June 29, 2015 • 43 mins
Since skateboarding arrived in the 1950s, women like Patti McGee, Peggy Oki and Elissa Steamer have proven that skating like a girl isn't second-rate. Cristen and Caroline shred the history of women in skateboarding and how it evolved from a gender-neutral California pastime into a nearly boy-exclusive subculture.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom never told you from House top
boards dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline, and we're going to talk about
skateboarding and first things First, Caroline, skateboarding terrifies me. Well, Kristen,
(00:26):
I agree, but I have no natural balance, so really
anything that requires me to balance on or around anything
is vaguely terry, including walking, uh, running, standing, those things
are also quite difficult for me. I did grow up
next door though, too, two boys who were super into skating,
Like they were out day and night all the time
(00:48):
on their skateboards, and we had in our neighborhood this huge,
terrifying hill. It was, you know, hard enough to walk up,
but imagine like skating down that hill, and that they
would do that all the time. And they tried to
get me on the skateboard, but my like my physical
being would only allow me to sit on the skateboard.
(01:08):
I couldn't. I was too scared to even try to stand. Yeah,
I gave skateboarding a very brief whirl in my younger
days and quickly landed directly on my But I think
that's the scientific word for it. And uh, and it,
and it really jostled me. And I'm a little embarrassed
(01:29):
the degree to which I am bodily harm risk averse.
And I've never really taken a chance since. So, I mean,
I think this could be perhaps a good opportunity for
us to try to skateboard right now. I mean we could. Yeah,
let's bring these mics on the road. Let's take these
(01:49):
mics on the road. You're ready, let's do it. Okay,
So Caroline and I are outside bro outside the podcast studio. Oh,
Caroline's just nodding. I'm just nodding. Yeah, we're about to
do our own stunts. Yeah, I bet you didn't know
that we do our own stunts for the podcast. I
didn't know we do our own stunts for the podcast.
(02:10):
And uh, we're standing next to a skateboard. It's a
real skateboard, listener, genuine, a genuine skateboard. And I took
my shoes off because I guess that's how you do this, right. Yeah,
we're in California especially, Okay, but we're not. But we're
going to try to be genuine, just like a skateboard,
(02:31):
all right. So I'm gonna just try to do this,
Caroline all right. Here we go. Um, this is just
for the podcast. Oh I'm rolling. Oh okay, I don't
(03:01):
need to. Like Now that I'm actually on it, everything
in my body is like, don't do it. And I
think that I know what if I just do it
and I keep my my other foot on the ground
the whole time, that's fine. I'm standing up right, you're
doing all right. I'm now sitting on the skateboards just
like I did. But I was a sheer child. Here
(03:23):
we go, going, I'm leaning so that I totally move it.
I'm really going, you guys, here go, I'm gonna lean
to the left. There we go. I've got to get
shouldered into it when you're pushing yourself on the ground. Oyes,
Well that happened. Yes, you can say that that happened.
(03:46):
Do you say that happened? Caroline? Though, I am curious
about something that you you teased me with before this podcast.
You're like, hey, I've got skateboard pet stories. Yeah. I
wish that I could stay that I put my dog
on a skateboard, because that would be one cool dog.
That dog would therefore be cooler than I am. But
(04:07):
I combined my love of my dogs and taking them
on walks with my fear of standing on a skateboard.
So I took my my neighbor friends board and sat
on it and then had my dogs dragged me like
a chariot. Caroline, you must paint a more vivid visual
picture for me. What kind of dogs are we talking? Okay,
so we're talking. They were blonde Lab retriever mixes. I
(04:28):
know some people call them yellow labs. I prefer blonde. Um.
But yeah, they had they had a one had a
pink leash, one had a purple leash. Sophie and Molly
and I would sit on the board and my and
my shorts and my little T shirt and and get
pulled like the non skateboarding goddess that I was. Sounds
like a real girl's night out. Ladies on the town,
(04:52):
that's right, Absolutely, ladies on the town, slash in the neighborhood,
not leaving the neighborhood, Ladies on the driveway. Right. But no,
enough about me and my my blonde animals. I want
to I want to learn how did how did you
get the idea to talk about this today, Kristen, Caroline,
I've actually been thinking about women in skateboarding for a
(05:13):
while ever since I ran across uh photos of the
original Betty as she's called Patty McGee. Cool lady, really
cool lady, and we're going to talk about her in
the podcast. And she was some some site her as
the first technically professional female skateboarder, and she also made
(05:34):
the cover of Life magazine and I got really into
her biography. UM a little while back, actually made a
stuff mom Never Told You her Story video and thank
you and that host I feel like the host in
that episode she was she was really onto something. She's
a little antagonistic always with her guests. Um, but Patty
(05:56):
was able to get through it somehow. What kind of
skate tricks? Why you doing? Aside from just cutting up
the asphalt, we were just kind of figuring things out,
so we would still do things like three sixties and
one eight and five, hanging ten relies, nose wheelie's foot
over foot, not to mention my signature move, which was
doing a handstand on my skateboard. And then not long ago,
(06:19):
I read this article in Wired magazine by skateboarder turned
programmer Catherine Sierra, who was sort of not I don't
want to stay taking on because she wasn't being combative
directly to Rodney Mullen, but questioning this premise that Wired
had put forth earlier. Of Weather also pro skateboarder Rodney
(06:42):
Mullen could revolutionize the tech industry because he came out
with his ted talk called popanali and innovate, and his
whole idea is sort of taking the ethos of the
skateboarding culture subculture, I should say, and applying it to
tech innovation, which Siara talks about at the heart of
(07:02):
it is a great idea, but she also cringes at
the idea of what she calls lionizing the sexist culture
of skateboarding and applying it to the sexist culture in
Silicon Valley. Yeah, because when you remove any type of
sexism or sex divisions in skating, I mean, it seems
(07:25):
like a great idea innovation, a casual, really fun culture
that's inclusive mainly of one type of person. Um. You know,
people sharing their tricks, sharing their skills, teaching each other,
trading ideas. That all sounds great, that could inspire any industry.
Let's be open, let's trade ideas. But then you know,
(07:46):
when she brings up the whole aspect of well, skating
kind of became this gender exclusive pastime that was really marketed,
i mean on purpose marketed to teen boys, and that
made the culture very sort of a verse to anyone
who was different. That's not such a great model for
(08:08):
the tech industry. Yeah, I mean it also opened my
eyes to how we take for granted today that skateboarding
is a male dominated subculture. Although it's now getting so
much attention and funding from companies as mainstream is Nike,
that's it might not even be so much of a
subculture anymore. But Sierra points out, how, hey, when I
(08:29):
started skating, it was not always that way. So Caroline,
whenever I hear like something gender wise that we take
for granted wasn't always that way, that always sets off
a sminty light bulb in my head. I think there
actually is like a corner of my brain now that
is devoted to stuff I'm never told you light up. Yeah,
(08:50):
I have a little easy bacu and light that goes
on and it kind of buzzes and it like vaguely
smells like brownies like whenever it happens. Now, I know,
I'm so hungry all the time. So we did some
digging and found some history, some skateboarding history and skateboarding
his story. That's right, And we're going to start it
(09:13):
off with a really optimistic, positive, wonderful quote by first
Betty Patty McGee. She says, I myself think that skateboarding
is just as much for girls as it is for boys.
That sounds really promising. She told that to Skateboarding magazine
in nineteen sixty five. She was like the cover girl
for that, for that? Is she right? That's right, she
was the very first woman on the cover of Skateboarding magazine. Well,
(09:35):
as we'll see, it definitely did have some more egalitarian
roots than it would have later on. But let's talk
about where skating came from. It was really born in
around the nineteen fifties some surfers, basically Frankenstein together a
skateboard out of roller skate wheels and a literal board. Caroline.
