^Thanks for the info! I gave up skating when I moved from Texas to Ohio in '94. But I do it every now and then on my daughter's board and have entertained her once or twice by falling HARD into the street and driveway! The OP has an awesome board and I WISHED I had thought about saving my boards! The really good ones were over $100 even back then!
The OP's original description, and your experiences, brought back some deep memories of skating board surfing.... In the early 1960's, I built my first skateboard from a rough fencing plank and the front and rear halves of the old steel roller skates that clamped on the bottom of your leather shoes and tighten with a skate key... In his dry land farm shop, my dad had a flexible cable hooked on the end of a 1/2 hp. old evaporative cooler motor and then a wire wheel brush on the other. I took the brush and removed all the rough splintery surface from both sides of the fencing plank that I cut to shape with a dozen blades of a hand coping saw and a coarse file. The grain pattern came in perfect center on the best side of the board to reveal of a 3" wide and 5" long shape of a candle flame....
The small town's local bank had just moved into their new building that had two new things the old main street stores didn't have: 1. A brand new continuously poured sidewalk 12' wide and the length of a tennis court with a flowing dip where it went in front of the Volunteer Fire House. Even with the steel roller skate wheels, the ride was silk smooth and lasted long enough to feel the air passing your face. 2. The bank's "modern" architecture had a plate glass front. From 8' high, it ran down to within an inch above the new sidewalk.
Across from the bank was one of 3 "mom & pop" grocery stores with their old meat counter where purchases were weighed on public scales, wrapped in white butcher-paper, and tied with cotton string. The owner knew my folks and grandparents. One Saturday after the bank closed, the owner came out of his store, stood and watched several of us using the new sidewalk, and took a look at my skateboard. He said,
"I've got two grandchildren. Could you make one of these for each one of them if I pay you?"
I floated home with the pride of little kid's first accomplishment!! And, one that was going to make me some money! With one new skateboard painted fire engine red, and the other painted royal blue, I delivered them a few weeks later. Soon, after this accomplishment, the bank and the local editor of the small town newspaper who's printing office was across the street from the bank, and next door to the grocery store, were stressed-out seeing half a dozen kids skating so close to the plate glass wall.. Even though a
loud skateboard-meets-plate glass bang could be heard now and then, nothing ever broke. But, they soon put out a notice that skateboarding in front of the bank's large plate glass front was "Off Limits" So, back to the short runs on the local public school campus's concrete tennis court halves and the tree-root-humps of cracked old residential street sidewalks.....
Thanks for the memories,
