HISTORY OF SKATE SHOES - PT 1

I think any collector does that to some degree. I must admit I’ve never thought about skating going back to the fifties and earlier.
Yeah, it did start in the fifties when the steel wheel boards came out. There was no nose or tail, no tricks, you basically just rolled down the street. And in the sixties it came with a tail and you could start doing tricks like nose wheelies and skids and slides. It’s history worth telling, because it really did evolve in its own underground way. And then from basically ‘76 to ‘81 there was a huge progression in the sport. 

You’ve got an amazing issue of Skateboarder that goes all the way back to 1965.
Yeah, the first issue came out in ‘65, and there were four editions. It was a bit of a laugh back then, skating was competing with hula hoops and yo-yos. The urethane wheel wasn’t invented until 1973, so they were riding steel and clay wheels and those things were super dangerous if you were on bitumen. Your feet would be chattering and your wheels would slide out! Kids were getting run over by cars, so skateboarding was banned until ‘73 when the urethane wheel was invented – then you could go into a turn and the wheels would grip, so it changed things a lot.