pat and Jeff went to the Bowl again. Then we all went to the board walk. Played a lot of video games.
– Kerrie Eisenhauer
Your author with a backside air out of the bowl, circa 1988.
As you can see, our trips consisted largely of what you would expect from a family vacation. We hit all the standards. We would spend large parts of each day on the beach where my sister and I would build sand castles and boogie board while my parents sunbathed and read. If the weather turned, we would watch movies, play games or go shopping. We would play at least one round of miniature golf and spend at least one night on the boardwalk, with its rides and arcades. Our vacations often overlapped with relatives or family friends so we would visit with them as well. Once I started skating, one of these standard activities became a shopping trip to Atlantic Skates. As mentioned in my interview with Denny Riordon, Atlantic Skates was the home of the brand Kryptonics (which later became Toxic). At the time, it was also the largest east coast skateboarding distributor and had a retail outlet in downtown Ocean City. In those pre-internet days it was magnificent. The huge amount of brands and products available far surpassed any of the other skate shops. Each summer I would stock up on whatever skate related ephemera I was fetishizing. In those early years it was, obviously, lappers, copers and rails. In later years I mainly remember just buying t-shirts or wheels. They had a discount wheel bin, full of what was most likely flawed or unlabeled Kryptonics that cost almost nothing. That was a godsend.
Just a few blocks from Atlantic Skates was the Ocean Bowl, which was also always on my itinerary. Skateboarding was illegal during the summer on the streets and sidewalks of Ocean City and it is precisely because of this that Ocean City built their skate park. In terms of skating, that park is what Ocean City is really known for. Instead of paraphrasing its history let me quote directly from their official website.
The Ocean Bowl Skate Park is the oldest operating municipal skate park in the United States. Following the rise in popularity of skateboarding in the 1970s, the Ocean City Council banned skateboarding on the streets within City limits. This prompted many skaters and their parents to attend the next Council meeting to ask that a space be provided for them to pursue their sport.
By the first week of June, 1976, the park opened. At that time, the facility consisted of a four foot deep asphalt bowl which proved so successful that a larger bowl was quickly added. In 1984 this “big bowl” was structurally weakened by successive tropical storms and was removed the following year. It was succeeded by an eleven foot high, twenty eight foot wide metal-surfaced halfpipe which served not only to replace the lost bowl, but also to respond to the changing demands of skateboarding and the huge popularity of vertical ramps at the time.
The ramp and the small bowl stood for another ten years when finally, in 1997, due to time, wear and the current needs of skaters, the park was again in need of renovations. After long hours of planning and many meetings, the City Council together with a Skate Park Committee composed of local skaters, business people, politicians and parents, came up with the resources to build the park that exists today. The old bowl and ramp were torn down in the Fall of 1997 and the new park opened in July of 1998.
Someone I don’t know with a lien to tail on the Ocean Bowl vert ramp, circa 1987.
The second version, from 1986 until 1997, is the Ocean Bowl that I knew. The bowl itself was a lumpy amorphous mess. You could roll down the ramp, carve the walls, maybe air out of the center bump, and, if it had a parking block, do a few lip tricks at the top of the bank. It was obviously a left-over from the ’70s era. It was fun but also frustrating to try to keep up any speed. I still skated it yearly. The vert ramp was undeniably the main attraction of the park, drawing skaters from all around the area. While the east coast had a thriving backyard vert scene, something I touched on in my last post and in the interview with Denny, those backyard ramps were often short-lived. The Ocean Bowl ramp was one of the only legal and therefore stable vert ramps nearby. By memory the closest others would have been Mt. Trashmore, in Virginia Beach or the ramp at Cheapskates, an indoor park north of Philadelphia. Not being a vert skater, I didn’t really skate the ramp that much. I did drop in on vert for the first time here but it was too large for me. Other than some kick turns, I normally just watched.
While I went to the Ocean Bowl at least once each trip, because of its day fees and pad rules I largely skated other things. The best of which was also one of the first. Early in middle school I found some blue fiberglass parts of what I think must have been an old water slide. Someone had arranged them in to a makeshift ramp in the marshy tidal swamp near our condo. Thinking back, this is exceptionally odd. In general almost everyone in Ocean City is a tourist, in town for a week at most. With its small permanent population, there were very few local skaters living there. Those that did live there would have had a yearly pass to the Ocean Bowl, not prowling around up at the undeveloped northern end. Yet someone had found these pieces, transported them to an out of the way field and set them up to skate. Subsequent generations of skaters, generations here measured in the days and weeks of each family’s stay, had in turn discovered this impromptu ramp and done their best to shore it up. It was literally held up with driftwood, pieces of broken cinder blocks and shards of lumber scavenged from who knows where. There were two pieces, a large half bowl and a wavy slide looking section. The slide section was set up as a runway in to the bowl. The bowl had just enough lip on it that you could do some tricks. If you wanted to hit the lip of the bowl more than once you had to make sure that you were squared up so that you could ride back up the roll in section to kick turn. I skated it all week. Every day there was a growing number of kids there as word spread through the network that children somehow form. It was probably the shittiest thing I have ever skated and it was also one of the most fun. That’s how it is with skateboarding a lot times. The most perfect ramp or park can get boring, you can actually have the most fun just figuring out what is possible at some piece of shit spot.
A street contest in the court next to the Ocean Bowl, 1988ish.
The fiberglass crap wasn’t there the following year, but my second favorite shitty OC spot was. A restaurant on the corner of our street had burnt down and been mostly demolished. All that was left of it was its foundation. There was a medium-sized flat section free of tile, rebar or protruding concrete blocks that skaters had dragged a parking block to. Obviously tied up in an ongoing legal or insurance dispute this property was never developed and remained an empty foundation, and therefore a skate spot, for the entirety of my childhood. Some years there would be one parking block there, other years two or three. Other summers there would be some plywood propped up as a bank or other makeshift obstacles. Kids kept finding it and changing it. In many ways it was perfect. You were left completely alone when you skated it. It wasn’t on public property so it was legal , you weren’t in the way of anything on private property so you would never get kicked out and it was rare that there other kids there so it was never crowded.
OC was great for street skating. Sure skateboarding was illegal on public property but all the strip malls lining Coastal Highway were private property and anyone that grew up in the suburbs knows the potential that that offers. In the front of these strip malls were painted curbs, parking blocks, manual pads, small stair sets, rails, benches and ledges. In the rear, gaps, loading docks, banks and other exploitable infrastructure. After I finished with the day’s activities, normally in the late afternoon to early evening I would go out skating. I would simply explore and each year I covered a larger distance than the previous, discovering new spots. The journal entries and photos posted above catalog some of my skating up until 1989. I don’t have any record from 1990, but I do have video from a damaged VHS tape from 1991. As I mentioned in my previous post, I filmed a video that year. The same caveat as before hold true. The quality is horrible, but in the following Marc and I can be seen skating some of the aforementioned spots.
It’s strange to think now about my era of “little kid skating”. When I was tic-taccing in the parking lot and obsessing over lappers I was not a little kid. I imagine myself like the young ones I see at the parks today, but the reality was different. I started puberty in the 5th grade. By the time I was in middle school I was a tall gangly teenager, even if I was only eleven. I think it is because I went through puberty so early that I was somewhat sexually precocious. Tied up with my memories of skateboarding at the beach are also memories of meeting girls. Skaters were known as being notoriously bad with girls. The skater look, the image, was very attractive to a certain class of teenage girls, but the skaters themselves were either generally oblivious or disdainful of that interest. My experience was different. I was acutely aware. So when I went out skating at the beach I wasn’t just looking for skate spots, I was also looking for girls.
I have this theory I call the Summer Camp Syndrome. It’s certainly not an original idea. I thought I had invented it but a quick search turned up many mentions of this phenomena. During middle school and early high school I went to a Christian canoe summer camp. In elementary school I had attended a more typical summer camp. The activities included swimming, short hikes, hymns and macaroni based arts and crafts, but we also learned to canoe. Once you were old enough you could join an advanced camp that toned down the religion and focused almost solely on the canoeing. It was a lot of fun. The camp was located near Harper’s Ferry, where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers meet. Each day we would head off to navigate a different stretch of river. The rapids, rope swings and overnight camping may have been the major appeal, but there were also girls. Every summer I would make a “camp girlfriend”, or if I didn’t there were still games of spin the bottle being played once we were away from the counselors. At that age this is what happens. You exist so much in the now that removed from your accustomed social setting the camp almost instantly becomes your new reality.
This was also true of the beach. I would go out skating and exploring and I would inevitably meet someone. All it took was eye contact and I would approach or be approached by a teenage girl. We would exchange numbers or hang out for a few hours. Sometimes we would make out, sometimes more if the girl was adventurous. So along with a “camp girlfriend” I made a “beach girlfriend” most summers as well. This dynamic changed by the later teenage years. The flirting didn’t stop but with the fact that sex was now a real possibility, it wasn’t as innocent. The interactions were more cautious and reserved and with the more sharply divided social cliques of high school it became harder to meet random strangers on the street. I instead tried to meet kindred spirits. There was really only one way to go about that, and that was by hanging out in front of Chat Street. Atlantic Skates was hands down the best skate shop in Ocean City but it wasn’t a hang out spot. If you were a teenage skate punk in the early ’90s the coolest place to hang out was Chat Street. Located on the boardwalk it was a hybrid skate shop and clothing store. Sort of a proto Hot Topic, it catered to the burgeoning alternative scene. It had walls of counter-culture stickers, racks of punk t-shirt, skateboards and CDs. You could probably even get your nose pierced there. I can’t remember for sure but I wouldn’t be surprised. It was all very ’90s. It was successful enough that they eventually opened a second store in Fells Point, Baltimore. The freaks, skate rats and punks would hang out on the boardwalk in front of it. I would just sit down on the wall and meet strangers. I met a future girlfriend there one summer. She was a several years younger but we talked and she gave me a copy of her ‘zine. We ended up in the same college a few years later. Another summer I met a whole crew of people, guys and girls. We became a temporary group of friends and hung out each night. Some of them were a bit older and not with their families so we scraped up enough money for cases of beer and drank at their place. By the end of high school that is how it was, the beach had become synonymous, not so much with skating or meeting girls, but with “partying”.
I didn’t really drink or do any drugs until late in high school. I had been straight edge, not really because of any strong belief but more by default. I had experimented early on but the party culture in my high school was generally jocks, who I hated, or gross hippie stoner kids, who I looked down on with disdain. What changed for me was that my long-term girlfriend dumped me and I used that as an excuse to start drinking. It was a flimsy excuse and I was being melodramatic, but the breakup was actually kind of traumatic. She had switched from her suburban high school to an arts magnet school in the city. I would hang out with her and all her new art school friends, but unbeknownst to me she had already started seeing one of them. He was in a band and he had a devillock. When she broke up with me and I found out, I felt foolish and took it hard. That winter my group of friends went on an organized snowboard trip, which is probably the first time I really “partied”. The minute the lights went off on the bus there was the sound of a million beer cans opening. I am sure we snowboarded but what I mainly remember about that trip is drinking, meeting girls and acting like hoodlums. We had an amazing time.
Senior Week was much the same. Senior Week is a tradition among Maryland suburban teenagers. At the end of the school year there is a week where all the graduating seniors go to the beach to party. It is a rite of passage, one of the first times many young people have to spend a week totally unsupervised. As such, it is generally an orgy of underage drinking. Our experience was no different. I went with my close group of friends. We were the only ones supposed to be staying at our condo, but by two or thee days in we had all sorts of other random people sleeping there as well. We went to the beach, the boardwalk and we tried to hook up with random girls but mainly we just drank. I also got stoned for the first time. I had smoked weed a few times prior but not really gotten high. Brian, who had switched from skating to drugs years earlier, smoked me out on the balcony. We smoke a lot and I had a delayed reaction. I wasn’t feeling it until I went off to the bedroom and promptly realized I was in fucking outer space. I scrambled for my Walkman and a tape to listen to but none of my punk rock was in the room. Instead I listened to someones Houses of the Holy tape and let me tell you, that was an experience. I was so high it was one of those “I can see the music, man!” kind of things. What I didn’t do during that trip was skate. I don’t even know if I brought my board. I don’t know if any of us did even though my whole skate crew was there. Much like how I ended my previous post on mini ramps, I was already starting to quit skating and hadn’t even realized it yet.
Ocean Bowl, summer of 2014.
Just this past summer I skated the newest version of the Ocean Bowl. It now has a pool, a big mini, a vert ramp and large concrete park pit with varying walls. I only spent a couple of hours there but enjoyed it. It’s the type of park that would take some time to really figure out. There are some awkward spots and some dead zones but it’s got a lot of potential. All I really did was carve around, do some ollies, 50-50s and rock ‘n’ rolls. What’s interesting is that it was built in 1998. We are currently in the midst of a huge skate park boom, with vast numbers built in the last five to ten years. 1998 is well ahead of the curve and shows a great deal of forethought and because of that Ocean Bowl is still a major destination for skaters. Most of the guys I met there last summer were not on vacation. They had memberships and had driven in from other parts of the state to skate the park. The footprint is still the same as the old Ocean Bowl, on the corner of an empty block, with ball courts next to it and some fields behind it. As I learned when I interviewed Denny, the original plan was to expand the park in to those fields, which would have been incredible but obviously failed for financial or zoning reasons. Maybe that will happen in a future incarnation as I expect it will be there for decades to come.