(09:56):
I tried to do that when I was a kid
with my rollerblade wheel lls and some old wood and
my parents garage. It did not go to his planned
How were you trying to adhere the wheels to the
wood nails, Caroline? Of course, were you nailing the whole
actual roller blade or just the wheels. I saw it
(10:16):
off the wheel panel from the boot and then nailed
it to this piece of what I found. Listen, friends,
when you're homeschooled, this is art class. Well it's also
like you know, who who can really pinpoint who invented
fire or who discovered fire first? No one, and and
(10:38):
so Kristen was one of many children myself not included,
who who discovered that you could put these wheels on
this piece of wood and use it for transportation. I
was doing it forty years late, but hey, I don't
know a for effort. Um. In nine nine though, roller
Derby skateboard hit the market, and that was kind of
the first mass marketed skateboard. And again it was basically
(11:02):
roller skate wheels on a wooden board. But this, I
mean this was called sidewalk surfing. This was surfers looking
for a way to continue their pastime, which you know,
was starting to be big at the same time, it's
starting to become a huge pastime for all types of Americans,
mainly Americans who live near water. Um, when there were
(11:22):
no waves and so therefore it was called sidewalk surfing.
Sidewalk surfing. I love how old school that is, Yeah,
you're going to go out sidewalk surfing and smoke some grass.
Watch out for the kids. What's up for thes my
concerned parent of nineteen nine. Well, you know, if you
were a concerned parent in nineteen fifty nine, you were
(11:43):
probably getting more concerned moving into the nineteen sixties, because
that's when skateboarding not just sidewalk surfing as a way
to surf when you can't actually get into the water.
That's when skateboarding hits mainstream pop culture. Yeah, in nineteen
sixty three, the first skateboard contest is held in her
most of California. And this is really when skateboarding is
(12:07):
the hot new fad. You have this rock and roll
duo named Jan and Dean. Those are two guys, by
the way, Jan and Dean who go on the Dick
Clark Show, Big deal. People not familiar with this huge,
huge deal, and old Dean pulls out a few simple
skate tricks on stage. I'm sure, I'm this was groundbreaking. Sure,
(12:29):
this was like the the equivalent of Elvis's pelvis. Yeah,
and parents were probably horrified. Look at how how not
so fast he's rolling across my television screen Dean Um. Yeah.
And then around the same time, ABC Wide World of
Sports broadcasts the skateboarding Championships. So like, that's how quickly
(12:52):
this enters the pop culture, uh universe. I mean, all
of a sudden, we have skateboarding championships from surfers putting
wheels on a board. Yeah, I mean I have a
feeling that this has to do with how, you know,
surfer culture was becoming more professionalized, getting more marketing attention.
Whenever there's a money spike, you always have you know,
(13:13):
media and marketers starting to skidder towards it. Um. Then
that we get to nineteen sixty five, and this is
it seems like simultaneously the climax and the denouement of
nineteen sixties skateboarding, because, as Skateboarding Magazine reports, it's almost
(13:35):
as if it died overnight. It was a huge thing
one day and then no more. And some of that
probably had to do with how skateboards were made at
the time and how nervous parents were about this new
fangled side walk surfing, right, I mean, they did have
(13:56):
clay wheels, which did make it dangerous. We get in
nineteen sixties six the short film called Devil's Toy, which
sounds like it was the skateboarding equivalent of reefer madness,
perhaps um, warning of the dangers of skateboarding. Yeah, it's
probably about how you know, you'll ride your Devil's toy
to buy some reefer mad I know, I know you'll
(14:20):
go mad. You'll you'll jump out of a window on
your skateboard, just like Helen. Hunh, that's like Helen. And
although that was PCP okay. Well, in the nineteen seventies,
despite the fact that people had kind of assumed that
this whole skateboarding thing was dying, we do see some
technological advancements, both for the wheels and the boards themselves. Um.
(14:44):
In nineteen seventy two, Frank Nasworthy invents You're a Thane wheels,
which makes the whole deal a little bit more sturdy. Yeah,
And then you have surfers coming up again, inspiring more
radical styles of skating. And in the nineteen seventy you
have the first professional skaters really gaining popularity and showing
(15:04):
off crazy new techniques during the contest that are that
they're able to do because of these new things like
the euthane wheels. And then in nineteen for instance, you
have a guy named Alan Gelf whom people nicknamed Ali,
who invented a little something called the Ali and uh,
(15:25):
and so it seems like, oh, it's boom time for
skating again. Whoa. You have these skate parks that are
being built, but at the same time you have insurance
companies saying, oh, you want to invite people out to
your park to skateboard and possibly hurt themselves on their
Devil's toys while you're gonna have to pay up. Yeah.
(15:46):
And so with insurance rate spiking and the parks closing,
suddenly skating is forced underground. And around the same time
that it's forced underground, it's also becoming associated with this
new fangled punk music. And so it is becoming associated
with this more aggressive punk and let's be honest, more
(16:08):
masculine subculture. And in the nineteen eighties though, we do
see a bit of a resurgence with those old VDSS
tapes in the VCRs where skaters can record themselves doing
tricks and then spread it out as well as far
as VHS tape can go. Yeah, I mean, and that
really revived this culture and sort of made it into
(16:29):
what street skating is today, And I mean, it's just
it's just like the old school effect of social media
and the internet, and um, not only could these guys
record themselves share their tricks, and then that sort of
spreads these new tricks all around. That also allows them
to more proactively seek out sponsorships and the whole thing
(16:52):
really gets underway again with a little help from technology. Yeah,
and in the ninety nineties we again see skate skating
go pretty mainstream with ESPNS, X games, and then suddenly
it's it's cool. Yes, it's still a subculture. Yes it's
still associated with like outside the mainstream kids, punk music,
(17:14):
all that stuff, but it becomes so cool thanks to
the X games that all of a sudden, advertisers are
using the skater, the image of the skater to appeal to,
you know, all the kids these days. They were using
it to sell everything from soft drinks to clothing lines
and everything in between. I'm pretty sure I remember seeing
advertisements for the now non existent Coca Cola product called
(17:39):
Surge that was very like skateboarder. Are you extreme, kids?
Is it? I drank so much Surge as a child,
so much so that when I watched the Futurama episode
where Fried drinks a ton of slurm. It just reminded
me of my childhood. But I again, like, let's say
hammer home here that I was the opposite of an
extreme child. Whatever you were pounding that serge, you know,
(18:03):
getting leashing up Sophie and Molly cruising down the driveway,
no one could stop you. No one could stop me
except the bump on the end of the driveway, at
which time I inevitably fell off. Well, Caroline, we just
rolled through like fifty years of skateboarding history. We did
not mention a single lady. We didn't mention all those
(18:25):
single ladies. But we'll find all those single skating ladies
right after a quick break. We now want to go
back though and fill in those blanks, because that's sort
of the the overarching history of skateboarding and culture. But
(18:47):
a lot of people might not realize that there were
a lot of women skating, particularly in those early pre
seventies days of skating when it was more about freestyle
and there were skate parks and it wasn't so much
focused on street and punk and counterculture. Really yeah, well,
Michael Brooke, who's the publisher of Concrete Wave Magazine was
(19:09):
quoted in huck as saying when sidewalks surfing hit big
in the nineteen sixties, both males and females skated, and
he points out that the population did skew more towards
the guys. But he points out, you had Patty McGee
doing a handstand on her board, which made the cover
of Life magazine in nineteen sixty five, and that remains
(19:31):
one of the most iconic skateboarding images of all time.
