When I was nine or maybe ten years old, I can remember my mother getting extremely mad at me when she had found out that I had mounted my old metal strap-on roller skates to a flat piece of wood and was trying to use it as a sidewalk surfboard. 

My friends at the time, Keith S. and Richard L., and I would go up Ketchum to  where they were building duplexes and basically steal a board and cut it into three pieces and mount our strap-on skates to the bottom of the board.  They were so horribly balanced and the skates themselves were of metal and loose around the bearings that made it extremely hard to skate on the sidewalk.  They did a little better in the streets but our streets were shot and chipped, which means that they were gravel and tar, so they were lumpy as well and you couldn’t ride them for very long because you would hit a gap in the side walk or a small pot hole in the street and you’d go flying off your board. 

 I can’t remember which one of us it was that got the first commercial skateboard, but I do remember all of us taking turns and riding it.  We thought that we had found utopia with this new board we could stay on for longer periods of time and make turns. We couldn’t do that with our homemade skateboards. Eventually all of us had our own boards and we would go to Charjean Elementary School’s parking lot and ride them in the big parking lot there, which was much smoother than our streets. Eventually, I think we all lost interest in it because we were all starting to play baseball and other things at that time, which would’ve been around 1965.

 I think it was when the United States seemed to lose interest in sidewalk surfing as well but, as my wife always says, if you wait long enough what was old will be new again. 

For some reason, in the 1970’s, sidewalk surfing on your skateboards seemed to find a new popularity and grew   

slowly into an actual sport.  People were actually getting paid to ride skateboards. They had teams and everybody would go to actual skateboard parks and watch them.  That was the birth of what is now extreme sports in the United States.  Who knew that this fad that was started in the early sixties would still be around today?  Looking online, I can see that skateboards or, as we called them, sidewalk surfboards can cost almost as much as a car did when sidewalk surfing was first invented.  No one knows exactly who invented it because it seemed to kind of be simultaneously springing up all over California and covered the United States almost immediately with this fad.  They even made it a centerpiece in the three Back to the Future movies in the 1980’s and even made a futuristic sidewalk surfboard that could hover, AKA the hover board.

I just can’t believe that during the long hot Memphis summers, we had so much fun with a piece of board and some strap-on roller skates and now it has become so popular and so high tech with today’s young people.  Do you remember the days that all of us were trying to learn to skate with those horrible metal strap-on skates.  Now try to remember that and picture it with one skate fastened to the bottom of a wooden plank and try to skate with that.  Yes, you’re right, it’s almost impossible to do it but we loved it. It was a wonder we didn’t kill ourselves or break our necks or something. I know we had scrapes and bruises and cuts all over us from sidewalk surfing because we were young boys that didn’t wear kneepads or helmets. Oh OK, no one had really invented pads and helmets or anything for roller skating in those days. I just thought it would be better if it sounded like we were more macho than we really were.  It really was a wonderful time when we were growing up, wasn’t it. Wish I could go back in time for real.