If we had a scene that was specifically ours, it was backyard mini ramps. When I started high school in 1988, the vert ramp scene that had flourished up and down the east coast was on its way out. If you are interested, that scene is nicely documented over at House of Steam. In the late ’80s vert went out of fashion among the kids. The few backyard vert ramps still around were primarily skated by an older crowd. My high school years, 1988-1992, perfectly coincided with what was a major transition period in skateboarding. The release of The Search for Animal Chin in 1987 marks the apex of vert’s popularity. By the following year, street skating had begun to take prominence and the ‘80s vert pros were starting to look like relics from an earlier era. Across the country, city kids flocked to urban plazas, such as Love Park or Embarcadero for example, and these hot spots would soon launch the new technical style of street skating that took over in the mid ‘90s. The boards changed to match this emerging style of skating, acquiring bigger, steeper noses, slowly shrinking and losing their shapes. By 1993, they had become the familiar popsicle shape, almost indistinguishable from today’s modern boards. It seems fitting that since we happened to come up during this transitional phase, we primarily chose to skate something that was in itself in between. As suburban kids, we too skated a lot of street. We also skated a little bit of vert. We mostly skated mini ramps.
The skateboarding craze of the mid ’80s was over by the time I entered high school. Of Team PEB, Eddie still skated but went off to a different school. Brian, like most of the other boys, had lost interest and stopped. Jeff B was a year ahead of me, so I was, for all intents and purposes, the only incoming freshman from my middle school who still skated. Two middle schools primarily fed into my high school. The second served the next neighborhood to the north, Cockeysville. Unlike my middle school, many of the Cockeysville kids still skated. Most of them would slowly quit during that first year as well but those that didn’t became the core of my skate crew and some of my closest friends. I met the first of them, Marc, my very first day at high school. He was in my homeroom and I recognized him from Lutherville. Through him, I gradually met the rest of the Cockeysville skaters, specifically Young and a second Jeff, Jeff R.
During those four years, both Jeffs had backyard mini ramps. So did a number of acquaintances. There were many more ramps scattered throughout the small section of Baltimore County of which we were aware. I imagine this was true for much of the suburbs across the nation at this time. It was a uniquely suburban phenomenon. You needed space not available in the cities to build these ramps but you also needed a certain amount of population density. In rural areas a vert ramp could be a destination, people would drive distances to skate it. No one traveled very far to skate a tiny mini ramp. You went to the one down the street instead. If there wasn’t one down the street you built one somewhere. What we had was a loose, shifting network of ramps. Some of them lasted years, some only lasted months. The key was that there were a lot of them. Every suburban skater with an indulgent or unconcerned parent built a ramp at some point. We floated between all of them. There was always a nearby ramp to skate.
Source: Skate and Annoy. This isn’t actually one of the shit ramps that I skated, but it may as well be.
The first ramp I ever skated was horrible. It was some garbage ramp in a clearing in a wooded, undeveloped lot. I don’t know who built it or when. It was probably boys a few years older than we were, a few years before. Whoever it was had obviously never built a ramp before. It was four feet wide with no decks and no flat. It wasn’t built with templates, just random crossed 2x4s creating uneven transitions on both sides. In spite of these obvious failings, I skated it a number of times and learned to pump and kick turn. There were quite a number of these crappy ramps strewn around my neighborhood, built by enthusiastic but unskilled twelve year olds, or worse yet their fathers. Those ramps were always the worst because that well meaning but ignorant adult would inevitably build something that was virtually unskateable. That hulking, creaking deathtrap would then sit unused in the backyard for a few months, slowly rotting before finally being torn down. I skated many of these. They were like four feet wide, splintery wooden roller coasters. The challenge was just to see if you could even ride on them, much less do any tricks. As young teens, we prowled the surrounding neighborhoods looking for these ramps.
I’m happy to say we never built one of these garbage ramps ourselves. I don’t know exactly why that is. I don’t think that we were any smarter or more competent than any of the other kids. We definitely never had the Thrasher Ramp Plans that is the header image of this post. We must have gotten some word of mouth advice from older boys and cut our teeth building launch ramps and quarter pipes first. Still, each time we built a ramp it was a learning experience. New problems were encountered and new solutions devised. Each ramp was like a barn raising, the community would come together to build them. Every skater associated with the crew would stop by to lend a hand. This shared experience meant that the mini ramps in my area became increasingly well built and more sophisticated with each passing generation. We learned to use power tools. We learned about chalk lines and levels. We learned how to draw our transitions. We learned the proper orientation of the 2x4s and to use screws, not nails. We learned cross bracing. We learned to use at least two layers of plywood and to stagger the seams. We learned the appeal of smooth top layers and that Masonite was not a good solution. It seemed perfect at first. Then it got dusty and slippery. Then, once rained on a few times, it turned in to a sodden mess the equivalent of wet cardboard. We used Lauan after that. We learned that PVC cracks quickly and makes poor coping. We learned how to drill metal coping. We learned to use post-hole diggers and sink 4x4s into concrete as corner posts.
Jeff B was the first of my friends to have a backyard ramp. After a summer of skating the mini ramp at Lutherville, he must have decided that he wanted one of his own. Like much of the rest of this blog, the time line is very hazy. I’ve consulted many of the people mentioned in this post and everyone has a different idea of when these things may have happened. So what I am presenting here is not a strict chronology. We must have built this first small ramp sometime during my ninth grade year, before the summer of 1989. Jeff B lived only two blocks away from me and I skated with him daily so I feel like I must have had a hand in this ramp’s construction but I honestly can’t remember building it at all. It was small at three feet high and eight feet wide, so it wouldn’t have required too much. I don’t have much memory of actually skating this ramp either but I must have learned a fair amount on it. A year or so later, when that ramp eventually came down, I wanted to move it to my backyard but my father wouldn’t have it. Instead I took one side of it, rebuilt it to strengthen it and wedged it in as a quarter pipe at the end of my driveway, sandwiched between our garage and basketball hoop.
That first mini was taken down because Jeff B had decided to build a new ramp and, despite what I said at the beginning of this post, the second ramp he chose to build was a vert ramp. What we built was ten feet high with a foot of vert, sixteen feet wide and had twelve feet of flat. It was huge for us at the time. I took an intimate part in building this one. I drew up the plans. I designed it modularly. We built the flat, decks and transition in sections and everything slotted together and then screwed in to place. The end result wasn’t perfect. In spite of some work with shovels flattening out the ground and spending a lot of time with strings it still wasn’t quite level. One side sat higher than the other did and it tilted laterally ever so slightly. It wasn’t bad enough that it effected the skating but it was bad enough to bother the perfectionist in me. It probably wouldn’t have been much different if we had built it on the fly, but with my planning we knew exactly how much wood we needed. This was important because as teenagers we didn’t have much money. We pooled our lawn mowing earnings and bought some of the wood. We recycled some of the old ramp. The rest… we stole as much of the rest as we could.
Your author at 16.
It’s an old joke among skaters of a certain age that you built your ramps with wood stolen from construction sites. It’s also true. I think for us, it all started with one piece of coping. We found a perfect sized pipe at a new building site roughly a mile from Jeff B’s house. We put that pipe on our skateboards and precariously wheeled it home. That area of Baltimore County, from Towson through to Hunt Valley, was just beginning what was to be a long and extended period of growth. There was new construction everywhere, from housing developments to strip malls. This was before security cameras were cheap and ubiquitous and contractors would just stack their wood up, unguarded, at the sites. Most of our thefts were fairly innocuous, at least as innocuous as theft gets. We were young teenagers on foot and could only manage a few 2x4s or sheets of plywood at most. We would just cherry pick a few sites. Most of these thefts were simply crimes of opportunity; we saw some wood we could use so we took it. Later, when we were driving, there were definitely some more egregious thefts, where we would load up the car with as much wood as could fit.
We built Jeff B’s vert ramp this way, in fits and starts. Through the cold spring of that year, we worked on it whenever we had some wood. We cut and assembled everything in an old shed in his backyard. The ramp was finished by the summer. The final piece was the second piece of coping. A young man in the neighborhood who worked for a building supplier got us a discount on that. I mowed his and his father-in-law’s lawns and his mother was Jeff B’s neighbor. I think he was fascinated with what we were doing and it is because of him the ramp lasted as long as it did. The ramp sat only a few feet from his mother’s bedroom window and she started to complain about the noise almost immediately. He helped mediate that ongoing dispute but of course couldn’t help with the noise complaints from other neighbors. We stuffed the underneath of the ramp with old carpet pieces and then sealed it in to try to muffle the sound as much as possible. County inspectors came out several times and it always seemed like it was on the verge of getting shut down, but that summer we padded up and skated it daily. I learned the basics, like rock ‘n’ rolls, axle stalls and low, early grab frontside and backside airs. That was about the limit of my ability on vert. Jeff B was, of course, much better than I was but at some point he decided to cut the ramp down to a more manageable six feet. My memory is unclear about when this happened. We could have done this as early as that fall but I would assume that we cut it down the following spring, as ramp building was generally seasonal. After each winter, all the teenage suburban skaters would emerge from hibernation and decide to build a new ramp somewhere. What I do remember is I cut down one side of the ramp completely by myself. Oblivious to safety as boys are, I was underneath the ramp, cutting through the last template when it collapsed on me. I wasn’t hurt, more out of dumb luck than anything else, but it scared the hell out of a watching neighbor. Despite all that unsupervised time with power tools, no one was ever really injured. The most serious injury was when I stepped on a nail. That one went a little like this:
“The soles of these shoes are really thick. Look! This nail sticking out of this 2×4 won’t even go through them. Look, I’ll put all my weight on it! Ouch!”
I digress; anyway, the smaller version of this ramp was a lot of fun. The vert ramp was too intimidating for me. Cut down, it was large for a mini at six feet but with those big transitions and the huge flat it seemed mellow. Yet, although it was so close to my house, I spent more time skating another ramp. This was the other Jeff, Jeff R’s ramp, or Dookie Ramp as it became known.
Inspired by a trip to Jeff B’s first mini the summer of 1989, Jeff R and the Cockeysville kids built a small mini sometime during our sophomore year. They built it in a field between an elementary school and small stand of trees. It was at the end of the dead end street on which Jeff R lived and just a block or so from Marc’s house as well. While we skated with the Cockeysville kids on occasion, our two groups hadn’t really merged yet. That happened because of Dookie Ramp. In its first incarnation, it was a small four feet high, eight feet wide ramp. It wasn’t perfect but it was fun. It wasn’t even that badly built but we took to calling it Shit Ramp for one reason or another. Eddie, whose parents were strict about cursing, made that name more polite and christened it Dookie Ramp. That was so stupid it stuck. Except for Jeff B none of us were driving yet so we had to skate to the ramp. Being in Cockeysville that meant I would go after school sometimes but otherwise it was just a bit too far, so I didn’t skate it very often. That changed the summer of 1990. Built on county property and subject to lots of complaints Jeff R eventually had to tear the ramp down. Yet instead of destroying it, he moved it in to his backyard. He didn’t just move it, he built a new, sixteen feet wide, four feet high ramp and attached the old eight feet wide ramp as a spine. When I heard a new ramp was being built, I was excited to help. I enjoyed the planning and problem solving, but the new Dookie Ramp went up so fast I missed my opportunity. I was taking driver’s ed after school that spring and I remember stopping by after my lessons one day, only to find everyone hard at work and the ramp almost complete. I was both excited and disappointed. They hadn’t needed my help, though. What Jeff R built was fantastic, it was significantly better than the first version. That ramp lasted somewhere around two years, or at least two summers, which is almost unheard of for backyard ramps. It was the perfect size for me. Once a ramp got over four feet I started to lose tricks, any smaller and it felt like a toy ramp. I could do more at Dookie Ramp than anywhere else. We skated it, if not daily, then close to that. I think I can safely say I skated this ramp more than any other. Random friends and acquaintances would sometimes stop by but, by and large, it was normally just the six of us.
I don’t have any pictures of it. What I do have is video. Sometime, most likely the summer of 1991, I borrowed Jeff B’s video camera and filmed a video. The camera was slightly damaged so the original recordings weren’t great. I then edited the video by dubbing from VCR to VCR. I dubbed on to a used tape. That tape then sat around for twenty some years before I finally digitized it. This is the long-winded way of saying that the video quality is horrible. I will be presenting selections from it as historical documents for this and some upcoming posts anyway. If you watch long enough you can sometimes make out what is happening. I apologize in advance.
Featured are me, Eddie, Young and both Jeffs. Marc is unfortunately MIA for this session.
Most of the local skaters knew each other and hung out at the same spots. While Eddie, Jeff B, Jeff R, Marc and Young may have been my core group of friends, there was a larger, looser network of kids that all skated together. Some of them had ramps as well. Chris, one of the slightly older guys, had a giant monster of a ramp farther up north. Clark had a small mini. I didn’t know Clark that well. All I really remember about him is that he had dreads. Long hair and dreadlocks were particularly popular in Baltimore County at the dawn of the ‘90s. It wasn’t a hippie or surfer kind of thing, though there were a handful of white Rastas. Our style was more an anticipation of the coming grunge fad. Like skateboarding, sub-cultures were also in shift during this period, with the ’80s stalwarts of punks, skins and goths fading out in favor of the more generic alternative. I had let my squeeb grow out past my shoulders but my hair was thin and straight so I normally kept it pulled back and wore a hat. Marc, with his much thicker hair, had some of the nastiest dreads, just big tangled, matted clumps.
A younger boy, Mike, also had a ramp. If I remember correctly it was a small mini, good for technical tricks but overall a bit boring after a while. Mike was one of the only younger kids we associated with. The only other one of note was Brandon Novak. Now known primarily for his drug problems and affiliation with Bam Margera, back then he was a wunderkind Powell Peralta prospect that my friends used to drive around to contests. There weren’t many other younger kids skating. Despite what Denny Riordon said in his interview, I do think skating kind of died at the start of the ’90s. In our area it had shrunken down to a small handful of core skaters. As I talked about in some of the first posts, those of us of the Bones Brigade generation grew up when it seemed like almost every kid skated or at least owned a skateboard. Boys had to have been of a certain age to catch on to this craze. You had to have been a tween in 1986. Much younger and you were still too much of a child; older and the Bones Brigade began to look like “cheesy boy scouts”, as their contemporaries labeled them. As the massive amount of mid ’80s skater kids slowly thinned throughout the rest of the decade there was very little in the way of younger kids replenishing the ranks.