But let's fill in before we get to Patty McGee
on our timeline. Let's go a year before that Life
magazine image and talk about Lynda Benson. You have handsome
surfboards producing a skateboard named after her. It was the
Lynda Benson Model, and it was the first skateboard with
(19:52):
a female namesake. And a fellow surfer talking about Lynda
Benson said she had incredible wave judgment and just the
waves apart. And here's this little she's like five ft two,
she's blonde, has a page boy haircut, very Julie Andrews,
but blonde and on a surfboard. Um, And she's obviously
so cool and so acceptably cool that not only is
(20:16):
she popular, but she's popular to the point where a
company is creating a skateboard or a sidewalk surfboard in
her honor. I wish I had good wave judgment. Just
a side note that sounds like some like like a
really really valuable life scale. I feel like I wouldn't
run into walls as often as I do. Oh god,
I know me too. I run into door frames all
the time. I have bruises on me. I don't know
(20:38):
where they come from. Um, but now I did go
somewhere in my mind when I read that quote about
how she has incredible wave of judgment, and I immediately
started to feel like a panic wave, A wave of
panic come over me, imagining myself on a surfboard like
in in a wave, and then how I would just
be hitting my head on things in the water, and
(21:00):
but anyway, not good. Then he came Then he came back,
and you had just walked into the door. It turned
I woke up on the floor. And then around the
same time, you have Wendy Bear, who was the only
female member of the original Macaha Skateboard Club. She was
sponsored by those guys, but later she was also a
member of the original Hobie Skateboards and surf team, and
Hobi is a big name. It also comes up when
(21:22):
you read about Patty McGee. Yeah, so that brings us
to n when Patty McGee is crowned figuratively as the
first Betty of skateboarding. And Patty, like Linda and Wendy
before her, was a surfer and she got turned onto
(21:43):
skating when she was in California. She was surfing. There
are a couple of different stories about how she ended
up skating. One is that her brother sort of frankenstein
a skateboard for them and she tried it out that way.
The other is that she was doing an in store
promotion and the guy who was supposed to demonstrate the
(22:05):
skateboard didn't show, so they were like, well Patty, and
she hopped up and skateboarded for the first time in
front of people. Um. But the fascinating thing, if you
aren't familiar with so called freestyle skateboarding, which was what
people were doing at this time, if you watch videos
and even just see stills of Patty McGee, she she's
(22:27):
usually doing handstands. She's doing all sorts of tricks that
we wouldn't think of today, there were no half pipes
for her to drop into. So in addition to her handstands,
she would walk the deck so like walk up the
board as it's rolling. She would do three sixties. She
would do wheelies, nose wheelies, of course, yeah, all sorts
(22:48):
of things like it was a lot of You would
basically just go down, go down a hill while performing
all these tricks, sometimes while doing a handstand, which again
my like, I feel like my evolutionary hypersensitive bodily harm
aversion is really triggered by the thought of that um.
And she was sponsored by Hobie's Skateboard and toward the country,
(23:10):
and because she hit it so big so quickly, she
usually is cited as like the first pro skateboarder. And
it helped that she did make that cover of Skateboarder
magazine in which she looks just just so, I don't know,
so effortless as she's skating, when she's skating by a pool,
she's wearing some some aqua shorts and a floral crop top.
(23:34):
Love it, I know. Well, so she becomes such a
great image of skate culture. She she ends up appearing
on Johnny Carson. She goes on to win first place
at the National Skateboard Championship Girls Division. And then on
May four, that's when she lands on the cover of
Life magazine doing her signature hand stand move and again,
(23:57):
I mean talk about effortless, like she just looks it
does and even look like there's a skateboard under her hands.
It just kind of looks like she's doing like a
cartwheeler or whatever. And effortless again, and she said her
very lovely like white pants, which is another thing that
I am terrified of. Yeah, it's another thing that I
can't do. Um. She only went pro for about a
(24:17):
year really, until the skating fat overall kind of died
down in the mid sixties. She also after that ended
up working in snow skiing, turquoise mining, and leather smith thing.
So she has a gill of all trades. Yeah, and
a fun anecdote about her When she was touring around,
(24:38):
um with Hobie, you'll notice too that a lot of
times skateboarders would do it barefoot. I mean that was
part of just like California surfer culture, but um, you
didn't have like skateboard shoes. And she was touring in
New York at one point and a taxi driver refused
(24:58):
to let her in because she's just like walking around
still barefoot, like oh what hey, oh sorry, I'm from California.
I don't get this. I don't get this town. Um.
But in two thousand and ten, she became the first
female inductee into the International Association of Skateboard Company Skateboard
Hall of Fame, and she and her daughter launched a
(25:20):
skateboard line. I believe it's called the Original Betty Skateboard Company. Yeah,
but I mean I want to know more about her
turquoise mining personally. But seriously, yeah, I have I have
some orders I can put in. Um. But moving into
the mid seventies, you know, skating, like we said, it
didn't just die. It just wasn't as mainstream as it
used to be. We get Peggy Okey. She was the
(25:42):
only female member of the Z Boys, the infamous Z
Boys a k a. The original Zephyr skateboard team. She
had an incredible personal style, but she really kind of
had a had a hard time from all sides in
terms of her skating career. She said, some of the
girls didn't like the fact that I skated like a guy,
(26:03):
so they protested me to the judges, and one of
the judges said, I skated better than some of the guys.
And it's so fascinating to compare photos of Peggy Oky
skating versus Patty McGee, who was only you know, skating
like maybe at most like ten years before. Because Okie
has this long hair, she's in ripped jeans, she's you know,
(26:26):
on the street, and it's it's a much grittier looking style.
And that's just how quickly this sport is evolving. And
those two, of course, we're not not the only women
skating at the time either. In fact, we heard from
Steph Mom Never Told You listener Cecilia, who shared a
(26:46):
story with us about her own mom, Michelle McNeil, who
picked up skateboarding as a hobby in the seventies and
like Peggy Oki, she was skating alongside the guys. My mom,
Michelle McNeil, found out about skateboarding when she started college
in ninet. She saw some guys skating on campus at
(27:07):
Long Beach City College in California, and again outside the
Belmont Olympic Pool, where there is a lot of concrete
to skate. The group hanging out by the pool was
rust Howell and his friends. They were really good. There
were a few girls around, but none of them actually skating.
Mom wanted to skate, not just watch. Soon after she
got her first skateboard and started learning tricks. They skated
(27:28):
everywhere they could. Mom had a car, so the guys
would pile in and go in search of vacant houses
with empty backyard pools. They would hop the fence and
skate the pools. If the cops came, she was the
first to the car so they could all race off.
Another friend, Herb Spitzer, was into downhill skating. Signal Hill
near Long Beach has a steep drop and a short
(27:49):
run off to the main street at the bottom. It's
scary but thrilling to try to skatetown skittered. Jim O'Mahoney
put on the Signal Hill speed run in seventy six
to see who could go down the fastest without crashing.
Skaters could either stand on their boards or life flat
on a new thing called a skate car. Guy grundy
(28:10):
one in nineteen seventy six and got his name in
the Guinness Book of World Records. Herb had been in
the first race and was racing again in nineteen seventy seven.
Mom found out that no girls had entered that first
year and thought there should be girls competing to My
grandpa owned a machine shop and he helped her make
a skate car. Another girl, Leslie Joe, rismand entered two.
(28:31):
They officially had a women's division of the race. Mom
became the first woman in history to skate downhill in
a contest observed by the Guinness Book of World Records. Unfortunately,
she crashed and Leslie Joe won the women's division. Mom
was not hurt in the crash, but it is pretty
spectacular to watch on film. It can be seen in
the documentary Signal Health Speed Run in nineteen seventy six.
(28:55):
Also in the late seventies, skate parks were popping up
all over. She frequent tend the Concrete Wave in Anaheim,
which was the first skate park in the southern California area,
as well as the Runway in Carson and Skatopean, Orange County.
At the skate parks, girls really had to hold their
own When waiting for your turn, you had to be
quick and aggressive or the guys would snake in front
(29:17):
of you. My mom has skated on and off since then,
and even now at fifty seven, rides her longboard in Honolulu, Hawaii.
