The History of Skateboarding

Video Transcript

"How you doing there? This is Simon Bingham. We're at No Comply Skateboard Shop in Austin, Texas, and I'm going to give you a little history on skateboarding. Basically, people have been skateboarding for as long as there's been wheels around. Because back in the 1920's, they used to make soap box carts that they would actually take old roller skate wheels and put them on wood and they make carts that were kind of scooter-ish. They had little handles on them, but those handles would fall off, and then all they would have left is a little piece of wood with wheels on it. And they would actually roll around on those, but not really even thinking of it as skateboarding being an actual activity. It wasn't until the early Sixties, when people started surfing a lot more and sort of associated those two things together. And that kind of brought skateboarding back out again. And then they did the same thing. They took roller skate wheels and putting them on pieces of wood and the just cruising down. And then, people got more and more into that and they actually called it "sidewalk surfing" at the time. And then basically a group of people in Venice Beach really popularized it by just throwing a lot of style and creativity into it. And that was Tony Alva was probably one of the biggest people to bring skateboarding to the mainstream, because he became popular in Hollywood and made movies and traveled around the world skateboarding and did a lot of the first stuff in back yard swimming pools and really helped put skateboarding on the map. Along with people like Stacy Peralta and his crew in the early Seventies. That really helped it get on the map. And then it just sort of evolved out of those groups of people and skateboard companies that they started in the early Seventies, and which some of them are still going to this day. And that's a little bit of history on skateboarding."