Hair farmers. From our 1992 class photo. Clockwise from top left. Me, Young, Joe and Marc.
For a couple of years we were dependent on the older Jeff B to drive us around. Once we were all driving many more spots opened up for us. Many of the ramps I skated I never even met the owner. It’s strange to think about now, but we would just drive somewhere, park and walk into some stranger’s backyard uninvited and skate their ramp for a few hours. Often it was only us there. Some of these houses were seemingly abandoned, we never saw anyone home. A few of the ones we went to more frequently were a five foot mini in Towson, a big, near vert ramp in Hunt Valley and a smaller ramp out across from the horse farms in the area my mother always called “the valley”. There were many more.
Then there were also kids who we knew but didn’t hang out with, except to skate their ramps. One of the better ramps in the area was one of these. It was in the backyard of this boy Kevin. Kevin and I had gone to middle school together and I think we even attended the same church but I don’t think I knew that Kevin even skated until I heard he had a ramp. He had his own group of friends that didn’t interact with mine. I didn’t like him. It wasn’t anything personal or that he had went to a different high school, it was that he was in a different clique. He was more hip hop and we were shaggy haired punk kids. There was definitely an enmity between our groups at the time. It was the narcissism of small difference. I only skated his ramp a few times because of this, which is a shame because that ramp was great. It was very wide, taking up almost his entire backyard, and very smooth. It was also tricky. One side was flat while the other side was eight feet even, an eight foot escalator and than eight feet of extension. I sprained my ankle there during one of the first days of my junior year. I did a backside disaster slide up the escalator and came in at that weird angle. I slid out and my ankle turned under me. It was a bad enough sprain that it put me off the board for close to six months. I never fully recovered. My ankle was fine but I was much more cautious after that. I held back a lot more. That injury also led almost directly to me losing my virginity. I had to sit out of gym class and I met a goth girl who was also sitting out the class, but that is a story for another kind of blog.
Jimmy was another guy from outside of our group who had a ramp. I knew him through Eddie but we never hung out with Jimmy, except at his ramp. I don’t think he even really skated anywhere else. He definitely never came to any of our ramps. He wasn’t part of some warring teenage faction, in fact he was a perfectly nice guy, he just wasn’t “cool”. He was rich, at least by our standards. Rich enough to have a pool and a tennis court. Jimmy and his older brother both skated, though Jimmy was the better of the two. His father had built them a giant awkward ramp in their backyard. It was pretty poorly put together but it was a lot of fun nevertheless. They had obviously not planned it out ahead of time. It was a large wide mini with a spine to a smaller mini. The far side of the larger part had an eight feet wide extension to near vert with a four foot section of extension opposite it, on the side with the spine. Instead of just making the smaller section of ramp four feet narrower to accommodate this, the extension on the spine side hung out over it instead. They rigged up some random banking there. You can see all of this below. The smaller side was also almost too tight to skate and lacked coping at the back end. The ramp was on uneven ground and up on stilts and the whole thing bounced, flexed, creaked and rattled constantly. It was still fun to skate even if his parents forced us to wear pads.
Jimmy and I skating his ramp. Filmed by Eddie.
My friends built their final ramp before the summer of 1992. The Jeffs collaborated and built it in our friend Claire’s backyard. She lived a bit farther north, in a slightly more rural area, and therefore had a much larger property and no immediate neighbors to annoy. I, oddly, had absolutely no part in the construction of this ramp. I don’t really know what I was doing that summer but I was obviously already starting to fade out from skateboarding. This was the summer before I went to college. I would move to Philadelphia that August. I took a trip to Europe at the beginning of the summer. I went to the beach for senior week and again with my family later that summer. I was working full time, or close to it, and still mowing lawns on the weekends, trying to save money for school. I went to an increasing number of punk shows and was becoming much more interested in drinking, smoking weed and chasing girls. I was still skating but I only ever skated Claire’s ramp once, and I literally mean once. I dropped in on it once, that was it. Which is a real shame because what they built was amazing. It was by far the best ramp we had built yet. It was very wide and split level. The smaller section was five feet high with metal coping, the larger, six feet with pool coping. It was slightly too big for me. I barely had any tricks on it. Then Bucky Lasek showed up. I just sat down, watched him rip it, got discouraged, gave up all together and never went back. That was the last backyard ramp I ever skated and, in hindsight, was a rather inglorious way to go out. I’m feeling frustrated and disappointed with myself right now, just typing this. I wish I would have skated it more but I can only guess my priorities were changing and it wasn’t important to me at the time. I know that all sounds pretty negative and like it is leading up to me talking about quitting, which it is, eventually, but I have a few other spots to talk about first.
Denny Riordon was our local pro, owned our local skate shop and built our local skate park. I had initially planned to interview him about that skate park, Lutherville, but soon realized just how much more he had to offer on the history of east coast skateboarding. What I didn’t know, until doing this interview, is how much of a pioneer Denny was. He encompasses the entire history of modern skateboarding, from the rise of polyurethane wheels through to the present. I’m very proud to be able to present to you the following interview.
Despite being such an important part of our local scene when I was growing up I now realize I don’t know very much about you. I know you lived and had your shop in our area but did you also grow up there?
Yeah I grew up in Cockeysville. I went to Cockeysville Middle School and graduated from Dulaney [High School] in 1976.
Did you stay there or did you move away at any point?
I stayed there through the ’80s. I didn’t really move out of there until the mid-90’s when I shut down my store. I went to California for a few years and then came back. Now I live in Ocean City [MD]. My parents, they’ve been in the same house in Cockeysville since 1966. That’s really home even though I was born in California. I never really went away except for the mid-’90s and that wasn’t for very long.
My next question is how and when did you find skateboarding? How did you start skateboarding and when was that?
I went to the beach [Ocean City] with a bunch of guys my junior year. You know how everybody goes for senior week to the beach? We actually got to go our junior year and I caught it again in our senior year. We went down for a week in 1974. It was probably June and I was down with a bunch of buddies and when we went out there was a girl riding around on a skateboard, just carving around on Coastal Highway. I watched her for a while and then I said, “Hey can I try that?” and she was like, “Sure.” So I skated on her board all week long and by the end of the week I’d bought my first board from Sunshine House.
Had you surfed before?
I had not. I did not surf until later on. I had been a big water skier. So I had that… not the sideways stance thing, but the whole carving thing. The thing is the [skate]boards back then were super, super skinny. You didn’t really pick the board’s nose up you just kind of carved around did like S turns and stuff like that. You didn’t do a whole lot. The things were tiny. They were smaller than the penny boards that the kids are riding nowadays. They were like 24 inches long and probably half as wide as a penny board. They were really tiny. There weren’t even sealed bearings. The bearings had butterflies on them. After a while those butterflies would wear out and all of a sudden you’d be skating and you’d see your bearings go shooting out down the road and you’d be done. So 1974, that was the beginning for me.
Were many people skateboarding then? Was it popular or was it a fringe activity?
It was very fringe. Boards were changing every other month. Polyurethane wheels had just come out maybe a year to two before and there weren’t, like I said, there weren’t closed bearings. There was no grip tape. I think I picked up on it because it was down there at the beach. It was more in the surf communities than inland. There was about three or four guys that got in to it at Dulaney that did it for another year or two and then they all stopped. I kept going, I just kept up with it.
Denny at Pot Springs Ditch with it’s first ever extension, 1975-76.
So you stuck with it even though you didn’t have much of a skate crew?
That changed really quickly once we found Pot Springs Ditch. That changed everything. I’m pretty sure we found it in early 1975. It was actually built in 1973 because there was a hurricane. Hurricane Agnes went through there. That entire area down there, there was no drain or ditch, that whole area was under water probably a good half of mile in both directions for three days. So they put those two ditches in there in case of another hurricane, which never happened. That’s why the ditch is always dry. There’s not really water that runs through there unless it rains. I remember we found it in ’75 and most of the guys that I was skating with were younger, I was the only one that was driving. When we pulled up there we really were afraid to ride down it because these boards we were riding were like, you know, they’re plastic with little tiny trucks…. We would let our boards roll down and see if they’d make it through the transition…
[LAUGHTER]
… before we actually got on the board. But that didn’t last for more than a minutes and then we were riding down the walls.
Yeah, right. Someone’s got to try it.
Yeah so it was really, really new and no one had been doing that yet. That was the first transition I ever attempted.
That was my first transition ever as well.
And those transitions still aren’t very friendly.
[LAUGHTER]
If you can skate those transitions, then you can skate anything. That became our spot. We’d go there ever day after school and it was a crew of us. It was me, my brother and a friend of mine, Chip Frederick, who just passed away. Bobby Strange, Bert Toulotte, Paul Chidester, all these guys went to Dulaney. Pete Howard. Eddie Tyler. Most of these guys lived right around there. I lived the furthest away, over in Cockeysville. Most of these guys lived in Springdale or right down the street off of Cinder Road. One guy still lives there.
So it was like this crew of about seven guys that would skate that place and that was it, no one [else] skated it. Then all of a sudden we added wood, we actually had the walls [high enough] at one point that when you kick turned you were above the street. That’s when people started taking notice. On any given weekend there’d be 25 cars parked out there at the ditch.
So people would travel to skate it?
Yeah they’d travel in and more people were stopping to see what was going on, taking pictures, kind of fascinated with, “What are these guys doing on these skateboards?” We constantly added wood. Every day you came and there was something new. It was usually extensions. There was no coping or curbs or any of that stuff going on yet. If you went out… we called it three wheels out… if you hung your wheels over the top then you were ripping. Everybody would do snake runs down the thing and just carve the whole ditch. We’d do follow the leader and there’d be ten guys flying down there. Stuff like that. Like I said there wasn’t grip tape on the boards yet, you couldn’t do a lot. [Skateboarding] changed quickly because everybody was pushing it and the magazines…. Pretty much what they were doing on the West Coast, we were doing six months [later]. You started seeing them [in the magazines] skate ditches then the next thing we saw them skate were backyard pools. So that was our next thing. The ditch was always there. We always knew we had it, but we were always looking for other things to skate.
Denny with a tailblock in an apartment building pool near Calvert Hall High School, 1979.
So what other things were there to skate? You mentioned backyard pools. Were there any because I never had any when I was growing up?
Well there were a couple of things that happened. There was always two weeks in the spring time when the pools would get drained for cleaning. Like Town and Country pool on Cranbrook Road, we would go in there and dry it out and make sure it was good. We’d ride those pools for two weeks straight. We’d go from one community pool to the next. It got to the point where sometimes there would be 30 guys in there in the shallow end and cops would come and we’d all scatter. Twenty minutes later, we’d all be back. Another one of our not so smart ideas, that we did anyway, was we would look for newspapers piled up in front of houses and if they had a pool and we’d drain it.
[LAUGHTER]
We had a pump system and we would literally drain pools and skate them until the people came home. That was pretty much what was going on, it was the whole Dogtown thing. We were doing the same thing, just on the other coast.
That’s amazing. I did not know that at all. I didn’t know there was anything like that going on on the east coast.
Oh yeah it was not good. There were other ditches too. There was the Arbutus ditch, which was down towards Catonsville , which people still skate a little. I think it’s a little over grown. There was this ditch out on 95 going towards DC, we called it Still Waves. It was two ditches that kind of came together, so you could skate down one and then go into the other and there was a full pipe at one end. You couldn’t ride the full pipe but you could ride up and around it and back in. Those three, between our ditch and those two ditches, were the hot spots where if you wanted to skate with other people, that’s where you’d go. The pool thing was very hush, hush. If we found a pool, we weren’t telling anybody. We were keeping it to ourselves. So the ditches you could go and find out who else was good or not good or whatever. Those two ditches fell apart for some reason, but Pot Springs, it’s still skateable. It’s way rougher than it’s been but it’s amazing that it’s held up this long.
I found some recent YouTube footage of kids there and it looked like they had DIYed up a quarter pipe out of the top of it. So they are doing stuff to it still.
Yeah it changes constantly. I put a couple of curbs there. They are still in there. They’ll be there forever because they’re so damn heavy no one can move them. It’s definitely not as built up as we had it in the ’80s and it was ridiculous in the ’70s because there was no one there to complain. None of those houses were there. That development with the tennis courts wasn’t there. There was nothing. So when I say we had the walls built up, they were eight feet higher and 16-20 feet wider on both sides.
It was built right in to that seam there. We would take two by fours and we’d actually dig out the ground right along the cement and we’d put a two by four down in there and then we’d pack [the dirt] back in. Then we put the plywood down so it would meet that seam and cement. The wood would meet so it wasn’t a bad kink and then it would go up eight feet higher. We had a take off ramp that we built out of pallets. We’d cover those with plywood and it would go back 20-30 feet so you could come flying in because you needed the speed, there was no deck on those plywood walls. You couldn’t drop in or anything. You were just doing a kick turn on a half of inch of plywood over the top. You could hang up so easily it was ridiculous.
I’ve read that Lansdowne opened in 1979, and the Ocean Bowl opened a few years before that. Did you skate those? Were there any skate parks around besides those two?
Well the Ocean Bowl was built in ’76. That is still the oldest skate park in the world. Lansdowne wasn’t built until ’78. There was a park called Concrete Wave that I helped design that opened up in ’77. It was either later ’76 or ’77. But the Ocean Bowl was the first thing that I skated that was a bowl type thing besides pools. You had to take a test to be able a ride [Ocean Bowl]. You had to go up around these lines. We were already ripping pools, so it wasn’t that big a deal for us. That’s when we started realizing there were other people around, the crew in Ocean City that we all became friends with and competed with in the ’70s at different events. Josh and Brian Marlowe, Brad Hoffman, Mark “One-Time”, Mickey Carmody, Mark Edmond, Pat Truitt and Billy Todd. There was a whole crew of those guys, there’s more, my memory is not what it used to be.