She's still friends with her guy and others from the
old gang. She's an honorary member of the University of
Hawaii Women's skate club, the Wahini on Wheels, run by
Jenny Rees. I feel very lucky to have such an
(29:37):
inspirational and badass mom. Well, I love it. And so
while Michelle was out there honing her skills with her
skating hobby, there were some other really amazing role model
women doing this professionally. You've got Ellen Berryman, who started
skating in nineteen when she met a whole bunch of
skater dudes near her house, and she had actually started
(29:59):
out as a gymnast, which is a little bit different
from some of the women we've talked about who got
their start us surfers um. But also during this time
that Ellen is getting her start, remember that your athane
wheel had just been invented, which made things a little
bit sturdier, a little bit safer, better than the clay wheel.
And in a Q and A with Longboard Girls crew,
Ellen said that the most important thing that got carried
(30:22):
over from this time period was the fact that everyone
had started to skate in pools, empty pools, obviously with
their earthane wheeled skateboards, and that carried over into vertical skating.
And so she says, the street skating we see today
is of course a natural evolution from the seventies. Yeah.
And Ellen O'Neill is someone often cited as a leading
(30:46):
lady of the freestyle scene. She was an early seventies
So Cal freestyle sensation and I do love looking at
photos of her, and we'll definitely have some posted or
at least linked to and the stuff I've never told
you dot com podcast posts so you can see them
as well, because I mean talk about a combination of
acrobatics and skateboarding that really drives home the kind of
(31:12):
I mean, like legit tricks that people were doing before
they had again, before they had half pipes and and
things like that that we would normally think of with
tricks today. Yeah, and Ellen O'Neil, I love I love
reading about where these women got their start. She started
skating purely as a way to get around and used
a skateboard on her paper route. That's fantastic. Yeah, and
(31:35):
she was such a freestyle sensation during that time that
she ended up working at a San Diego skate park
in the late seventies as one of their on site pros.
So she wasn't just like pushed aside of some you know,
some girl to be forgotten about. She worked as a
professional skater to help other kids. And when it comes
to longboarding, which interestingly today more girls have been gravitating
(31:59):
toward that because as it has traditionally been a little
bit friendlier to lady skaters, who probably are cringing at
the use of the phrase lady skaters. Um, there's Eadie
Robinson who was alongboard star in her day, So clearly
women can skateboard. Yeah, we've been skateboarding since skateboards were
first invented. Yeah, because it wasn't a thing. I mean,
(32:21):
why wouldn't women skate exactly, And so there was that
pre gendered era of skateboarding. So let's take a closer
look though, at how skateboarding really turned so male dominated. Yeah,
and this is going back to Huck magazine and article
(32:42):
by Tetsuhiko Indo, which is really interesting and really depressing
all at the same time. To sort of learn about
that evolution of skating being this sort of like wonderful
but still kind of countercultural, egalitarian sports slash activity back
in the day to being something that was just geared
(33:03):
towards the drinkers of surge, the drinkers of surds Um,
And we touched on it earlier. I mean, it has
a lot to do with a dwindling number of skate
parks and more niche marketing to guys skaters. And I mean,
I think that that the skate park factor is so
huge when you think about the fact that boys might
(33:24):
be it more liberty than girls to just roam the
streets and find, you know, an empty parking lot or
an abandoned building, whatever kind of space that might be
deemed too dangerous for a girl to go out and do. Yeah.
And so the fact that skateboarding culture merged with that
punk culture, uh indo rights, it's sort of changed the image.
(33:46):
It got a lot more aggressive, a lot more underground.
And Cindy Whitehead, who is a former pro skateboarder and
now board designer and sports stylist, experienced this first hand.
She said quotes, skateparks started dying off, and once that happened,
we didn't have sanctioned contests, We had backyard ramps and
(34:06):
pools which we originally started in. So skateboarding went back
underground and the industry went dormant for many years. So
I mean across the board. If you were interested in
skateboarding at that time, you had to be really persistent
in order to make it happen, in order to keep skating,
find spaces to skate, find people to skate with. But
(34:26):
more and more and more, if you were a girl
interested in skateboarding, there were fewer and fewer acceptable spaces
for you to do that. Yeah, and it was well,
And it was also getting to the point where if
you were a girl who walked up to a bunch
of guys skating and you said like, hey, I want
to join in, what are you doing? You might just
get laughed out of the pool, the swimming pool, because
(34:47):
it was by then it was starting to become so
entrenched as a guy thing or a dude thing that
girls who expressed any interest in it, it was like,
why this is that you're not welcome here? This is
duo dangerous for you. Yeah, And Catherine Sierra in that
Wired magazine article we talked about a little while ago,
talks about this in the nineties eighties, in particular, when
(35:09):
it comes to skate culture. She says that it devolved
from a vibrant, reasonably gender balanced community into an aggressively
narrow demographic of teen boys. And with this evolution of
skating and how it's becoming more of sort of this
underground thing. We're moving away from the freestyle skating that
had been so popular and that had been so open
(35:30):
to girls and women, and suddenly, um, things like you know,
working on your footwork and flat tricks on pavement like
Patty McGee was so great at those are out. Street
skating is in, and girls are no longer considered real skaters.
It's sort of like the conversation that we have around
geek girls nowadays. Yeah, and girls in gaming, girls are
(35:51):
not real gamers, that whole real question coming up again
and again. Um. So from there we you know, we
mentioned the influence of VHS and you have guys recording
themselves and watching other guys do tricks and they're sharing in.
This culture is spreading and these dudes are really rebuilding
the industry. In the eighties and nineties, this is when
(36:12):
Tony Hawk and his pals really start to make an inroad,
and as it develops, the marketing starts to be focused
narrower and narrower onto specifically guys under eighteen, although of
course you do have exceptions. There is, for instance, Alyssa's Steamer,
known as the godmother of street skating. She was the
(36:36):
first pro street skater in the sense we think of
it today, and also a four time X Games gold medalists.
She has someone not to be messed with. Yeah, but
she was also the only female character that you could
be in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater video games. So it's like, well,
here is your one female idol or a mentor or
(36:57):
you know, role model that you get. You just get
the one, and I mean she's an awesome skater. But
it's like, oh, were there really no other girls skating
in the nineties? Not a lot? Yeah, no, definitely not
a lot. So by this point, then, sociologically speaking, skateboarding
has become not only a male dominated subculture, but girls
(37:18):
skating is almost a subculture within a subculture, which is
really interesting to think about too. So that was then,
you know, we're past the days of the VHS. Caroline. Well,
I don't know, maybe it's coming back just like a
cassette exactly who knows hanging out of those those VHS
as friends? So Caroline to borrow some VHS terminology. If
(37:40):
we fast forward to today, Um, you know, not only
do we have VHS, well no, no, we don't have
VHS anymore, but the Thrasher magazine is still around, and
we have the Internet. What's going on? Skateboard has become mainstream?
So has a gender balance been restored? No? Not really, No,
(38:04):
not really, even though more girls are skating, probably even
ever before. Yeah, and it's actually more girls internationally are skating. Yeah,
So Caroline, that pretty much covers skateboarding the past, But
in our next episode we need to talk about skateboarding
for women in the present and also rolling into the future.
(38:29):
And in the meantime, though, we want to hear from
listeners about their skateboarding experiences. Mom Stuff at how stuff
works dot Com is where you can email us. I
would loved to hear from any other listeners who have
a badass skateboarding mom like Michelle, or if you yourself
are a badass skateboarding mom, please email us, send us
(38:51):
pictures if you want to as well. Mom Stuff at
house Stuff works dot com again is email address. You
can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcasts or messages
on Facebook, and we got a couple of messages this
year with you. When we come right back from a
quick break. Well, I have a letter here from Nicole
(39:11):
in response to our man Caves episode. Uh subject line
lesbian response to man gives podcast so very straightforward love it.
