It must have been about 1974 or '75 because I remember where I was living, and I moved in '76. At school one day some kid had a bit of wood with roller skate wheels on it and he was sitting on the thing going down a path in the playground. I don't remmeber his name and his minutes of fame didn't even add up to fifteen, because the moment the other kids saw this, they all wanted one, and it didn't take much to make one. Get a bit of wood, make it vaguely into a rounded off surfboard shape and nail the two halves of the roller skate to it. Then, when the nails come out (almost straight away), drill holes and use nuts and bolts instead. I blame this early experience making boards for my ability in the DIY department, and I remember making a board for a mate of mine who was crap at anything involving using hand tools. There was a slight disadvantage with the roller skates that he had in that the trucks didn't make the board turn when you leaned on it, so he blamed that for his slow learning curve.
Anyway we were soon hurtling (oh alright then, trundling) down the hill outside my house, first sitting then standing, then moving on to slalom round stones before the inevitable request to my parents to buy me a proper board. A 'proper' board in those days meant a 'Newporter' polypropylene deck with tiny trucks and massively wide (by today's standards) wheels which may have been some sort of urethane, but unfortunately not the sort designed for skateboard wheels, so they weren't even as fast as the rubber roller skate wheels I had 'progressed' from. The wheels also had loose bearings which I used to take out, clean and then pack with grease, which made them much quieter but also much slower. This was the start of my love of customising boards and equipment to try to make them in some way better. This was wasted effort a lot of the time, but I think just the act of fiddling with the board kept me going during those awful times when I couldn't skate for some reason.
And the non skating times were bad - I was totally addicted in a way that I wouldn't re-experience for 27 years when in 2002 I started skating again, and I spent virtually every waking hour thinking about skating, and if I wasn't doing that then I was making new decks or drawing half pipes in double physics. (well, gravity has a bit to do with physics...)
The desire for better eqipment continued apace, and I lost count of the number of times my mother said 'well what's wrong with the old wheels/deck/trucks? you've only had them five minutes.' This was an argument which had no logical answer, as the old stuff was indeed in full working order, and probably less than a year old, given the pace of the advances and changes made in skate gear during those early years. I developed a method of first broaching the subject with my dad, who seemed to be more amenable to my requests and usually backed me up when my begging became unbearable.
Those early years were fantastic. I used to try to find a skatepark near to any location that my family were going so that they could drop me off while they went and had a walk or looked at a garden centre or something. This was combined with a skateboard club every Friday night at the local leisure centre, and I was gaga with excitement when my parents announced that we were actually going to move to a new house over the road from the leisure centre - could it get any better? I know it sounds stupid, but these are the sorts of things that kept me going, and knowing there was a ramp to go and ride every Friday night 200 yards from my house was pure bliss.
The ramp in question was actually two ramps which could be joined together as a lethal half pipe about four feet wide or as a quarter pipe which was how we normally arranged it, as it enabled more people to use it. We all waited in a queue at one end of a long room and when it got to our turn we skated down the room, up the ramp, did a kickturn about a foot from the top and then (hopefully) down again to join the back of the queue. This went on for about two hours and then it was back to doing kickturns on a bit of wood leaned against a bench in my back yard. There were a few older kids who could do more exotic stuff like grinds and small airs, but it wasn't very impressive. This was the life of a skateboarder in a small town just north of Birmingham in 1976.
Eventually a mate who was about a year older than me got his driving licence and his mother was insane enough to let him use her car. This enabled us to get a bit further afield and we used to got to West Midlands Safari Park near Kidderminster which had a small concrete skatepark with a small bowl, a banked freestyle area and... a pool. This was Nirvana: A pool. Exactly like the ones we had all gawped at in pictures of Californian skaters in the mags. It was a good one too, although I only realised that after about three years of sporadic visits, by which time I was good enough to do double axle grinds and edgers on it. When I first rode it I wouldn't have known a good pool from a bad one, but this one had almost perfect transitions, was a nice size - not too big, not too small - and had a smooth white marbelite surface with blue tiles - perfection. In later years a decent wooden halfpipe appeared as well, but the pool is the thing that will forever represent the nadir of seventies skateboarding for me, with all its connotations of sun, California, and illegal sessioning; this wasn't illegal, of course, but it was the ideas and the lifestyle that the pool represented which were important, even more so I imagine to skaters in the UK than to those who lived in that unimaginably distant land across the Atlantic where (or so I imagined) virtually everybody had a rounded-bottom swimming pool in their backyard.
I remember when a mate first told me that in California they rode around empty swimming pools, the image that came into my head was of a pool like the ones I had swum in, which were square sided like an olympic pool with tiles all over, and I couldn't really see what the attraction would be of skating in them - it would be like skating down a slope on a bumpy surface with a wall at the bottom. I never really cottoned on to what the fuss was about until I started seeing pictures of people like Jay Adams and Alva doing their stuff.