Concrete Wave opened up and that was a full size cement park out on Pulaski Highway. That was a big deal. Everybody came in from Pennsylvania, Philly, DC, and Ocean City. They all came there because it was the new thing.
Backside 5-0 at Concrete Wave, 1977-78.
What was that like? What was the layout of the place?
There was one bowl that had some vert, but it was probably 15 feet deep and it was weird because you couldn’t really work it back and forth, it was like a one hit, but it was 45, 50 feet wide. The rest of the park was more like snake runs into bowls. They would all meet. You could go from one snake run into a bowl over the top into another bowl. But there was no real vert, it was all bank walls, so it was still more people carving and doing lay back slides, no real airs unless you were doing like early grab stuff. It’s funny because we did do early grab stuff and then that went away and then it came back in the ’80s when everybody was doing launch ramps. We were doing that in the tight corners in those parks.
There was another park that opened up in the ’77 too, in Gaithersburg, called Freestyle Skate Park. It was pretty much the same set up as Concrete Wave, but it was smaller. It had a little bit bigger, steeper runs. It was run by Salty Selt and Dan Hopkins, they were the local pros. Concrete Wave and Freestyle, were privately owned. They didn’t last long because they weren’t making any money. It just cost too much to build.
Then there was another one called Glass Wave, which was all fiberglass. I think they opened up between 1977 and ’78. Now these were legit half pipes. They had half pipes, quarter pipes and that’s when people were really starting to push the vert a little bit more. That was also in Gaithersburg. It was indoors, it used to be an indoor Skateland and they put ramps everywhere. That was going on at the same time Lansdowne was being built.
The county was going to build a whole park there [in Lansdowne], not just a skateboard park, because that’s all county property. There was a building they had built for a pro shop and it had bathrooms. They were supposed to have a grand opening but the neighbors didn’t want it there. They basically burned the building down the night before and so [the county] just left [the skate park] there. They just said, “Screw it, we’re done with it” and they washed their hands of it. There was no fence. There was nobody watching it. They just let it go because of the neighbors. It’s a rough neighborhood, especially back then. The neighbors just didn’t want anything to do with [the skate park]. Of course, a lot of the local kids skated it for the next five years and loved it and there were some really good skaters that came out of there.
You would only go there in a group. You never went there by yourself because there were always fights. There were guys on motorcycles riding that park, bicycles and I saw pit bull fights there. People were always getting beat up there. It was a bad scene. So you went there with like a group of five or six guys for sure. But there was a great scene going on and it changed off and on. Now it’s been fenced in and they’ve fixed it up some. I skate it probably five, six times a year still.
When we used to go there it was still rough, but it wasn’t as rough. We used to go really early in the morning and I always joked that we kept push brooms in our cars because we would have to sweep out all the broken bottles every morning.
Yep. Just like the ditch. I must have swept that ditch out a hundred times. It was crazy.
Yeah so a lot was going on. You basically had four or five skateboard parks open up between ’75 and ’79. Then you had Cascade Skateboard Park. That thing opened up in like ’79 and it had an indoor keyhole pool that’s still there today. Apparently there’s a contractor in there and he’s got a wood floor over it and people are always asking him if he’ll let people go in there and skate it. The pictures that are out there right now, there’s one section that’s still… they buried most of it. The kids dug out a big section. It’s kind of overgrown and it’s still there but it doesn’t really show most of the park. The park was huge. It had a giant outside part. It had a half pipe that was just ridiculously deep. When I say it was deep, it was 25 feet deep, it was like six feet of vert…
[LAUGHTER]
…it was, nobody skated it. It was stupid. They had a bunch of cool bowls but the indoor pool was the big attraction because you could go there any time of day. If it rained, snowed or whatever you could skate that thing.
Double flip no comply on a hotel beach patio in Ocean City, 1988.
It sounds like you skated absolutely everything. So how did you end up focusing on freestyle because we knew you as a freestyle pro?
It’s weird because when I first started skating I had the only vert ramp in all of Maryland and I was big in to vert. Back then you did everything. You did vert, you did slaloms, you did high jump, you did 360s, you did long jump, you did freestyle. You did everything . I toured with the Pepsi team from ’77 to ’79 and that was all vert stuff and freestyle. We had this collapsible ramp we’d tote around. A lot of times we would be doing high school assemblies and there would be no way to [setup] anything, so you had to do it yourself. We’d go into a school and there’d be 5,000 kids there and we had a professional MC that Pepsi had hired, it’d be a three or four man team. We’d do freestyle. I would always jump people. They’d lay eight people down, we’d put the principal on the end and I’d jump them from board to board. Because I was known for jumping a car at contests or demos.
So we’d just do basic stuff like that and then after the demos the local kids would take us to their vert ramps or their ditches or whatever. I did that for two years. I was just traveling the country doing that. So freestyling got pretty big but I never really stopped skating vert until the mid-’80s, because of my back. I hurt my back on the Pepsi ramp, I’ve got pain from that still to this day. The G forces bother me too much. It’s funny because I actually tried to skate vert twice now in the last 30 days. But it doesn’t feel right. I don’t know, we’ll see. I still did street style, I was able to do that for a while, it didn’t bother my back as much as vert did. The thing with vert, there weren’t really a lot of places to skate anymore. When my ramp came down in ’80 there weren’t any vert ramps around because from ’82 and ’83 skateboarding just stopped.
In the early ’80s, everybody started focusing on one thing, guys stopped doing everything. Guys were just either vert or freestyle or slalom or whatever. So I got stuck in the freestyle thing and of course I got to skate against Rodney Mullen, Per Welinder, Kevin Harris and all those guys. Rodney and I did demos together. I got to be friends with all those guys. I was fascinated with what you could with the board on flat ground. I was addicted. I would go up to Dulaney. My practice time would be from midnight until 2:00 in the morning. I could turn the lights on at the tennis courts and I’d go up there with my boom box, in the ’80s, and skate for two hours at night, almost every night, by myself. That was my time where I didn’t have to worry about if anyone was around. I’d be practicing for contests or whatever else.
Once you make that move to the professional ranks you kind of… everything changes. I can remember the day I turned professional, the next day I skated differently. I felt like I skated at a different level the next day. It was just as mental thing.
Did you just have more confidence?
I definitely had more confidence for sure. I [also] felt that if I was a pro I have to live up to that. I should be the best skater at the ditch or the best skater at the ramp or wherever. It pushed me to concentrate more. Seriously, the next day I skated differently. I’ll never forget. I skated Pot Springs [Ditch] and I probably did five or six new tricks that day. Or I took a trick that I could do an added something to it. It just felt like my feet were on the board better. It was weird. It’s an “all between your ears” kind of thing, it’s that confidence, it’s the fact that you are doing this as a profession, that you get paid to skate…. I think if you talk to a lot of athletes, it doesn’t matter what they are doing, they go through the same thing. There’s a little bit of pressure too. You have to perform. It was a good thing for me though. I loved it and it made me just want to be better.
Did the pressure of contests ever get to you? I have heard lots of other pros say that they hated skating contests.
I think I started skating pro contests in ‘76. That was the first level and I went to a much higher, national level in the ’80s. In the beginning the contests didn’t bother me as much but the competition wasn’t at the level it was when I skated in the ’80s obviously. In the ’80s I was quite a bit older so I was skating against a lot of guys 10, 15 years younger than me. I got more nervous as I got older which is weird. You would think it would be the other way around. A lot of the guys I skated with had nerve issues. Whether it was freestyle or on the ramp, their brain would just go blank. In freestyle we had set routines that we would just do over and over and over and over. Some of the guys on my team back then also had routines on ramps. They’d start skating and I’d be like, “Dude you just did ten 50-50s, did you forget to do all your tricks?”
[LAUGHTER]
They’d just go blank.
Pepsi team, 1978.
Let me stop you here because I want to backtrack for a minute to clear a few things up. First, the Pepsi thing, how did this happen? Were you already sponsored at this point and got a Pepsi deal? Could you give me the history of how you ended up skating professionally?
Before Pepsi I had a sponsors. I had a board sponsor but I didn’t have pro model or anything. I just had sponsors like clothing sponsors and shoe sponsors. I rode for Vans back then, a company called 360 Sportswear. A company called Ferragamo, which made boards and wheels. Who else? Megatron Trucks… I know there’s more, I just can’t think of them. I had a bunch of sponsors and I was actually flown out to a contest in Phoenix, Arizona. I think that was in the mid-70s. I didn’t know it, but Pepsi had sent out recruiters looking for people for their teams because what they had was four, four-man teams that went around the whole country. I had no idea they were even there.
I think I was skating against Stacy Peralta, Ty Page and Mike Weed and I ended up getting in the top three or four and no one knew who I was. I was the only East Coast guy there. I was kind of out of my element but I skated well. When I got back there was another skateboard park that was having a grand opening, Crofton Skateboard Park. I was there to be like the entertainment or whatever, the pro skater. Of course I was riding the pools, it was all vert. I was all about their pools. It had great pools and I was doing that and somebody said, “You’ve got a phone call in the pro shop.” And I’m like, “What? Nobody knows I’m even here.” They got a hold of one of my sponsors and called me and said, “We need you in New York in two days if you want to be on this tour team.” I was playing lacrosse at Towson University, starting freshman and I quite college and I quit lacrosse and went on tour.
The Pepsi thing was kind of like being a rock star for a couple of years. It’s hard to believe I even did it. It was really fun and I got to go all over the country. It was unbelievable.
That must have been amazing.
Yeah it was because back then skateboarding was still so new you really were treated like a rock star. People would lose their minds. The kids all wanted your autographs, the girls all wanted to make out with you and the local skaters all wanted you to come skate with them after the event. Friday demos were the best because we usually had the weekend off. So all the local kids would be like, “Okay we’re going to this ramp, we’re going to that pool, we’re going here, we’re going to this party.” I was just out of high school and the other guys were all still in it. Pepsi was paying us, paying our expenses. We were living large at the time. For then, not compared to what guys make now.
It seems like you got really good, really fast. You went from starting skating to touring with Pepsi in just a couple years. Did it just come naturally to you or did you have to work at it?
Well it was a little bit of both. I did put in a lot of time. I was a big lacrosse player, but my senior year in high school I was skating five, six, seven hours a day after school and like ten hours a day on weekends. It was definitely both because I was having so much fun with it that I was skating ridiculous amount of hours. Back then everything was new. Every day you learned something new. It could be the simplest thing but it was so new you felt like you were making things up even if you weren’t. It was exciting because you knew something was going to happen every time you went out. The equipment was changing monthly then too. We lived for the magazine. Every month when the magazine came out there was a new wheel, a new truck, a new board. First we started with no kicktails and then there was a wedge that was just glued on and then they finally started curving them. So the equipment was changing at the same time. I’d always been a really good athlete, but I did put in a lot of time. It was like an addiction for me. I would dream up tricks. I’d try something new and dream about why I couldn’t do it. The next day [I’d] make the trick because I dreamt about what I was doing wrong. It was fun because you didn’t have a coach, no one was telling you what to do, you were just trying stuff. You didn’t have videos to look at, you didn’t have anything. We would lay magazines down that had four pictures that were supposed to be a sequential… like eight or ten frames to figure out what was going on. It was a fun time, it was great to be able to live that, for sure.
Da Denny Riordon model.
Did the Pepsi team lead then to future sponsors? Did that exposure introduce you to other companies?
What happened after that was that I had moved to the beach and skateboarding just stopped. The country went into a recession between… I would say mid-’82 to almost the end of ’83. The country was like… skateboarding went away. Everybody’s sponsors went away. There were no contests. All the skateboard parks went out of business. I started surfing but I also kept skating just because I loved it so much. So for two years I skated on my own just for fun and learned to surf.
In ’84 the economy came back around and there was a Pro Am held in Ocean City, at the park, and of course I entered four events because that’s what you did back then, you were like “I’ll go in everything.” I went in freestyle, the bowl freestyle (which is on the walls), 360 contest and barrel jumping. I had no sponsor. It was just for fun. I got two firsts and two seconds and I was like, “The hell with this, I’m going to try and get sponsors again.” That was ’84. I opened my store in November of ’84. By ’85 I was the first Billabong skater ever. That was my first clothing sponsor in the ’80s and I was their very first skater. Then I picked up Converse, Freestyle Watches and others I am forgetting. I still didn’t have a pro model at that time. I didn’t do that until later in the ’80s. But I started picking up sponsors and basically I started a second career.
So when you started hearing about me, I was in my second career. I had already done the ’70s thing.
Yeah, that is around when I would have first met you, around 1985 at Island Dreams.
Yeah, I got the store going. We moved the store a couple of times. I think we were in the first location for like a year and then we moved down to Burke Avenue, Burke and York Road and we were there a couple of years. We just kept outgrowing everything. Then I was approached by Kryptonics [for a pro model]. Kryptonics was owned by Atlantic Skates then. Something, I don’t know what, happened, some legal thing went down with them or they lost the licensee or something but then Dorsey [Truitt] started Toxic and that’s why you saw my board go from Kryptonics to Toxic. When I went to Toxic is when I was selling tons of boards. It was ridiculous how many boards I was selling. He was selling them all over the world.
Yeah it’s an iconic ’80s deck. I see it talked about all the time on skateboard collector forums.
Yeah for my age that was really late in my career but I was just so dedicated to it, you know, still skating and running the store. I was married and had kids and the whole deal. I had another guy I skated with, this guy Tim Morris, out of Columbia. He was a big freestyler and we would skate every minute we had together, it was ridiculous. Back then you had NSA going on and we were traveling around all over the country, and out of the country, for contests. You wanted to be ranked in the world at that time. My thing was, if I could stay in the top 15 in the world I’d keep skating. Once that was over, I was done.