Nicole says, I listened to your podcast about man caves
more than ready to raise my feminist flag in fury
and anger, but instead I found myself taking a different
perspective than before. With the perceived feminization of the workplace,
(39:35):
it's natural for men to want to masculinize the home,
even if most homes are already gender neutral by default.
That being said, I think the hyper masculine and expensive
man cave is unnecessary and if used as an escape, unhealthy.
I grew up in a family where the women had
craft rooms and the men had workshops. So if having
his own man cave is important to a man in
(39:56):
a heterosexual relationship, then his female companion deserves to have
a own equivalent as a married lesbian. I also want
to comment on She sheds my wife, and I decided
early on that having a private office for us to
use interchangeably is important, and that when in use, the
other is not allowed to enter. When we finally have kids,
they will not be allowed into the office either, which
(40:17):
I think is is pretty normal. And despite that both
of us being rather traditionally feminine, our home is still
very gender neutral, with the only indicator of our combined
girliness being the abundance of candles packed into every available space.
I can't imagine that our office or she should will
be anything other than a professional and polished area where
we can work in peace. As always, thank you for
(40:40):
all the hard work and research you both do. It's
helped make me a better and more open person. And
thank you Nikki. Sarah wrote us a letter subject line
my dad body. She writes, as soon as I heard
your podcast on dad Bods, I knew I had to
write in. I'm twenty one and going into my senior
year of college that has no fraternities or sororities. Since
(41:00):
the topic came up in the media, my friends can't
stop talking about it. My fitness obsessed and lesbian friends
don't get the appeal, but one of my roommates, who
as a boyfriend understands. She says, I love that he's fit,
but no, not more fit than me, and he'll raise
me to see who can eat more chicken wings. In
the spirit of disclosure, my dad himself doesn't have a
(41:21):
dad body. He's tall and skinny. But the guy I'm
currently interested in is the epitome of the term. He's
ever six ft tall and pushing to twenty, but it's
also a D three college athlete and is generally seen
as in shape and attractive. I asked my roommates if
they could think of a female equivalent of the dad body,
and one of them replied that I have it. I'm
(41:42):
about five seven and one twenty with a skinny waist
but wide hips. I have no visible muscle in my arms,
and tummy shure aren't town at all due to my
sporadic workout schedule and love of junk food. I'm just
lucky to have a quick metabolism, which enables me to
act like a guy who would normally get a dad
bought but still maintained physique of a quote unquote relatively
desirable college aged woman. I don't think this standard is
(42:05):
right or fair, but I had to write in and
tell you a little bit from a young adult perspective.
So thank you, Sarah. I love your letter, and um,
a chicken wing eating contest is the most romantic thing
I can imagine. So keep up that, Dad Bob. And
if you've got letters to send to us about Dad Bob, skateboarding,
(42:26):
She Sheds, or whatever's on your mind, Moms of a
House of Works dot com is where you can send
them and for links to all of our social media
as well as all of our blogs, videos and podcasts,
including this one with links to all of our skateboarding
her story sources. Head on over to Stuff Mom Never
Told You for more on this and thousands of other games.
(43:00):
Four
Welcome to stuff Mom never told you from House top
boards dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline, and we're going to talk about
skateboarding and first things First, Caroline, skateboarding terrifies me. Well, Kristen,
(00:26):
I agree, but I have no natural balance, so really
anything that requires me to balance on or around anything
is vaguely terry, including walking, uh, running, standing, those things
are also quite difficult for me. I did grow up
next door though, too, two boys who were super into skating,
Like they were out day and night all the time
(00:48):
on their skateboards, and we had in our neighborhood this huge,
terrifying hill. It was, you know, hard enough to walk up,
but imagine like skating down that hill, and that they
would do that all the time. And they tried to
get me on the skateboard, but my like my physical
being would only allow me to sit on the skateboard.
(01:08):
I couldn't. I was too scared to even try to stand. Yeah,
I gave skateboarding a very brief whirl in my younger
days and quickly landed directly on my But I think
that's the scientific word for it. And uh, and it,
and it really jostled me. And I'm a little embarrassed
(01:29):
the degree to which I am bodily harm risk averse.
And I've never really taken a chance since. So, I mean,
I think this could be perhaps a good opportunity for
us to try to skateboard right now. I mean we could. Yeah,
let's bring these mics on the road. Let's take these
(01:49):
mics on the road. You're ready, let's do it. Okay,
So Caroline and I are outside bro outside the podcast studio. Oh,
Caroline's just nodding. I'm just nodding. Yeah, we're about to
do our own stunts. Yeah, I bet you didn't know
that we do our own stunts for the podcast. I
didn't know we do our own stunts for the podcast.
(02:10):
And uh, we're standing next to a skateboard. It's a
real skateboard, listener, genuine, a genuine skateboard. And I took
my shoes off because I guess that's how you do this, right. Yeah,
we're in California especially, Okay, but we're not. But we're
going to try to be genuine, just like a skateboard,
(02:31):
all right. So I'm gonna just try to do this,
Caroline all right. Here we go. Um, this is just
for the podcast. Oh I'm rolling. Oh okay, I don't
(03:01):
need to. Like Now that I'm actually on it, everything
in my body is like, don't do it. And I
think that I know what if I just do it
and I keep my my other foot on the ground
the whole time, that's fine. I'm standing up right, you're
doing all right. I'm now sitting on the skateboards just
like I did. But I was a sheer child. Here
(03:23):
we go, going, I'm leaning so that I totally move it.
I'm really going, you guys, here go, I'm gonna lean
to the left. There we go. I've got to get
shouldered into it when you're pushing yourself on the ground. Oyes,
Well that happened. Yes, you can say that that happened.
(03:46):
Do you say that happened? Caroline? Though, I am curious
about something that you you teased me with before this podcast.
You're like, hey, I've got skateboard pet stories. Yeah. I
wish that I could stay that I put my dog
on a skateboard, because that would be one cool dog.
That dog would therefore be cooler than I am. But
(04:07):
I combined my love of my dogs and taking them
on walks with my fear of standing on a skateboard.
So I took my my neighbor friends board and sat
on it and then had my dogs dragged me like
a chariot. Caroline, you must paint a more vivid visual
picture for me. What kind of dogs are we talking? Okay,
so we're talking. They were blonde Lab retriever mixes. I
(04:28):
know some people call them yellow labs. I prefer blonde. Um.
But yeah, they had they had a one had a
pink leash, one had a purple leash. Sophie and Molly
and I would sit on the board and my and
my shorts and my little T shirt and and get
pulled like the non skateboarding goddess that I was. Sounds
like a real girl's night out. Ladies on the town,
(04:52):
that's right, Absolutely, ladies on the town, slash in the neighborhood,
not leaving the neighborhood, Ladies on the driveway. Right. But no,
enough about me and my my blonde animals. I want
to I want to learn how did how did you
get the idea to talk about this today, Kristen, Caroline,
I've actually been thinking about women in skateboarding for a
(05:13):
while ever since I ran across uh photos of the
original Betty as she's called Patty McGee. Cool lady, really
cool lady, and we're going to talk about her in
the podcast. And she was some some site her as
the first technically professional female skateboarder, and she also made
(05:34):
the cover of Life magazine and I got really into
her biography. UM a little while back, actually made a
stuff mom Never Told You her Story video and thank
you and that host I feel like the host in
that episode she was she was really onto something. She's
a little antagonistic always with her guests. Um, but Patty
(05:56):
was able to get through it somehow. What kind of
skate tricks? Why you doing? Aside from just cutting up
the asphalt, we were just kind of figuring things out,
so we would still do things like three sixties and
one eight and five, hanging ten relies, nose wheelie's foot
over foot, not to mention my signature move, which was
doing a handstand on my skateboard. And then not long ago,
(06:19):
I read this article in Wired magazine by skateboarder turned
programmer Catherine Sierra, who was sort of not I don't
want to stay taking on because she wasn't being combative
directly to Rodney Mullen, but questioning this premise that Wired
had put forth earlier. Of Weather also pro skateboarder Rodney
(06:42):
Mullen could revolutionize the tech industry because he came out
with his ted talk called popanali and innovate, and his
whole idea is sort of taking the ethos of the
skateboarding culture subculture, I should say, and applying it to
tech innovation, which Siara talks about at the heart of
(07:02):
it is a great idea, but she also cringes at
the idea of what she calls lionizing the sexist culture
of skateboarding and applying it to the sexist culture in
Silicon Valley. Yeah, because when you remove any type of
sexism or sex divisions in skating, I mean, it seems
(07:25):
like a great idea innovation, a casual, really fun culture
that's inclusive mainly of one type of person. Um. You know,
people sharing their tricks, sharing their skills, teaching each other,
trading ideas. That all sounds great, that could inspire any industry.
