Origins“Skateboarding is not a crime.” When the slogan, borrowed from a 1964 article in the New York Times, first appeared on a sticker stuck to the bottom of a skateboard in the 1980s, it was both a manifesto and a plea.
With skaters flooding the streets to practice their art, skateboarding had become much more visible, and not just to potential future skaters. Upstanding citizens, outraged by the skaters’ fearless tricks, didn’t hesitate to call the police to stop what they saw as a disruptive problem.
Today, two decades into the twenty-first century, it can be hard to believe that this dynamic ever existed. Skateboarding is no longer in the comfortable shadows of a counterculture accessible only to the in crowd.
With millions of skaters around the globe, televised contests (including the Olympics), popular video games, thousands of skate parks, certified instructors, and even specialized schools (like Bryggeriets Gymnasium in Sweden, a high school where skateboarding is taught as a formal subject), it’s easy to see that skateboarding has become socially acceptable.
At least to some extent.
Though skaters have begrudgingly allowed the general public a glimpse into their world, the lifestyle still holds a certain mystique, with its own codes, customs, keys, and traditions. Any attempt to understand and explain it all is destined to fail.
First of all, there is the very nature of skateboarding: while it resembles a sport in its emphasis on risk-taking and getting back up to try again, the culture of rebellion that sprang up around skateboarding in the early 1970s is a world away from the traditional trappings of sports, with its coaches, practices, and requirements to perform under standardized conditions.
The act of riding a skateboard is just one small part of a diverse artistic tapestry. Tug that thread, and you’ll quickly begin to unravel a vast web of connected practices. For example, skateboarding is defined in part by the grace of its movement (“style”), which itself is influenced by the graphic arts, avant-garde fashion, and a unique musical culture, all of which proudly come together to create performance art—in the situationist sense—designed for consumption. Ever since the first magazines and VCRs, skateboard culture has chosen to propagate along its own channels, relying on self-produced videos rather than broadcast TV, and it has long been a proponent of the DIY ethos. It is difficult to imagine traditional sports encouraging such an imaginative, freeform approach.
In short, skateboarding has built up a culture of its own from scratch, brick by brick. But how, exactly?
This book attempts to retrace its unlikely odyssey, a tale of glory days and hard times, feast and famine. It was written for everyone—from pros to complete novices—to explain how something that was once a children’s toy became a recognized sport, blazing a trail out of the shadows and into the spotlight without allowing the influence of the masses to water it down completely.
In the early days, however, no one could have imagined it would eventually reach such heights. To find the “Big Bang” that set things in motion, we need to go all the way back to the seventeenth century, when Belgian inventor John Joseph Merlin—who also designed prototypes for wheelchairs, scales, and watches—created the forebears of today’s roller skates. He would put them on and parade around a grand salon while playing the violin, pausing only to admire himself in an immense mirror. This was the first recorded attempt to put a human being on wheels, albeit rudimentary ones.
From this point on, the origin story is peppered with discoveries, experiments, and makeshift contraptions all converging toward something much more exciting. In the 1930s, the Skooter Skate, a sort of half-scooter, half-skateboard, hinted at the irrepressible urge to surf the pavement. On May 14, 1959, American inventor Albert C. Boyden filed the first patent for his Child’s Coaster, which had all the components of a rudimentary skateboard: a deck plus four wheels attached to movable axles held taut by a spring. That same year, coincidentally or otherwise, the
Los Angeles Times reported that six college students had been injured on campus while racing down hills on a “skateboard”—the first recorded use of the word. That article was also the first to link skateboarding with vagrancy and included a call to ban the fiendishly dangerous object.
Though skateboards had only just been invented, the verdict was already in—skateboarding was now, indeed, a crime.
But this chilly reception did not stop it from finding its niche. In the early 1960s, Boyden joined forces with John Humphrey to market a proto-board known as the Humco Surfer, and Roller Derby launched the first skateboard to achieve widespread commercial success.
Surfers immediately saw the appeal, riding these rolling boards to relieve their boredom when there were no waves. Larry Stevenson published the first ad for a skateboard in Surf Guide Magazine and created his own brand, Makaha, in 1963.
When skateboarding first made a splash in the 1960s, it set off a little ripple of public infatuation. The swell even washed up on French shores as a very brief trend in 1964, when pro surfer Jim Fitzpatrick brought a dozen boards to hand out on his tour to Paris and Biarritz.
Back in the United States, every good little boy and girl got a Roller Derby for Christmas, and effervescent youth idol Patti McGee was photographed doing a handstand on a skateboard for the cover of
LIFE magazine—a gymnastic pose with little resemblance to modern skateboarding tricks.
Already, the toy was beginning to develop a vague aura of nonconformity.
Then Herbie Fletcher, legendary surfer and patriarch of the Fletcher family, started something new in 1964. One of his buddies took a picture of him skating in an empty swimming pool he had come across in Pasadena, California. At the time, no one thought twice about the snapshot—not even Herbie really paid any attention.
As it turned out, they should have.
By the late 1960s, children had moved on to the next fad.
Some predicted the demise of the cheap sidewalk surfing toy, which was difficult to maneuver and didn’t roll well. But in reality, though no one realized it at the time, the story of skateboarding had only just begun.
Copyright © 2025 by Morgan Bouvant and Sébastien Carayol. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