About ’89, I’ll never forget, I was in Louisville, Kentucky and I was the oldest guy on the tour by seven years. The next guy down was seven years younger. I was like, “Fine. You know what? I think it’s time.” I finally hung up the competition thing. I really had two major careers.
That’s right around the time that freestyle kind of officially died too I guess.
Tony Hawk’s dad was running the NSA then and he died. When he died no one picked it up for a long time and the contest scene took a hit. We had all gone through the whole Bones Brigade thing. You had Rodney, Kevin Harris and Per Welinder. All those guys were big in the videos [even though] Tony Hawk, Cab, Lance and McGill, those guys, were the highlight because vert was so big.
It all just kind of faded there for a while and that’s what skateboarding has done ever since the ’60s. It’s always gone… right now we’re in the same situation. Skateboarding is so dead right now as far as the industry goes. Usually what happens is it comes back bigger than ever, but if we didn’t have the Dew Tour and the X-Games right now, skateboard would be gone. Again, it would just be back to the core, kids that did it, people that did it just for fun and in the streets. Guys are still making good money. It’s still going on because of the big sponsors and TV stuff but it has faded in and faded out four or five times. You know like the shoes, like skateboard shoes were so big and most of those companies are almost out of business or just hanging on.
Invert at the Towsen family backyard ramp, 1986.
I want to backtrack again to something else you said earlier, you mentioned you had the first vert ramp in the area. Can you tell me about that?
Well first it started out as a quarter pipe.
[LAUGHTER]
Back then we didn’t know how to cut transitions. We had never seen transitions cut with plywood. So we would take two by fours and we’d put one nail in each side and then we’d bend that thing until we thought it looked like a transition and then we’d nail it in place. We always put way too much vert on them. We had like four feet of transition with four feet of vert. And of course no decks. In the beginning we used broomsticks as coping until we started figuring out, “Hey, let’s steal some pool coping.” We all learned to drop in on those crazy ramps. Literally three or four feet of vert with no transition, that’s what we learned to drop in on. Guys would get just killed. It was terrifying to drop in but that’s all we knew.
There was actually a half pipe at Concrete Wave, they built it just before they went out of business. For some reason I thought, “Oh, I can move this.” I was the only guy driving and I rented a truck with a hydraulic lift and I got 20 guys. We took the decks down. We cut the flat out and we literally picked up one whole side, 16 feet wide, ten feet tall, picked it up, slid it on the truck. Drove it from Pulaski Highway all the way to Cockeysville. When we got to Harford Road we had forgotten there were overpasses. It was like, “Holy shit we’re never going to make it!” I had to pull over on the shoulder and have somebody climb up there and go, “Okay you’ve got two inches.” We had to do that at every overpass and we had to do that twice. We got it back to my neighborhood and my parents live on a dead end street. We moved out all the poles from the dead end and we carried this thing down. We already had a flat built, ready to go on cinder blocks. We carried it down, slid it in, went back, got the other half, same thing. Really ridiculous. We put that all together and that was the only half pipe for probably two to three years solid. Guys would come down, all the PA guys were coming down and DC guys and Ocean City guys. Brad Hoffman, I don’t know if you ever heard of a guy name B Rad, he was pretty famous in Ocean City, he broke his femur on the ramp. He always talks about that.
We had pool coping on both sides. We had full decks. But again, it was, you know… eight foot transitions, or seven foot transitions with two or three feet of vert. But we didn’t care, we had the ramp and we were constantly stealing wood to re-ply, because it was all plywood and it would get all splintery. That was the scene there for quite a few years because that was the [only] half pipe.
It seems like when I was growing up there was a crew of guys a few years older than me that were just vert rippers, like Paul Wisniewski . They obviously came from somewhere, but we didn’t know about those ramps.
Yeah I’m really still good friends with Paul. You know he has his own company called Green Issue Skateboards?
No, I don’t know anything. I just remember him because he was so good and had blonde dreads.
We built a ramp down in Towson called the Ark Ramp. It was down right off Providence Road. There were these three kids, they all skated, Tim, Rusty and Jeff Tadder. Their mom allowed us to build it in their backyard which was not far from where Paul lived. Paul, Dave Barranco, Rob Carrigan, Brett Snyder and Matt Hohner, those guys lived at that ramp. They’d get off school and head straight to the ramp every day. There was like five or six guys that were there every day. All those guys actually were skating for me at the time. Bucky [Lasek] was hanging around but he was only like 12. We had pro demos there and we had Lester Kasai, Tom Groholski , Jim Gray and other good guys coming in. It was like a shop demo but it was in these people’s backyard.
L-R Top Row: Lauren Hough, Denny Riordon, Dave Walcher. Bottom Row: Paul Wisnewski, Brett Snyder, Tim Tadder.
Amazing. You said the Ark Ramp guys were skating for you, does that mean they were sponsored by Island Dreams?
Yeah, there’s a bunch of guys I sponsored, it’s quite a list. Most of them didn’t drive back then so I would load them up and take them to contests. We went around all over the place to contests. It was all amateur so you had age groups and we had guys as young as nine years old. There would be the nine and under and 10-12 years old, 13-15, 16-18, over 18…. I had all the categories covered. I would coach these guys at contests, try to be their coach/cheerleader and say, “Listen, you’ve got two or three runs and you didn’t do this in that line and you need to calm down and stop worrying about the competition.” You know, that kind of stuff.
They didn’t get anything for free but they all got discounts. Not just on skate stuff but if they wanted to buy a snowboard or a surfboard or whatever as well. I paid for all the [contest] entry fees. If I took them down to Ocean City I would put them up. We went to Virginia Beach a couple times. A couple of my guys made the nationals and went down to Florida for the nationals. I’d cover a lot of that and we had team shirts and stuff.
We’d try to have everyone hang out weekly and skate together. That didn’t always work out but a lot of guys would skate together a couple times a week or at least on the weekends. Most of these guys were pretty local, pretty much that Towson, Loch Raven, Timonium area. Paul Wisniewski obviously. Jeff Brown, Roman Kiebler, Chris Sieverts and Dave Barranco. We had these brothers, one was 12 and one was nine, Jamie and John Anecharico. They actually lived up in Jacksonville. Jeff Stamper, Rob Carrigan, Drew Verdechia, Matt Hohner, Art Lundquist and Scott Franklin. Scott made the nationals for freestyle. Brett Snyder, Lauren Hough and Timmy Tadder. It’s a big crew man. I started going through them… I thought there was like ten but there’s 16 guys. I’m still actively in contact with a lot of these guys through Facebook. Chris Sieverts still rips. He’s a ripping surfer, skater and snowboarder. I see him all the time, he hangs out down here with me. Jamie Anecharico lives down the street from me. Dave Barranco and Paul are in California but I talk with them constantly on Facebook.
Did you build any other ramps back then?
Yeah I helped build a ton of ramps. The two that everyone talked about was the Karma Ramp (what we called my ramp) and then the Ark Ramp. There was another ramp that we built. It was at one of the fraternity houses, we built a ramp there too, but it was very short lived. The problem was back then was you built a ramp and then somebody would come in and say “oh liability” and it was gone.
It got kind of old. There was a big ramp down in Columbia we’d go skate, but they were up and then they were down. It could be six months. You’d hear about a new ramp and you’d go there and you’d skate it and it would be gone. That was the problem with the vert scene. You never had anything consistent until finally Ocean City built theirs but then you’re into the [mid] ’80s. They built one that was there for quite a long time. They still have one. But it was hit or miss how long [other] ramps would last. Or parks. The skateboard parks came and went. Some were only open for a year then they’d be gone. There were two that were built that were never even opened. One park, it didn’t have a name. Behind the roller rink off of Joppa road there was actually cement poured and it never opened. Then there was another one on the north end of Pulaski Highway. It was just… whoever poured it… it was so rough. It was just poured and left and kids would skate it but it would just rip you to pieces if you fell. So that’s why everybody went to Concrete Wave. There were people that would spend a lot of money and the park wouldn’t even open.
Which leads me perfectly into what I want to ask you about next, which is how the park I skated growing up, how Lutherville actually happened? I’m really confused about what happened there.
I built the whole thing. Lutherville… I was always fighting the politicians and standing up for kids rights. You know, there’s nowhere to skate. They give you tickets if you’re in the street. They arrest you if you’re at the ditch. In fact, I know four ten years olds who were handcuffed and taken to the police station in Towson for skateboarding in the ditch. The parents dropped them off and they end up in the jail.
I was always petitioning and a guy who was a recreation director, came to me and said, “People are asking if someone could teach skateboarding in the gym at the old elementary school in the winter time and would you be interested?” And I said, “Yeah I’ll teach freestyle” because there were no ramps, there was nothing you could use. So he goes, “How many can you handle?” I said, “I don’t know, you probably won’t have that many.” Well 30 kids signed up. Every Saturday for two hours we taught freestyle. After a year of that, two of those kids ended up skating for me and would go on and win NSA contests as amateurs.
A finger flip off one of the first ramps at Lutherville, 1987.
So we were doing freestyle classes in there and weren’t bothering anybody. Then spring came and I said, “Listen is it all right if we build a couple of small ramps and put them out in those courts because the basketball hoops aren’t there anymore and nobody played?” And he was like, “Yeah cool, that’s no problem.” So we built those little ramps and again they would come and go. People started dropping off ramps if their parent’s didn’t want them in the driveway or something.
The ramps started getting in bad shape. The [county] was getting worried about the liability. That’s when I had the Save Lutherville contest. We had made tee shirts up, raised money and got some parents involved but it ended up there wasn’t enough money. So I just paid for everything. I took like $5,000, $6,000 out of my own money. The school wasn’t being used. We had a key to the school and they gave us an [empty] classroom. So that winter me and this guy, Lauren Hough, whenever we had time, I was running my store, he had a job, we pre-fabbed everything for the new park. We built out everything and our plan was to cover everything in steel because wood would wear out.
We worked in there all winter long and we pre-fabbed everything. Cut all the transitions, cut everything so when we came out there we could put it all together really quickly. The hardest part was drilling the steel because you had to countersink every screw. We were going through…. I don’t know how many countersink screw drill bits we went through. It was ridiculous. That was it, we basically built it on the down low, this guy was doing this kind of without the whole knowledge of Baltimore County Recreations and, you know, he worked for them.
Then people loved it. Everybody went there. Parents dropped their kids off. It was like a babysitting center. We had a bunch of contests there, we had contests all the time. God, weekends the place was packed. That went on for, I don’t know, a little while and then the Giant [super market] started complaining about the kids going down there on their skateboards and one thing led to another.
Then finally, it was a Saturday morning, I’ll never forget. My phone started ringing off the hook and these kids were calling me in a panic. They’re like, “They’re here tearing the park down! They’re ripping it to pieces!“ They had chain saws and crowbars and they had a crew. [Someone] called Channel 2 and they showed up and when I got there it was almost all destroyed and the kids were riding around trying to stop the guys from doing it. Parents were screaming at them. [Channel 2] interviewed me and I said, “This is ridiculous. Where are the kids going to skate?” The [county] didn’t care. It was all politics at the time. Skaters were always looked upon as hoodlums, that we’re causing trouble and we always got blamed for all the glass in the ditch I’m like, “That’s the kids that come here at night to party.” Skaters are not breaking bottles because then they can’t skate.
I went through years and years and years of the authorities shutting us down. You know they tried to close… they did close down the Ditch for a while. They had fencing around it and we’d cut holes in it. Signs went up saying “No Trespassing.” Well we painted them all black and put “Skateboarding Is Not A Crime” stickers all over them. Yeah stuff like that. I was just always the guy, I was the older guy. So I was always the one standing up saying, “Screw this, we’re not leaving.” And it got to the point where the cops were coming up and I’d be, I was 40 and I was skating there [the Ditch] and this cop pulls up. He’s like, “Dude you’re going to have to leave, the neighbors are complaining.” I go, “I’ve been skating here longer than you’ve been alive. “ He’s like a 20-year-old. I go, “I’m here because I’m stressed out. When I’m done in an hour I’ll leave.” And he looked at me and he’s like “Alright.” He just drove off. I was just done with it. I was just, “I can’t handle it anymore.” So we’d go round and round.
So yeah Lutherville was a really cool scene for awhile. So many people still talk about Lutherville, it’s crazy.
There was nothing like it. There was no street course like that anywhere nearby.
I had been skating in all the contests. That’s where the idea came from, the idea for the box with the rail on it and hitting it from four different sides. I had skated in Savannah Slamma and a couple other contests and a lot of that stuff was in my head from skating those. I said, “Let’s just take this and build it here.”
And then you built that great mini ramp. That was like a second phase of the metal ramps. That mini ramp was amazing. That was one of the first proper mini ramps that I ever skated.
Yep, you know that’s when we… we cut all our transitions way ahead of time. Yeah the seam on that mini ramp was awesome. It’s a shame thinking about it right now because I was always fighting the, “Well, how long will things last?”
We talked about the cyclical nature of skateboarding earlier. It feels like when I moved away, which would have been in the early 90’s, skating died again. Did you close the shop because of that?
The shop didn’t go out of business because skateboarding was dying. I had started repping and I was trying to do two things at once and I was making a lot more money…. Skateboarding was still pretty healthy. It had definitely slowed down, I mean in those mid to late ’80s I’d call up Powell and I’d go, “Okay send me 100 Hawks, 100 Cabs, 100 McGills, a 100 Guerreros , 100 Lance Mountains” and they’d be gone in a month. It had one of those phases in the ‘90s where it did slow down but the industry was still big. Airwalk was big and we had a lot of new companies coming out. You had H-Street coming out and all those guys came out. So that was another boost but it definitely wasn’t like those last years in the ’80s. It wasn’t as strong as that. So it definitely slowed down but it didn’t go away. Each time it goes away less and less. At that time it went away some but it was still the core. Skaters were still out there and they were still skating. I think the contests scene slowed down quite a bit, locally and nationally. That’s about when Tony [Hawk]’s dad died and the NSA folded for a little while. That’s probably right around when things slowed a little bit too.