Let's be open, let's trade ideas. But then you know,
(07:46):
when she brings up the whole aspect of well, skating
kind of became this gender exclusive pastime that was really marketed,
i mean on purpose marketed to teen boys, and that
made the culture very sort of a verse to anyone
who was different. That's not such a great model for
(08:08):
the tech industry. Yeah, I mean it also opened my
eyes to how we take for granted today that skateboarding
is a male dominated subculture. Although it's now getting so
much attention and funding from companies as mainstream is Nike,
that's it might not even be so much of a
subculture anymore. But Sierra points out, how, hey, when I
(08:29):
started skating, it was not always that way. So Caroline,
whenever I hear like something gender wise that we take
for granted wasn't always that way, that always sets off
a sminty light bulb in my head. I think there
actually is like a corner of my brain now that
is devoted to stuff I'm never told you light up. Yeah,
(08:50):
I have a little easy bacu and light that goes
on and it kind of buzzes and it like vaguely
smells like brownies like whenever it happens. Now, I know,
I'm so hungry all the time. So we did some
digging and found some history, some skateboarding history and skateboarding
his story. That's right, And we're going to start it
(09:13):
off with a really optimistic, positive, wonderful quote by first
Betty Patty McGee. She says, I myself think that skateboarding
is just as much for girls as it is for boys.
That sounds really promising. She told that to Skateboarding magazine
in nineteen sixty five. She was like the cover girl
for that, for that? Is she right? That's right, she
was the very first woman on the cover of Skateboarding magazine. Well,
(09:35):
as we'll see, it definitely did have some more egalitarian
roots than it would have later on. But let's talk
about where skating came from. It was really born in
around the nineteen fifties some surfers, basically Frankenstein together a
skateboard out of roller skate wheels and a literal board. Caroline.
(09:56):
I tried to do that when I was a kid
with my rollerblade wheel lls and some old wood and
my parents garage. It did not go to his planned
How were you trying to adhere the wheels to the
wood nails, Caroline? Of course, were you nailing the whole
actual roller blade or just the wheels. I saw it
(10:16):
off the wheel panel from the boot and then nailed
it to this piece of what I found. Listen, friends,
when you're homeschooled, this is art class. Well it's also
like you know, who who can really pinpoint who invented
fire or who discovered fire first? No one, and and
(10:38):
so Kristen was one of many children myself not included,
who who discovered that you could put these wheels on
this piece of wood and use it for transportation. I
was doing it forty years late, but hey, I don't
know a for effort. Um. In nine nine though, roller
Derby skateboard hit the market, and that was kind of
the first mass marketed skateboard. And again it was basically
(11:02):
roller skate wheels on a wooden board. But this, I
mean this was called sidewalk surfing. This was surfers looking
for a way to continue their pastime, which you know,
was starting to be big at the same time, it's
starting to become a huge pastime for all types of Americans,
mainly Americans who live near water. Um, when there were
(11:22):
no waves and so therefore it was called sidewalk surfing.
Sidewalk surfing. I love how old school that is, Yeah,
you're going to go out sidewalk surfing and smoke some grass.
Watch out for the kids. What's up for thes my
concerned parent of nineteen nine. Well, you know, if you
were a concerned parent in nineteen fifty nine, you were
(11:43):
probably getting more concerned moving into the nineteen sixties, because
that's when skateboarding not just sidewalk surfing as a way
to surf when you can't actually get into the water.
That's when skateboarding hits mainstream pop culture. Yeah, in nineteen
sixty three, the first skateboard contest is held in her
most of California. And this is really when skateboarding is
(12:07):
the hot new fad. You have this rock and roll
duo named Jan and Dean. Those are two guys, by
the way, Jan and Dean who go on the Dick
Clark Show, Big deal. People not familiar with this huge,
huge deal, and old Dean pulls out a few simple
skate tricks on stage. I'm sure, I'm this was groundbreaking. Sure,
(12:29):
this was like the the equivalent of Elvis's pelvis. Yeah,
and parents were probably horrified. Look at how how not
so fast he's rolling across my television screen Dean Um. Yeah.
And then around the same time, ABC Wide World of
Sports broadcasts the skateboarding Championships. So like, that's how quickly
(12:52):
this enters the pop culture, uh universe. I mean, all
of a sudden, we have skateboarding championships from surfers putting
wheels on a board. Yeah, I mean I have a
feeling that this has to do with how, you know,
surfer culture was becoming more professionalized, getting more marketing attention.
Whenever there's a money spike, you always have you know,
(13:13):
media and marketers starting to skidder towards it. Um. Then
that we get to nineteen sixty five, and this is
it seems like simultaneously the climax and the denouement of
nineteen sixties skateboarding, because, as Skateboarding Magazine reports, it's almost
(13:35):
as if it died overnight. It was a huge thing
one day and then no more. And some of that
probably had to do with how skateboards were made at
the time and how nervous parents were about this new
fangled side walk surfing, right, I mean, they did have
(13:56):
clay wheels, which did make it dangerous. We get in
nineteen sixties six the short film called Devil's Toy, which
sounds like it was the skateboarding equivalent of reefer madness,
perhaps um, warning of the dangers of skateboarding. Yeah, it's
probably about how you know, you'll ride your Devil's toy
to buy some reefer mad I know, I know you'll
(14:20):
go mad. You'll you'll jump out of a window on
your skateboard, just like Helen. Hunh, that's like Helen. And
although that was PCP okay. Well, in the nineteen seventies,
despite the fact that people had kind of assumed that
this whole skateboarding thing was dying, we do see some
technological advancements, both for the wheels and the boards themselves. Um.
(14:44):
In nineteen seventy two, Frank Nasworthy invents You're a Thane wheels,
which makes the whole deal a little bit more sturdy. Yeah,
And then you have surfers coming up again, inspiring more
radical styles of skating. And in the nineteen seventy you
have the first professional skaters really gaining popularity and showing
(15:04):
off crazy new techniques during the contest that are that
they're able to do because of these new things like
the euthane wheels. And then in nineteen for instance, you
have a guy named Alan Gelf whom people nicknamed Ali,
who invented a little something called the Ali and uh,
(15:25):
and so it seems like, oh, it's boom time for
skating again. Whoa. You have these skate parks that are
being built, but at the same time you have insurance
companies saying, oh, you want to invite people out to
your park to skateboard and possibly hurt themselves on their
Devil's toys while you're gonna have to pay up. Yeah.
