| | This is really just a continuation of my earlier post, the streets of Los Angeles but as I grew up skating the streets of Hollywood I thought I would devote another post to this.
My first skateboard, was a tiny orange plastic skateboard when I was in the second grade and it's amazing to think back now how well I could ride that thing considering it was a pretty badly designed chunk of plastic compared to modern day boards. I rode it for several years and I took it everywhere with me. I rode it in the dirt, in the grass but mostly a rode it around the concrete school grounds during recess periods and in my backyard when I got home from school.
Embarrassingly, what I graduated to from this was roller skates as my best friend was a roller skating fanatic. And it was really about competition and getting better than he was which I quickly did. This was one of those friends you remain competitive with your whole life, it seems, no matter what the circumstances are. You always are comparing what you've done and accomplished in your life to this person. One such instance was at a skating rink, on a school field trip, where I raced against him and about 20 other kids and adults of all ages. I was probably the smallest kid there and I new that if I could muster up all my youthful energy at the starting line and got off to a fast start I would avoid the inevitable collisions that would probably occur around the first turn.
As I predicted, almost the entire crowd of kids were fighting for a little patch of free space and literally tripping over each other as I sped to the lead, free and clear and led the pace for the three laps and only came in second at the last second because I slowed down, on the last lap, and wasn't paying close enough attention to the group of frenzied skaters gaining on my heels and frantically trying to catch me. Anyway, that was one of those fond childhood memories you later look back on.
I lost my point to that story and I was really only leading up to the fact that I soon graduated from spending my days rollerskating to purchasing an actual real wooden skateboard that I bought at a shop on Hollywood Blvd, about a block West of Vine called The Spot. I basically had very little idea what I was buying and just bought it based on the cool skull graphics it had. Anyway these were the days of nose guards, rails, skid plates and lappers (a piece of plastic that goes over your back truck so you could lift the nose of your board over curbs and get up them with ease (this was in '81 or '82 before ollies, or at least nobody I knew could ollie).
Anyway, now I was skateboarding home every day. (to be continued...) |
| | Posted 4/6/2007 9:10 PM - 71 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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