It seems like those contests went away until they got reinvented by things like the X Games and now Street League.
Well, yeah, once the X Games came on that changed everything. It took it to the highest level and you see where it is now. Guys were making… the top, top guys make a lot of money. There are still a lot of great skaters that don’t make any money. But because they started getting on TV so much, that took it to the next level. But then, you know, in the 2000s vert almost died. Vert has kind of come back now but street skating took over. It was real street skating. It wasn’t parks or anything.
Denny and Rodney at a demo in NY, 1987.
In a way it was like the rebirth of freestyle.
Well I still claim the reason there is street style is because of Rodney Mullen. I mean Rodney… there’s two guys that I say have changed skateboarding, [that] would be Rodney and Tony [Hawk]. Those two guys… I mean and if you go all the way back there is Tony Alva and Jay Adams…. There’s certain guys that just gave to the sport what no one else would be able to.
Rodney is like… I mean he’s a freak of nature on a skateboard. I knew him personally. Rodney is kind of a genius. His parents wouldn’t let him skate. He never skated transitions or anything, his parents wouldn’t allow it. They made him wear full pads and helmets even when he was skating freestyle when he was a little kid. I met him when he was 12. His parents were doctors and lawyers and they didn’t want anything to do with him on the skateboard. That never changed.
I think he’s probably one of the most influential skaters of all times. He was doing stuff on flat land, like air walks and mute 360 grab ollies that all of a sudden Tony was like “Hey….” Because Tony actually used to ride freestyle, so Tony started taking [those tricks] to the vert when he was like 13. Rodney was way ahead.
The last thing I want to ask you is, you obviously still skate because you’ve mentioned it, so where do you like to skate now? What kind of stuff do you like to go to?
I still skate mini ramps. I actually have a little one in the backyard. I recently just got remarried, so I have a son that’s 26 and a daughter that’s 24. My son and I have always skated together. We still do. We snowboard a lot too. And then I’ve got twin ten year old boys here that learning to skate. So we have a little mini ramp thing out back here and recently I’ve been…. I’ve always really enjoyed mini-ramp because it doesn’t bother my back and I feel like I’m still doing stuff. I really don’t like freestyle anymore because freestyle actually bothers my back, all the hand stands, all the tricks up on the trucks and all the pogos…. I haven’t been on a freestyle board in years.
I love transition, like bank walls and I went to the Ditch as a tribute to my friend that died, Chip Frederick, and skated there for like 45 minutes the other day. It just brought back unbelievable memories. Then two weeks ago I skated the Ocean Bowl pool and actually rode the vert ramp a little bit. I haven’t been on vert in years, so it’s pretty much mini ramp stuff.
I was in Ocean City earlier this summer and I hadn’t seen the park since they’d redone it. I hit it up for an hour or so one morning. I like it. It’s really nice.
Well right before the recession hit they were going to take that entire baseball field, that basketball court, that whole block was supposed to be a skateboard park. Everybody was all excited and then the recession hit and it’s not come back on the table yet.
That would have been crazy! I liked the smaller sections. I can actually get tricks there. The big stuff I can just like carve and kick turn.
Yeah it’s got a couple of dead spots in there.
55 grinds for his 55th birthday, Ocean City MD.
It’s really weird for lines.
Yeah you can get stuck in no man’s land. But I like to just skate the pool if I want to just carve around without doing anything. I’m almost 60 years old, I’m not doing anything but carving it, just trying to lose some weight.
[LAUGHTER]
Some guys started doing that on Wednesday. So there’s a crew of them, a bunch of guys that are in their 40s and 50s that are there just to carve around and have fun.
We’ve got a similar scene at my local park. It’s amazing how many guys are still out there doing it. When I was a kid I was competitive. I was disappointed when I couldn’t keep up with my friends. Now anything I can do feels great.
The main thing is that you’re out there having fun. Like me on mini ramp, I’ve got 15 tricks that I do that I can do consistently. I actually probably ride mini ramp better now. In fact, I know I ride mini ramp better than I did when Lutherville was there. I do way more tricks, way more technical stuff and it’s weird, but I don’t fall that much anymore. I can’t afford to fall.
Yeah you’ve got to stay within your comfort zone. You can’t just go for something weird.
Yeah like I used to do blunts and those are gone.
I can still do them when I grab, you know, but I can’t do them no handed anymore. I feel just happiest doing frontside grinds, stand up grinds to revert and that kind of stuff. I still surf too. You know my whole surfing thing has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. I’ve surfed all over the world. Between the two of them, you know, they’re both in my blood, there’s no doubt about it.
UPDATE: 9/18/2015
In the months since we did this interview, Paul Chidester, has uploaded some footage from the ’70s. Below are three videos featuring Denny and some of the spots mentioned above. Enjoy!
This project has made me realize just how confused my personal chronology is. What I thought was a fairly accurate working timeline quickly fragmented under closer scrutiny. I have resorted to using certain events that I can place in time as markers or signposts, if you will. From those I can then extrapolate and make educated guesses about when, approximately, things happened. Of all the places I plan to write about, my memory of Lutherville is the most jumbled. Besides having trouble with the years I also realized that my understanding of how it came to be is based on rumor, hearsay and conjecture. I plan to interview Denny Riordon soon in the hopes of clearing some of this up. Denny was our local pro, owner of our local skate shop and was, if I do recall correctly, the person responsible for Lutherville. Until then though, much of this may not be totally accurate but it should be close enough that the spirit of the truth remains intact.
The best skatepark ever. This was Lutherville between its first and second incarnations.
Lutherville was, as I remember it, an accidental skatepark. There were two public elementary schools within a mile of my house. Built to serve the baby boom, both schools were not needed while I was growing up, so one of them, Lutherville, was shuttered. It was not abandoned, just temporarily closed. Some of the offices were still in use and it hosted community events and rec. leagues. With its ball fields, tennis courts and playgrounds it essentially functioned as a public park. The fields stretched out behind the school to the west and the north. Up a small hill from the fields, in the northern most corner, were the tennis and basketball courts. A row of trees separated these courts from the back of a grocery store and strip mall. The tennis courts were often in use, the ball court much less so. At some point, at least as early as 1986, ramps were placed in that court. I know it was 1986 because Lutherville is one of the ways I discovered punk rock. That is one of my “signposts” allowing me to place this in space/time.
Your author doing a mute air. Note the poorly tacked on street sign at the bottom of the ramp.
In elementary school, I had listened to Top 40 radio. Each weekend I waited excitedly for Casey Kasem to do his countdown. I only owned two records, Michael Jackson – Thriller and Rick Springfield – Working Class Dog. My babysitter had bought me the latter because he was her favorite. By 5th grade, my tastes had begun to change. The hits on the radio at the time were things like Whitney Houston – “Greatest Love of All” but I liked the Pet Shop Boys – “West End Girls” better. I was drawn to darker and more new wave influenced songs like “One Night in Bangkok“. The first cassingle I bought was “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”. Knowing that I liked music but not really knowing what kind of music I liked led me to explore the radio stations. I soon stumbled upon WHFS, the local alt rock station (though at that point, the vaguely post new wave rock they played was called “progressive). WHFS turned me on to college rock bands like REM. Next, I found the local college station, WCVT, out of Towson State. WCVT had a very eclectic format, but it played a lot of punk and industrial.
Jeff B. with a wall ride at the old Lutherville.
By middle school, many of the big name punk, hardcore and new wave bands must have been on my radar. As evidenced by the video I previously posted, you can hear Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys and The Descendents in the background. I have vivid memories of middle school parties, sneaking sips of smuggled in alcohol and playing spin the bottle while “Richard Hung Himself”, “Bitchin’ Camaro”, “Pictures On My Wall” or “Add It Up” played in the background. While I knew about some bands, I did not own anything. Punk and hardcore tapes were, at that time, impossible to find at any of the local stores. The first punk tape I owned I found on the ground at Lutherville. Side A was the Repo Man soundtrack. Side B was something I thought sucked, something that I thought sounded like U2. It was probably something cool that I couldn’t appreciate at the time, like The Boomtown Rats, but back then I only listened to Side A. I only found out it was the Repo Man soundtrack because I described it to an older guy and he identified it for me. Besides the songs I taped off the radio, this was the only real tape I owned for quite a while. Eventually I befriended some of the older skaters and they dubbed me albums from their vinyl but until then I listened to that Repo Man tape so much that it stretched out and slowed down. Knowing I liked harder music but not knowing where to find it also led to a winter of shoplifting metal tapes from the nearby Caldor. I perfected a method, was never caught and, since I selected them almost at random, amassed quite a varied collection. Positively, this turned me on to Sabbath and negatively, put me in possession of To Hell With The Devil.
Brian, judo air on to the box at the second version of Lutherville, pre-contest.
Therefore, Lutherville was incredibly important to my adolescent aesthetic development but I cannot really say for sure how it became a skate spot, much less a skatepark. What I have always believed is that Denny held an unlicensed, unofficial contest there in the basketball courts, and just left the ramps there afterwards. I remember those ramps vividly. There was a launch ramp, an small eight foot wide triangle with coping on top, a wall ride ramp (or a “bash” ramp as we called it since it wasn’t flush and you had to bash against the wall to ride it out), a tiny spine, and a double coping-ed “flat bar” for rail sliding and grinding. These ramps sat in that court and slowly rotted for at least a year. Lutherville at that point was not a destination spot for skaters. No one really went there except for the local kids. The bottom lips of the ramps, especially on the launch ramp, chipped and wore down. Street signs were stolen and placed over the holes. Parking blocks and picnic tables were dragged in to the court. I think we took Brian’s launch ramp there when he tired of it. This kid, I think named Roman, somehow wheeled in his nice big quarter pipe. He lived miles away. We would constantly readjust the ramps, sliding them around to try out new combinations. One day we would place the launch ramp up against the picnic table, another day we would put the rail slide bar down the table. It was your perfectly shitty DIY spot of the launch ramp era, before DIY meant pouring concrete. These places, while not common, existed elsewhere at the time. There were various empty or abandoned places where skaters would bring random objects and that clutter and detritus would evolve into something resembling a skate spot. What didn’t exist at the time was skateparks and that is what Lutherville became.
Some random guy doing a sweeper on the little triangle. Notice that there are no corner banks and the box didn’t have a bank yet either. You either had to slide that bar or ride off.
How this happened is even more confused in my mind. At some point the ramps were refurbished. The existing ramps were shored up and a flush to the wall wallride ramp was built. Everything was re-surfaced with blue sheet metal. These minor changes alone would have been an immense improvement and that does not even include what became the centerpiece of the new Lutherville, the fun box. A launch ramp on to the top, a steep bank off one side, a ledge on the other and a double coping-ed railslide bar down the back. This was revolutionary stuff. There was nothing like this anywhere nearby. Two large banks were then built in opposite corners of the park and the box rotated to sit at an angle facing them. You would drop in on the far bank, air on to the box, slide the rail, do something on the other bank and then either push off to hit a launch ramp or ride back up the bank on to the box, roll in to the launch ramp and hit the wall ride ramp. The triangle, spine, railslide bars and parking blocks sat off to the sides. I always believed that Denny rebuilt the place in preparation for a second contest called “Save Lutherville” but now I am not so confident of that.
Mike Vallely doing something stupid (a layback fs grind?) atop the wall at the Save Lutherville contest.
I skipped school one of the last day of 7th grade, with the intention of skating all day. Brian and I (and a third boy, who, I cannot remember now) first skated all the way up to Towson to Denny’s skate shop, Island Dreams. After hanging out there for a while for no reason whatsoever, we slowly made our way back to Lutherville. Unbeknownst to us, Eddie’s mother had spotted us earlier that morning and my mother was waiting for us at Lutherville, because she knew I would turn up there eventually. She caught us just in time to be returned to school, lectured by the vice principal and sent to our final classes in a mixture of shame and infamy. As punishment I was forbidden to skate for a little while but instead I just hid my skateboard at Brian’s house for the interim. Was Lutherville steel by this point? If my mother instantly knew where to look for us, it must have been a real skate spot, but the times do not add up. We are in cool weather clothing in the pictures of us skating the unfinished version of the park so I originally assumed that the initial construction took place in early spring of 1987, with the contest being held sometime that following summer. The picture I found of Mike Vallely at the contest throws that theory in to doubt. In it you can clearly see his elephant deck, which did not come out until 1988. So maybe the steel was added in the fall of 1987 or even early spring of 1988 with the contest held later that year? Or did it sit there for over a year and the contest was to “save” it in that state, not pay for the upgrade? Or was there even a third contest? I do know I was hanging out at Lutherville daily by 1988 because Jeff B was a year older than I was and already in high school. A girl he knew liked me. This is another marker because even though she was only a year older, I felt so cool being in middle school and “dating” a high school girl. Nothing really ever happened between us. We hung out a few times, she talked all sorts of dirty things to me over the phone and I thought I was going to lose my virginity. She then declined sneaking in to the Lutherville school building to hook up in an empty classroom or bathroom, lost interest in me and that was that.