(15:46):
And so with insurance rate spiking and the parks closing,
suddenly skating is forced underground. And around the same time
that it's forced underground, it's also becoming associated with this
new fangled punk music. And so it is becoming associated
with this more aggressive punk and let's be honest, more
(16:08):
masculine subculture. And in the nineteen eighties though, we do
see a bit of a resurgence with those old VDSS
tapes in the VCRs where skaters can record themselves doing
tricks and then spread it out as well as far
as VHS tape can go. Yeah, I mean, and that
really revived this culture and sort of made it into
(16:29):
what street skating is today, And I mean, it's just
it's just like the old school effect of social media
and the internet, and um, not only could these guys
record themselves share their tricks, and then that sort of
spreads these new tricks all around. That also allows them
to more proactively seek out sponsorships and the whole thing
(16:52):
really gets underway again with a little help from technology. Yeah,
and in the ninety nineties we again see skate skating
go pretty mainstream with ESPNS, X games, and then suddenly
it's it's cool. Yes, it's still a subculture. Yes it's
still associated with like outside the mainstream kids, punk music,
(17:14):
all that stuff, but it becomes so cool thanks to
the X games that all of a sudden, advertisers are
using the skater, the image of the skater to appeal to,
you know, all the kids these days. They were using
it to sell everything from soft drinks to clothing lines
and everything in between. I'm pretty sure I remember seeing
advertisements for the now non existent Coca Cola product called
(17:39):
Surge that was very like skateboarder. Are you extreme, kids?
Is it? I drank so much Surge as a child,
so much so that when I watched the Futurama episode
where Fried drinks a ton of slurm. It just reminded
me of my childhood. But I again, like, let's say
hammer home here that I was the opposite of an
extreme child. Whatever you were pounding that serge, you know,
(18:03):
getting leashing up Sophie and Molly cruising down the driveway,
no one could stop you. No one could stop me
except the bump on the end of the driveway, at
which time I inevitably fell off. Well, Caroline, we just
rolled through like fifty years of skateboarding history. We did
not mention a single lady. We didn't mention all those
(18:25):
single ladies. But we'll find all those single skating ladies
right after a quick break. We now want to go
back though and fill in those blanks, because that's sort
of the the overarching history of skateboarding and culture. But
(18:47):
a lot of people might not realize that there were
a lot of women skating, particularly in those early pre
seventies days of skating when it was more about freestyle
and there were skate parks and it wasn't so much
focused on street and punk and counterculture. Really yeah, well,
Michael Brooke, who's the publisher of Concrete Wave Magazine was
(19:09):
quoted in huck as saying when sidewalks surfing hit big
in the nineteen sixties, both males and females skated, and
he points out that the population did skew more towards
the guys. But he points out, you had Patty McGee
doing a handstand on her board, which made the cover
of Life magazine in nineteen sixty five, and that remains
(19:31):
one of the most iconic skateboarding images of all time.
But let's fill in before we get to Patty McGee
on our timeline. Let's go a year before that Life
magazine image and talk about Lynda Benson. You have handsome
surfboards producing a skateboard named after her. It was the
Lynda Benson Model, and it was the first skateboard with
(19:52):
a female namesake. And a fellow surfer talking about Lynda
Benson said she had incredible wave judgment and just the
waves apart. And here's this little she's like five ft two,
she's blonde, has a page boy haircut, very Julie Andrews,
but blonde and on a surfboard. Um, And she's obviously
so cool and so acceptably cool that not only is
(20:16):
she popular, but she's popular to the point where a
company is creating a skateboard or a sidewalk surfboard in
her honor. I wish I had good wave judgment. Just
a side note that sounds like some like like a
really really valuable life scale. I feel like I wouldn't
run into walls as often as I do. Oh god,
I know me too. I run into door frames all
the time. I have bruises on me. I don't know
(20:38):
where they come from. Um, but now I did go
somewhere in my mind when I read that quote about
how she has incredible wave of judgment, and I immediately
started to feel like a panic wave, A wave of
panic come over me, imagining myself on a surfboard like
in in a wave, and then how I would just
be hitting my head on things in the water, and
(21:00):
but anyway, not good. Then he came Then he came back,
and you had just walked into the door. It turned
I woke up on the floor. And then around the
same time, you have Wendy Bear, who was the only
female member of the original Macaha Skateboard Club. She was
sponsored by those guys, but later she was also a
member of the original Hobie Skateboards and surf team, and
Hobi is a big name. It also comes up when
(21:22):
you read about Patty McGee. Yeah, so that brings us
to n when Patty McGee is crowned figuratively as the
first Betty of skateboarding. And Patty, like Linda and Wendy
before her, was a surfer and she got turned onto
(21:43):
skating when she was in California. She was surfing. There
are a couple of different stories about how she ended
up skating. One is that her brother sort of frankenstein
a skateboard for them and she tried it out that way.
The other is that she was doing an in store
promotion and the guy who was supposed to demonstrate the
(22:05):
skateboard didn't show, so they were like, well Patty, and
she hopped up and skateboarded for the first time in
front of people. Um. But the fascinating thing, if you
aren't familiar with so called freestyle skateboarding, which was what
people were doing at this time, if you watch videos
and even just see stills of Patty McGee, she she's
(22:27):
usually doing handstands. She's doing all sorts of tricks that
we wouldn't think of today, there were no half pipes
for her to drop into. So in addition to her handstands,
she would walk the deck so like walk up the
board as it's rolling. She would do three sixties. She
would do wheelies, nose wheelies, of course, yeah, all sorts
(22:48):
of things like it was a lot of You would
basically just go down, go down a hill while performing
all these tricks, sometimes while doing a handstand, which again
my like, I feel like my evolutionary hypersensitive bodily harm
aversion is really triggered by the thought of that um.
And she was sponsored by Hobie's Skateboard and toward the country,
(23:10):
and because she hit it so big so quickly, she
usually is cited as like the first pro skateboarder. And
it helped that she did make that cover of Skateboarder
magazine in which she looks just just so, I don't know,
so effortless as she's skating, when she's skating by a pool,
she's wearing some some aqua shorts and a floral crop top.
(23:34):
Love it, I know. Well, so she becomes such a
great image of skate culture. She she ends up appearing
on Johnny Carson. She goes on to win first place
at the National Skateboard Championship Girls Division. And then on
May four, that's when she lands on the cover of
Life magazine doing her signature hand stand move and again,
(23:57):
I mean talk about effortless, like she just looks it
does and even look like there's a skateboard under her hands.
It just kind of looks like she's doing like a
cartwheeler or whatever. And effortless again, and she said her
very lovely like white pants, which is another thing that
I am terrified of. Yeah, it's another thing that I
can't do. Um. She only went pro for about a
(24:17):
year really, until the skating fat overall kind of died
down in the mid sixties. She also after that ended
up working in snow skiing, turquoise mining, and leather smith thing.
So she has a gill of all trades. Yeah, and
a fun anecdote about her When she was touring around,
(24:38):
um with Hobie, you'll notice too that a lot of
times skateboarders would do it barefoot. I mean that was
part of just like California surfer culture, but um, you
didn't have like skateboard shoes. And she was touring in
New York at one point and a taxi driver refused
(24:58):
to let her in because she's just like walking around
still barefoot, like oh what hey, oh sorry, I'm from California.
I don't get this. I don't get this town. Um.
But in two thousand and ten, she became the first
female inductee into the International Association of Skateboard Company Skateboard
Hall of Fame, and she and her daughter launched a
(25:20):
skateboard line. I believe it's called the Original Betty Skateboard Company. Yeah,
but I mean I want to know more about her
turquoise mining personally. But seriously, yeah, I have I have
some orders I can put in. Um. But moving into
the mid seventies, you know, skating, like we said, it
didn't just die. It just wasn't as mainstream as it
used to be. We get Peggy Okey. She was the
(25:42):
only female member of the Z Boys, the infamous Z
Boys a k a. The original Zephyr skateboard team. She
had an incredible personal style, but she really kind of
had a had a hard time from all sides in
terms of her skating career. She said, some of the
girls didn't like the fact that I skated like a guy,
(26:03):
so they protested me to the judges, and one of
the judges said, I skated better than some of the guys.