I never really noticed that skating was dying until it was too late; not that I could have done anything about it. I didn't really mind at first - in fact it was quite pleasant to go to skateparks and not have to wait for ten minutes to have a go in the bowl or on a halfpipe, and the loss of the gits who used to snake everyone all the time were a bonus for everyone still left, most of whom seemed to have a much more relaxed attitude to the whole thing. To start with there were still quite a few hardcore kids going to the Friday night sessions at the leisure centre, and these were now good fun, with about ten of us having a great time, and we all improved as a result; encouragement from your peers being a great way to overcome your reservations about trying a new trick. But it couldn't last, and the Friday night club came to an end because the people who came along and ran it, who were the parents of one of the older guys, couldn't afford to keep subsidising us, and the ramps got moved to the Safari park which was an hour's drive away, and so very rarely visited.
Without the impetus of those Friday night sessions to keep them going, one by one the other kids dropped out of skating, and before I knew it I was on my own. I couldn't believe it - what the hell was the matter with everybody? here was this fantastic sport/recreation/lifestyle or whatever you want to call it, and everyone just stopped doing it for no obvious reason.
I carried on skating when I could, and went to a halfpipe in Birmingham somewhere a few times with some friends who had got into rollerskating (which I also did for a while) but even that petered out after a while and by about 1983 I was barely using my board, having also discovered the fatal combination of girls, pubs and beer. I can use this as a bit of an excuse, but the real reason I stopped skating is that I had no-one to skate with, and it's just not much fun on your own. There's no-one to congratulate you on landing a new trick, and no-one to laugh at you when you bail for the hundredth time. Landing a trick on your own is meaningless - like the old conundrum: if a tree falls over in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? The point being, of course, that it doesn't matter whether it makes a sound or not, because nobody cares.
I have no way of knowing if I would have carried on skating had I been a bit younger and yet to discover the delights of the opposite sex and drugs and drink, but I fear I would not; after all, kids who were younger than me gave up as well, so why would I have been any different? Even after all this time I cannot understand why skating died out so quickly, and it makes me all the more determined to make the most of the parks which are around now. I think there's a good chance that skating might be here to stay this time, if only because the corporate giants who have now got involved have different ways of marketing and selling their equipment, and this may make skating continue to appeal to new generations of kids for years to come, but it's far from impossible that the whole thing might just disappear again, taking with it the whole infrastructure, leaving behind just the hardcore element who are in it for the love of it. Come to think of it, this might not be such a bad idea in terms of getting rid of the hangers on and the bandwagon jumpers who are inevitably cashing in on skating's popularity (those corporate giants again), but that's another story...
In 2001 I moved house and was going through the old detritus which builds up over six years of living in the same place, and I came across my old board; a Powell Alan Gelfand 'Ollie' tank deck with Trackers and Bones which I had held onto since 1981 when I bought it. Quite why I had held on to it I don't know, but I think there may have always been a secret yearning to get back on the thing and go skating again, but a curious feeling that I was too old to start again kept me from doing anything about it, together with the fact that the current style of streetskating left (and leaves) me unmoved.
While trying to decide what to do with the board I tried looking up the name of the deck on Google and found a website run by two Americans who collected old boards. Looking through their wants list I discovered they wanted my deck, and after a bit of negotiation I sold it to them in exchange for cash and a new 25th anniversary reissue of the Powell Ollie deck which had only just been released. Getting this deck was the impetus I needed to get off my arse and start skating again, so by summer 2002 I was making regular visits to PlayStation park in west London, where I started meeting other skaters of 'my generation' all with a similar story to tell. It's just the details which change, but a common thread is Stacy Peralta's documentary, 'Dogtown and Z-boys' which came at a perfect time; just as I was thinking about skating again, along comes this film which not only celebrates the incredible beginnings of the sport but ends with the news that Tony Alva still skates pools every day. If I had needed encouragement to start skating again, that need evaporated when I heard that news, and I couldn't wait to get out and ride a halfpipe or a pool again.
In the past year I have made new friends, become much fitter, lost my beer belly and managed to do frontside airs out of the top of a halfpipe - something which in 1976 seemed about as impossible to me as the thought of doing a 900 or something does now. (Actually the though of just doing an ollie up a kerb seems pretty far-fetched, but anyway...). Skating is about so much more than the act of getting on a skateboard; it's a perfect way of finding out about yourself and improving not just the physical things like strength and co-ordination but the mental and metaphysical things as well. If you have the will to keep trying a trick time after time after time, despite the very real probability of hurting yourself, (possibly badly), it is like giving your brain a workout, and the effect it has on the way you run your life in other areas can only be good.
My outlook on life has improved immeasurably since I started skating again, and there is only one conclusion to draw: this time, I'm never giving up.
Andy Eaves July 2003 for more information: www.oldboarders.net