Mike V. with a huge one foot mute and an elephant deck so this must be 1988. Source: Rob Cole Sr. Facebook
Whenever it was that the contest did actually happen it was a big success. The t-shirt from it was my prize possession. I’m fairly certain it was just a print of the flier, black ink on a white shirt of a hand drawn skeleton doing a (method?) air surrounded by sponsor logos but it was the coolest thing that had ever happened and I was proud to be a part of it. The contest was huge, easily the largest one I had ever been to. It drew sponsored ams and a few pros. We were slightly star struck by Mike V but I must admit to also being somewhat underwhelmed. It seemed to me like he spent the whole day trying to air the entire box, which would have been super impressive, it had never even entered my mind that that was possible, but I don’t think I ever saw him come close to landing it. I may have been distracted though. I had entered the contest and, because of the size and quality of the skaters there, was super nervous. I could not understand why I kept having to pee until someone explained to me that it was anxiety. I then puked in the bushes. My run was a total failure. I was so hyped up that I started out way too fast and slid out on my first launch. I remember lying on the ground and hearing shouts of “keep going”. I got up and did but I never recovered. I decided right then and there that contest skating was stupid and not for me.
Some guy who was probably sponsored with a Madonna to tail on the box during the Save Lutherville contest.
Again, this is conjecture but I believe that the money raised from this contest went to cover the cost of the metal and new ramps and, more importantly, build what completed the transformation of Lutherville from a basketball court with a bunch of ramps in it into a bonafide skatepark. That final step was the construction of a five foot high, sixteen foot wide, metal surfaced mini ramp. I think this happened the summer of 1988, the summer just before high school. Lutherville is where I really learned to skate a mini ramp. It was not my first mini ramp; Jeff B had a tiny, maybe two and a half foot high, eight foot wide ramp in his backyard that had been my first. The step up to the Lutherville ramp was drastic, I basically had to learn to skate ramps all over again. That summer I slept over at Jeff B’s house often. We would wake early and go to Lutherville before it got crowded, because it now did get crowded. It was a legitimate skatepark. It was a destination. People travelled to it. This really has to be stressed. In the mid to late 80s there were no skateparks. The closest thing we had was Lansdowne, a blobby concrete holdover from the 70s but I did not discover that until later in high school. There was a small bowl from the same era in Ocean City, MD, along with a large vert ramp, but that was three hours away. There were backyard vert and mini ramps scattered throughout the whole area but since we could not drive yet they were not really accessible. A few years later we would often drive a few hours north to Cheap Skates, a private indoor park in Pennsylvania that had vert, mini and street ramps. That was the closest skatepark. In the mid 80’s a free, public street skatepark with a good mini ramp was unheard of. It was absolutely unique for the area and it was only about six blocks from my house. We would skate it early while we could still get runs in, because the snaking got very bad very quickly. I frankly did not have the skill to hang out with the older guys who came later in the day. Jeff B did. He was already significantly better than I was. I had to go early to practice. I remember learning all sorts of stupid throwback tricks there, like sweepers and layback FS grinds but I also remember learning FS stand-up grinds to tail there. That is a trick that is still one of my go to’s today, as evidenced by the header image of this blog. I do not think anyone calls them that anymore, now they are probably just called a FS 5-0 to tail, but back then it was a stand up grind. When I skated the street section I liked doing little ollies on to the box, rail sliding the bar down and doing big kick turns way up on the vert of the wall. The early grab launch ramp era was finally starting to go out of fashion.
Jeff B with a FS 5-0 (or “stand up grind”) on the Lutherville mini ramp.
When it got too hot or too busy we would run to the 7-11 for drinks and sit at the picnic table under the pine trees. Like any skatepark nowadays it had its own slowly rotating cast of local characters, some legendary, some infamous. There was never any adult supervision but despite that there were rarely any problems. I remember only one or two fights and a few of the older guys would regulate things a bit when local delinquents would show up trying to cause trouble. There were no lights so you could not skate it much after dark but it had no set hours. It was never locked. In fact I do not think it even had doors for a while. I really do not understand how it existed, how someone could just build some ramps on government property and have it last for years. Did Denny have any sort of permission or did he just do it? It was not just a few portable ramps anymore. The mini ramp and all that steel made it feel permanent.
“Everything dies baby that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back”
Bruce Springsteen – “Atlantic City”
I cannot even begin to tell you how long it lasted, it was there at least until I was in high school. At some point the county became involved. There was an attempt to restrict the hours and enforce helmet and pads rules but since the culture of the place had already been set by so many years of pure anarchy, this did not go over well. Holes were cut in the fences and we either skated it early or late, when there was not anyone around to make us pad up. Eventually the rumor began going around that it was about to be torn down. This happened during the summer because I was at Ocean City, MD at the time. I had my father drive by it on our way home and I saw the ramps half demolished. I was sad but not devastated. I had known this was coming for a while. What I do remember is how unfair it seemed. Why did they, they meaning the government, the county, the adults, the square normal world, have to go and destroy something that was so cool? It gave me a nihilistic feeling, a negative faux-zen, as in everything is fleeting, impermanent and this too shall pass. This was echoed again and again throughout high school. Cool spaces that held punk shows were routinely shut down, soon after they popped up. Backyard ramps rarely lasted more than a few months. Everything I liked was illegal; everything that was fun had to be controlled and ruined. It seemed like everything we made, everything we found, every burst of creativity was destined to be destroyed by the entropy of the adult world. What I have now that I did not have then is the perspective of time. Things do come back. There is now a legal county run park in Cockeysville, a bunch of metal ramps in a court including a mini, just a few miles up the road from Lutherville. Though I bet it is nowhere near as cool.
As was discussed in Team P.E.B. here we are skating a launch ramp. It starts with Jeff and Brian. I join them next followed by Eddie. Note the sick Minor Threat, Descendents and Dead Kennedys soundtrack.
There are some portrait shots at the very end if you want to see faces.
If I was to stay true to the “spots” theme this entry should really be titled “Launch Ramps”. Hell, even that is not very accurate. Maybe “Jeff B’s Driveway and in Front of Brian’s House”? How unwieldy is that? Team P.E.B. is much more evocative and fun.
Pat (your author). Boneless in a tiny bank. I don’t think this was posed because of that ridiculous open mouth but I doubt it was a make.
In elementary school I had a super hero club. Inspired by my favorite comic book, the X-Men, and a book of rare animals a relative had given me, I named our “team” the MAMMALS. Knowing myself, I am sure there was also some tortured acronym that MAMMALS was meant to stand for, but I can’t remember what. I assigned all of my friends code names based on animals best suited to their characteristics. I was, of course, Wolverine since it was my club. The only other code names that I can still recall are Spider Monkey for Ray (a natural climber) and Mongoose for Dwayne (who was quite acrobatic). My younger sister was Hedgehog. She still holds that against me. This team didn’t really do anything, other than imagine ourselves as superheros at recess. Through some selective cognitive dissonance we somehow thought we were superior to the girls that ran around pretending they were horses.
After the onset of puberty and the shift to middle school my dorkier tendencies were somewhat eclipsed by skateboarding. In fact, I can remember exactly when that happened. We had played Dungeons and Dragons in elementary school. “Played” being used in the absolutely loosest sense of the word since I don’t think any actual rules or modules were followed. We basically just made it all up as we went along. We were too young and too easily distracted to sit still through all that dice rolling and math. Sometime late in elementary school, I did, briefly, try to run a campaign following a little closer to how the game was meant to be played, with a simplified rule system I cobbled together from the manuals, but we only met once. Early in 6th grade, another boy, Sam, decided we were going to start fresh and play by all the rules. One weekend afternoon all my nerd friends met at his house to roll up new characters. I skated over there and after a few hours of arguing over the proper means of character creation followed by a last minute decision to play Gamma World, I left, deciding that skateboarding was much more fun.
Eddie looking stylish in Vans, baggy khakis and an oversized bomber.
The MAMMALS had ceased to exist so I formed a skate team. This was in fashion at the time, not even just boys emulating the pro teams, but think “The Ramp LOCALS!” and “The Daggers”. My team was called Team P.E.B. for Pat, Eddie and Brian (I warned you about the acronyms). We were the three boys in our neighborhood that skated so we had naturally flocked together. We were soon joined by Jeff B, who was a year older, better and already a bit too sophisticated to really care about being part of the team. In hindsight I don’t think Brian particularly cared much either. He was not as obsessive as I was and would soon be the first of us to stop skateboarding. Team P.E.B. was, for all intents and purposes, just Eddie and me.
The younger boys though, they ate it up. We had several hangers on that I made honorary members of the team. The most ridiculous of which got himself kicked out of a contest my mother had driven us to. I can’t even remember his name but he wanted to be part of the team so badly he had, unbeknownst to us, brought with him a TEAM P.E.B. stencil and a can of spray paint. This contest was held at a closed gas station somewhere in a nearby Baltimore county neighborhood. Just a few little wooden ramps scattered around an empty parking lot, nothing special. In fact, after finding the pictures, its pretty amazing how sparse it was. Three launch ramps and a quarter pipe. It was the first, and one of the only, contests I entered. We had organized various informal “skate jams” before. Those were a thing at the time. Total amateur contests where you would pick a spot, spread the word and a bunch of random kids would show up and compete. Generally it was for nothing other than bragging rights, but I think the one I organized by the loading dock at our elementary school had a small entry fee with the winner taking the money. This contest was organized by a local shop and had sponsors, age brackets, permits and everything. There were actual adults there.
Brian busting a big method into the mat at Jeff B’s house.
While we were warming up, this boy who was not skating in the contest, just there in support of Team P.E.B., tagged the empty cashier’s booth with his stencil and was promptly ejected. Having nowhere to go he skulked about in the nearby bushes all day, until the contest finally ended and my mother returned to pick us up. I got third place in the contest. I think I won a gift certificate. Or maybe a t-shirt or hat. Something trivial anyway. I didn’t do much of anything, just went in a circle and did the same airs out of the launch ramps over and over again. I probably kicked turned or axle stalled on the quarter pipe and maybe did a board slide on the parking block. This earned me some criticism from my friends, but I was consistent and didn’t fall so the cautious approach paid off. The kids that won just did more complicated airs. That’s what the contest was really, not a a street competition per se, but a launch ramp competition.
That is Ed Templeton in 1987 on the right but it could easily be me.
1987 was the year of the launch ramp. Honestly, the whole of my middle school years, 1985-1988 were the launch ramp years, but I think it peaked in 1987. 1987 was also peak squeeb. I had one. My parents were very indulgent about my stupid haircut. My great grandmother cut it that way for me and my father helped me peroxide the bangs. It started short and somewhat respectable but by the end of middle school had become a long dangling blonde thing with cropped hair everywhere else.
The speed that these trends spread, despite being transmitted only through Thrasher, Transworld and the very rare video parts, has always fascinated me. On one hand its not that surprising since skating is such an aesthetic pursuit. Tony Hawk was one of the most popular pros at the time so it makes sense that so many teenage boys decided they wanted his haircut. Other things are more complicated. Airwalks were the most popular shoe. Which is odd, just in and of itself since they are now just a K-mart brand. I had forgotten just how popular they were though. Going through my old pictures, I was amazed how much Airwalk graffiti and grip tape art I saw. Yet at some point we all stopped wearing Airwalks and Vans and instead started wearing big basketball high tops. Did we wear Air Jordan’s because of the Bones Brigade as well? There is a (possibly apocryphal) story that they only were wearing those Jordans in Animal Chin because they couldn’t get Vans. Did that accident (if it did happen) influence the whole of skateboarding? What about Converse Cons? Those were incredible popular amongst teen skaters but I don’t remember any pros wearing them, though I’m sure some did. I feel like we, as children, collectively decided on these shoes because the suede and canvas of the skate shoes of the time just didn’t hold up. I remember my Vans being more Shoe Goo and duct tape than shoe. We didn’t care about “board feel”, all we were doing was launching out of ramps and slamming to the ground and wanted shoes that lasted.
Another question is why launch ramps? With Natas Kaupas’s part in Wheels of Fire heralding the birth of the new age, street skating began to really take off. Gonz and Natas were doing kickflips. In the video I have from this time (embedded below) you can see my friend Brian try a kickflip. He doesn’t land it but the motion is right. He could probably do them. I didn’t think kids were doing kickflips as early as 1987 but obviously they were. Yet, instead of deciding to explore the more technical side of street skating, something that obviously came in to fashion a few years later in the early 90s, in 1987 skaters decided en mass that they wanted to skate launch ramps. Maybe it had to do with Hosoi and the pictures coming out of Venice Beach? However it developed, launch ramps became the primary focus of street skating. There was this weird monomania about it. That is all that anyone wanted to do.
Jeff B had the first launch ramp in the neighborhood. More importantly he also had a large gymnastic wedge mat. That is where I learned. We would set up the ramp in his driveway so that it was downhill, push at it and launch off into the mat. With no fear of injury it was easy to learn all the basic grabs. Next we learned all the tweaks. There was a whole litany of tricks based on vert airs. Every minor variation had a new name. Grab mute and tweak back and it was a Japan Air, melon and it was a Crooked Cop. Does anyone in 2014 even remember what a Crooked Cop was? We almost never skated this ramp without the mat. There wasn’t enough room in Jeff B’s driveway to ride these airs out and the street in front of his house was too bumpy, busy and narrow for us to move the ramp out there. Instead, after we had learned all our tricks in to the mat, we skated a launch ramp at Brian’s house. He kept it in his garage and we would drag it out on to the much quieter side street he lived on. It was tighter and shorter than Jeff’s so we had to brace it with cinder blocks because it had a tendency to slide. The four of us would spend entire days here, doing early grab air after early grab air off of the thing.
The contest in question. Three launch ramps and a quarter pipe. Not pictured, a parking block.
Launch ramps obviously weren’t a new invention. The very first kid to ride a skateboard probably propped a piece of wood up on something and attempted to get some air. It’s kind of ridiculous to think about it now, but in a lot of ways nothing has changed. Go to any skate park, and you will find young kids lined up to air out of the fly-out spot. That is all that they want to do. Getting air is fun. The only difference with us is that we had to crash all the way back down to earth, twisting ankles and ruining our knees. I guess there is a second difference, in that it was all early grab, it had to be early grab. We could ollie off of those ramps, but somehow we never thought to ollie in to a grab. No, instead you would crouch down and grab the board, often before you even hit the ramp and try to tweak it slightly one way or another because that was a trick. This is what skateboarding was for a few years until, at least for us, mini ramps took over. But there is something else to talk about first and that is Lutherville which I will cover in the next two posts.
