Skateboarding was the boom within the boom. Except it was actually bigger. By the numbers, skateboarding blew surfing out of the water, with 50 million skateboards reportedly sold worldwide during the first half of the 1960s, compared to perhaps a million or two surfboards. Here was a sport that arrived with every possible teen-market advantage. The board itself was cheap, and could be ridden anywhere, in any kind of dry-weather conditions. It was functional—skateboarding got you there a lot ...
Chapter 4:
Ten-Year Boom
- Gidget the All-Powerful /
- The Rebel Next Door /
- Hobie vs Velzy vs the IRS /
- Better Surfing Through Chemistry /
- Summer on the Inside /
- Surf Fashion, Lightly Salted /
- Surfing the Newsstand /
- Process of Elimination /
- Oil City Showdown /
- The Jazz Stylings of Phil Edwards /
- Technicolor Surf Boom /
- Heroes and Villains /
- Blackball Blues /
- Dick Dale, Destroyer of Amps /
- Surfing in Five-Part Harmony /
- Tokyo to Tel Aviv /
- Flight of the Larrikin /
- Bob Evans Means Business /
- Midget Wins It All /
- But Will it Play in New York? /
- Houses of the Holy /
- We Own the Sidewalks /
- Beautiful from any Angle /
- Duke's Big Contest /
- Can You Handle the Penetrator? /
- Girls, Don't Panic! /
- David Nuuhiwa Walks on Water /
- An Invincible Summer /
We Own the Sidewalks
Skateboarding, at first, was nothing more than surfing on land. Skaters wore the exact same Levis, logo T-shirts, and Pendletons as surfers. Pushing authenticity to the limit, they even rode shoeless—the gnarled black-soled feet of the dedicated skater were a bane of suburban mothers coast to coast.