UPDATE:
The entire video of us skating Brian’s ramp is now up and located here.
I have a theory that you can never truly know a place unless you grow up there. I know this is not a particularly original idea, in fact I think I may have first encountered it in print in an old Stephen King novel, but it’s still an idea I developed independently so I’m laying claim to it. I think I first formalized this theory during my freshman year at college. I had moved out of state for school and that first year I did a fair amount of late night wandering around the surrounding neighborhoods. I quickly realized how little I knew about where I now lived. Live somewhere long enough as an adult and you can become familiar and comfortable with the area, but it will never be the same as where you were raised. The continuous exploration that is such a fundamental part of childhood gives an intimate knowledge of the territory that cannot be replicated later in life. This exploration begins in the home before slowly expanding outwards in an ever-increasing radius, a logarithmic spiral, as the child becomes more mobile and the ranging area expands.
Digging around in our basement one winter I found the hidden Christmas presents and subsequently ruined the myth of Santa Claus for my younger sister. I was in the backyard of almost every house in the neighborhood, jumping fences for “shortcuts”. A group of us found a way up on to the elementary school roof. Why, I don’t know? We figured out how, so, like Everest, we climbed it simply because it was there. Any small overgrown vacant lot or patch of trees was a forest to explore. New homes or other buildings under construction were routinely broken in to, not so much for petty theft or minor vandalism (though those two often accompanied it) but because the temptation to see what was inside was irresistible.
I grew up in the immediate northern suburbs of Baltimore, a quintessentially suburban area that would be instantly familiar to anyone from a similar environment. Baltimore is encircled by a beltway and roughly bisected by the Jones Falls Expressway, which becomes I83 as it continues north into Pennsylvania. A main road lined with chain stores and strip malls ran parallel to that highway and my house sat one block off that road, almost in sight of the junction of the Beltway and 83. I say almost in sight because there was a small ridge in the way. Growing up, that ridge was home to a drive in movie theater and from my sister’s bedroom window you could see fragments of the screen. I spent many hot summer nights trying in vain to watch what was playing. That drive in was later replaced with a mirrored glass clad office building where my childhood friend Joe worked, if not still works.
A few years ago, home for the holidays and going a bit stir crazy one afternoon, I went for a long walk. I found myself on the far side of the railroad tracks, very near that office building. I was still relatively close to my parent’s house but many blocks out of the way if I followed the roads home. I decided to take the shortcut through the woods. The path that I remembered was still there, overgrown but passable. The skeleton of the half-finished mini-ramp that we had discovered as children (and made grand plans to finish that never materialized) was also still there, though nature had begun to reclaim it. There was a small stream that was harder to cross than I had expected. The banks were muddy and steep and took a bit of scrabbling to get up the hill to the track bed. Once across the tracks, the quickest way home was then to walk past the loading docks behind a strip mall, jump a fence and then climb a path up a long steep hill to the main road. This is not how adults get around in the suburbs and I’m sure I raised a few eyebrows. Even seeing adults walking around my parent’s neighborhood is still something of a rarity, much less pushing through brambles, fording streams, jumping fences and climbing hills, yet I grew up there. That was how you did it as a child. That was the proper way home.
It was at Joe’s house that I first stepped on a skateboard, an old yellow banana board we found in his basement. Joe lived directly across from the elementary school, less than a half mile from my house. Down one shaded block of old growth oak trees and older homes, through a block of newer, nearly identical, post war houses (where my friend Eddie lived) and up a small rise before dropping down one final block to the elementary school. I used to stop at Joe’s after school to play with his action figures or look at his comic books. Along with Dungeons and Dragons and science fiction novels those were my interests at the time. Not that I wasn’t physically active. My parent’s approach to childhood development had been to throw everything at us and see what stuck. Both my sister and I took a variety of lessons and played a wide range of sports. I wasn’t particularly clumsy but I also didn’t have much in the way of natural talent. I was never going to be an athlete. My interests were leaning much more towards art and the typical “indoor kid” pursuits until I found skateboarding. Two neighborhood boys, Eddie and Brian had started skating slightly before I did and because of them my parents had already asked if I would want a skateboard. I had declined the offer but after playing with the board at Joe’s house and feeling a natural affinity towards it, I changed my mind. I have no idea what brand my first deck was, though I can still picture it. It was just a generic board from the local department store, not even a Nash Executioner, though it did have a dragon on it.
“Two hundred years of American technology have unwittingly created a massive cement playground. It took the minds of 12 year-olds to realize its potential.”
At its essence, skateboarding is a child balancing on a wheeled piece of wood and yelling, “look what I can do!” What comes next is that without any real forethought, “look what I can do” becomes, “I wonder if I can do that on this thing over there”. It is now a truism that “skateboarders look at the world differently” but back then the idea seemed revolutionary. The aimless childhood exploration became purposeful exploration. We spent all day scouting unfamiliar neighborhoods looking for the happy accidents of the man made environment, especially focusing on the ignored infrastructural and interstitial industrial spaces ripe for repurposing. The best of these became named, they became “spots”. California had empty pools. The Baltimore suburbs had the Ditch and the Ditch was my first “spot”.
We had actually found the Ditch well before we started skateboarding. Adjacent to the elementary school was a cul-de-sac and behind that cul-de-sac a large storm drain emptied into a small ravine. “Ravine” is almost definitely too generous a description. Seen today I would be surprised if it was deeper than five feet, but to us, as children, it was massive. We played there often. It was the site of much climbing and faux-rappelling. In that strange oral history of children it was named Deadman’s Ditch for reasons forever lost to time. The storm drain that opened into the ditch was large enough for us to enter it only slightly hunched. Legend had it that the older boys in the neighborhood had a fort farther back inside, complete with lawn furniture and porn magazines, where they would smoke weed. I was never able to verify any of that because, even armed with flashlights, we lost our nerve after venturing only a short way up the tunnel. What I do know is that one day while playing there, a bunch of older boys burst forth from the tunnel and set upon us. What followed was a lot of hooting, hollering, stick bashing and bikes thrown down the ravine while we younger children scattered. I can only imagine that it must have looked like primate warfare from an adult perspective. It was all so uneventful in the end. No one was hurt and we all slunk back later to retrieve our bikes but I still remember how terrifying it was. There was something so feral about childhood. We lived in fear of those older bullies for years.
A narrow strip of trees, or “woods” in our suburban parlance, bordered the small stream that was fed by the runoff from the tunnel. These “woods” extended behind the elementary school and effectively separated my neighborhood from the apartment and condominium complex behind it. Except in times of heavier rain, this stream generally dried out by the time it reached the concrete drainage ditch near the eastern entrance to the apartment community. That drainage ditch at first inherited the name of the ravine, it was just a continuation of Deadman’s Ditch to us, but once I was skating and meeting other people from outside the area, I found that they called it Pot Springs Ditch, named for the road that passed over it. We eventually just shortened that to “The Ditch”. Most of it was a small, tight ditch, possible to skate as a snake run but not much else. We would try to treat it like our own personal Wallows but the angles were too steep and the flat too short to really do much with it. It widened and mellowed where it crossed under Pot Springs Road before narrowing again and winding through the emerald manicured lawns of a much wealthier community, eventually joining a proper stream that flowed into Loch Raven Reservoir.
Skateboarding was weird in 1985. It was incredibly popular but no one I knew really knew how to skate. The first summer that I skated, it was mostly what I term “little kid skating”, something that is instantly recognizable to this day. It generally features a kicking out of the board, a bunch of random flailing of limbs and then turning to a friend and loudly saying, “Did you see that! I almost did a 540!” It is still just, “look what I can do”. The next step is when it stops being just play and becomes actual attempts to learn tricks through massive amounts of sometimes extremely frustrating repetition. Street skating was in its infancy and was not really codified yet and there was a brief and confusing period where we were as “good” as the pros. We weren’t really as good as someone like Tommy Guerrero for example. We weren’t as fast or as stylish and couldn’t do things as big as he could, but we could do all the tricks. We were at least as “good” as the street skating in Future Primitive. It wasn’t really until Public Domain that we truly began to be outpaced. Most of the street skating footage we saw at the time was from contests, where the remnants of the old 70’s “street style” skaters were now competing against shirtless punks jumping off cars. The magazines and videos of the day were filled with vert skating and as east coast suburban kids we didn’t have access to anything like that. We tried to emulate those tricks on the street. We did early grab airs out of curb cuts, bonelesses, acid drops and street plants.
“Little kid skating”. Source: randomly found on ye olde internet
A large amount of product fetishism accompanied the fad. We were all poseurs. There were must have decks, such as the Powell Peralta Tony Hawk or the Vision Gator. We wore brightly colored, checkered slip on Vans and floral Jams or velcro-ed Jimmy’z. We girded our decks with every conceivable protection device, padding them out like football players with skid plates, noseguards, rails, copers and lappers, the brighter the colors the better. I had neon green grip tape on my department store board that I had, by then, spray-painted neon orange. The 80’s weren’t known for their understatement, more was always better. I would not be exaggerating if I said that close to half of the boys in my 6th grade class skateboarded. By the 8th grade the fad had started to pass and the numbers had been whittled down to the true skaters, those that would skate for at least the rest of high school. The Ditch was largely responsible for this transformation in me, from fad follower to someone who identified as a skateboarder. It was the first real “spot” I ever skated, the first place I ever felt like a real skater.
There were wider sections of the Ditch on both sides of Pot Springs, with a low, square, graffiti filled tunnel passing under the road. Judging by that graffiti (Sabbath, pentagrams, swastikas, weed and dicks if memory recalls) this had been a hang out spot long before I found it. I can only guess that it had been skated since the 70s if not earlier. That is a story for one of the east coast pioneers to tell, some brave soul on a piece of wood with roller skate wheels decided to try to roll down the damned thing (Ed. note, it was Denny Riordon!). By the mid ’80s it was a spot that people from surrounding areas traveled to skate. We skated the western side. By later in high school, the skating had shifted to the eastern side, probably because that side had more trees, was more concealed from traffic and was therefore less likely to attract the attention of a random passing cop. The eastern side was a mirror of the western side, in fact, it may have even been wider for longer, but to me the “proper” side is always going to be the west. As I said before, here the ditch widened, flared is a more accurate description, going from the narrow steeper section to a much wider flat section with mellower banks as it approached the bridge. The dirt along the edges of the lip was dug out so you could grind and, as I will always remember it, it had random pieces of wood lying along the top, to give you more roll in speed. Opposite these would be partially sunken parking blocks, emulating coping. Against the bridge it banked slightly to the wall, allowing for awkward wall rides. It wasn’t easy to skate. The surface was rough, there was an abrupt transition from the flat to the banks and it was very difficult to keep your speed up. My friends didn’t like it. I did and I often went alone. I wasn’t really allowed to, it being “illegal” and a hangout spot for older burnouts and other suburban malcontents, but like much of skating at that age, once I was out of the house I did as I pleased.
Wallride. Source: Jeff Martin’s Facebook
What I liked so much about the Ditch was that it offered me a taste of what ramp skating must be like. I would imagine myself taking a run on a half pipe, pretend that I was a pro skater and try to mimic all the tricks I had seen in print or on video. Of course I couldn’t skate it like that initially but I do remember when I learned. One day I went alone. The Ditch was normally empty and I often had it to myself. That day there was an older boy there. He was probably only in high school but he seemed like an adult to me. He was vaguely punk (“hesh” in current skater jargon) in complete contrast to my day-glo 80’s little kid style. He intimidated me. He was much better than I was but he was friendly and he taught me quite a lot. He showed me how to skate the Ditch like a ramp, not that I could immediately do it, but his advice lead to me learning all the basic lip tricks on the parking block. Things such as axle stalls, disasters and rock n rolls, as well as slashing grinds and small frontside ollies, moves that gave lateral motion, instead of the “square” back and forth, and that allowed you to pick up much more speed. He also told me that if I wanted to skate seriously I had to ride Indys, because, I kid you not, I think I had pink Gullwing trucks at this point. That is a lesson I still heed to this day that is how important it was. When I bought a board again after about 20 years of not skating, I had no idea what kind of deck or wheels I should buy, but I knew I had to get Indys.
I became a local at Ditch. It was my spot for about a year or two. I was better there than many of my friends because I skated it so often. I vividly remember how cool I felt when I would land a trick that was at a next level of progression. A smith grind across the length of the parking block, or a wall ride to board slide off the edge of the wall to back in fakie. We would tell the little kids we were pros, passing older teens would harass us; cops would sometimes stop and chase us out. Occasionally there would be older, better skaters there but in general it was a kingdom of 12 year old boys. I think it was (and is) so important to me because it was mine. I found it. It wasn’t a spot that I heard about via word of mouth. It wasn’t something built for us or that we built. It was something that was essentially in my backyard that I adapted to skateboarding, that allowed me to see the potential of skateboarding.
The extraneous accessorizing passed as middle school advanced. The grip tape became black and the clothing more understated. I eventually stopped skating the Ditch very often, more because of changing fads and increasing opportunities than for lack of interest. It remains in my mind as the most formative spot of my youth and it’s a shame I don’t have any pictures or video from back then. I’ve included some of what I have found online. The wallride is the only contemporaneous picture. There are also a few random clips on YouTube that I will include below. I hope to skate it again soon and get my own pictures and video. I imagine it will completely suck and I will hate it but it was the best thing going for a year or two in the mid 80s and I’m sure it’s still a popular spot for the neighborhood kids.