And it's so fascinating to compare photos of Peggy Oky
skating versus Patty McGee, who was only you know, skating
like maybe at most like ten years before. Because Okie
has this long hair, she's in ripped jeans, she's you know,
(26:26):
on the street, and it's it's a much grittier looking style.
And that's just how quickly this sport is evolving. And
those two, of course, we're not not the only women
skating at the time either. In fact, we heard from
Steph Mom Never Told You listener Cecilia, who shared a
(26:46):
story with us about her own mom, Michelle McNeil, who
picked up skateboarding as a hobby in the seventies and
like Peggy Oki, she was skating alongside the guys. My mom,
Michelle McNeil, found out about skateboarding when she started college
in ninet. She saw some guys skating on campus at
(27:07):
Long Beach City College in California, and again outside the
Belmont Olympic Pool, where there is a lot of concrete
to skate. The group hanging out by the pool was
rust Howell and his friends. They were really good. There
were a few girls around, but none of them actually skating.
Mom wanted to skate, not just watch. Soon after she
got her first skateboard and started learning tricks. They skated
(27:28):
everywhere they could. Mom had a car, so the guys
would pile in and go in search of vacant houses
with empty backyard pools. They would hop the fence and
skate the pools. If the cops came, she was the
first to the car so they could all race off.
Another friend, Herb Spitzer, was into downhill skating. Signal Hill
near Long Beach has a steep drop and a short
(27:49):
run off to the main street at the bottom. It's
scary but thrilling to try to skatetown skittered. Jim O'Mahoney
put on the Signal Hill speed run in seventy six
to see who could go down the fastest without crashing.
Skaters could either stand on their boards or life flat
on a new thing called a skate car. Guy grundy
(28:10):
one in nineteen seventy six and got his name in
the Guinness Book of World Records. Herb had been in
the first race and was racing again in nineteen seventy seven.
Mom found out that no girls had entered that first
year and thought there should be girls competing to My
grandpa owned a machine shop and he helped her make
a skate car. Another girl, Leslie Joe, rismand entered two.
(28:31):
They officially had a women's division of the race. Mom
became the first woman in history to skate downhill in
a contest observed by the Guinness Book of World Records. Unfortunately,
she crashed and Leslie Joe won the women's division. Mom
was not hurt in the crash, but it is pretty
spectacular to watch on film. It can be seen in
the documentary Signal Health Speed Run in nineteen seventy six.
(28:55):
Also in the late seventies, skate parks were popping up
all over. She frequent tend the Concrete Wave in Anaheim,
which was the first skate park in the southern California area,
as well as the Runway in Carson and Skatopean, Orange County.
At the skate parks, girls really had to hold their
own When waiting for your turn, you had to be
quick and aggressive or the guys would snake in front
(29:17):
of you. My mom has skated on and off since then,
and even now at fifty seven, rides her longboard in Honolulu, Hawaii.
She's still friends with her guy and others from the
old gang. She's an honorary member of the University of
Hawaii Women's skate club, the Wahini on Wheels, run by
Jenny Rees. I feel very lucky to have such an
(29:37):
inspirational and badass mom. Well, I love it. And so
while Michelle was out there honing her skills with her
skating hobby, there were some other really amazing role model
women doing this professionally. You've got Ellen Berryman, who started
skating in nineteen when she met a whole bunch of
skater dudes near her house, and she had actually started
(29:59):
out as a gymnast, which is a little bit different
from some of the women we've talked about who got
their start us surfers um. But also during this time
that Ellen is getting her start, remember that your athane
wheel had just been invented, which made things a little
bit sturdier, a little bit safer, better than the clay wheel.
And in a Q and A with Longboard Girls crew,
Ellen said that the most important thing that got carried
(30:22):
over from this time period was the fact that everyone
had started to skate in pools, empty pools, obviously with
their earthane wheeled skateboards, and that carried over into vertical skating.
And so she says, the street skating we see today
is of course a natural evolution from the seventies. Yeah.
And Ellen O'Neill is someone often cited as a leading
(30:46):
lady of the freestyle scene. She was an early seventies
So Cal freestyle sensation and I do love looking at
photos of her, and we'll definitely have some posted or
at least linked to and the stuff I've never told
you dot com podcast posts so you can see them
as well, because I mean talk about a combination of
acrobatics and skateboarding that really drives home the kind of
(31:12):
I mean, like legit tricks that people were doing before
they had again, before they had half pipes and and
things like that that we would normally think of with
tricks today. Yeah, and Ellen O'Neil, I love I love
reading about where these women got their start. She started
skating purely as a way to get around and used
a skateboard on her paper route. That's fantastic. Yeah, and
(31:35):
she was such a freestyle sensation during that time that
she ended up working at a San Diego skate park
in the late seventies as one of their on site pros.
So she wasn't just like pushed aside of some you know,
some girl to be forgotten about. She worked as a
professional skater to help other kids. And when it comes
to longboarding, which interestingly today more girls have been gravitating
(31:59):
toward that because as it has traditionally been a little
bit friendlier to lady skaters, who probably are cringing at
the use of the phrase lady skaters. Um, there's Eadie
Robinson who was alongboard star in her day, So clearly
women can skateboard. Yeah, we've been skateboarding since skateboards were
first invented. Yeah, because it wasn't a thing. I mean,
(32:21):
why wouldn't women skate exactly, And so there was that
pre gendered era of skateboarding. So let's take a closer
look though, at how skateboarding really turned so male dominated. Yeah,
and this is going back to Huck magazine and article
(32:42):
by Tetsuhiko Indo, which is really interesting and really depressing
all at the same time. To sort of learn about
that evolution of skating being this sort of like wonderful
but still kind of countercultural, egalitarian sports slash activity back
in the day to being something that was just geared
(33:03):
towards the drinkers of surge, the drinkers of surds Um,
And we touched on it earlier. I mean, it has
a lot to do with a dwindling number of skate
parks and more niche marketing to guys skaters. And I mean,
I think that that the skate park factor is so
huge when you think about the fact that boys might
(33:24):
be it more liberty than girls to just roam the
streets and find, you know, an empty parking lot or
an abandoned building, whatever kind of space that might be
deemed too dangerous for a girl to go out and do. Yeah.
And so the fact that skateboarding culture merged with that
punk culture, uh indo rights, it's sort of changed the image.
(33:46):
It got a lot more aggressive, a lot more underground.
And Cindy Whitehead, who is a former pro skateboarder and
now board designer and sports stylist, experienced this first hand.
She said quotes, skateparks started dying off, and once that happened,
we didn't have sanctioned contests, We had backyard ramps and
(34:06):
pools which we originally started in. So skateboarding went back
underground and the industry went dormant for many years. So
I mean across the board. If you were interested in
skateboarding at that time, you had to be really persistent
in order to make it happen, in order to keep skating,
find spaces to skate, find people to skate with. But
(34:26):
more and more and more, if you were a girl
interested in skateboarding, there were fewer and fewer acceptable spaces
for you to do that. Yeah, and it was well,
And it was also getting to the point where if
you were a girl who walked up to a bunch
of guys skating and you said like, hey, I want
to join in, what are you doing? You might just
get laughed out of the pool, the swimming pool, because
(34:47):
it was by then it was starting to become so
entrenched as a guy thing or a dude thing that
girls who expressed any interest in it, it was like,
why this is that you're not welcome here? This is
duo dangerous for you. Yeah, And Catherine Sierra in that
Wired magazine article we talked about a little while ago,
talks about this in the nineties eighties, in particular, when
(35:09):
it comes to skate culture. She says that it devolved
from a vibrant, reasonably gender balanced community into an aggressively
narrow demographic of teen boys. And with this evolution of
skating and how it's becoming more of sort of this
underground thing. We're moving away from the freestyle skating that
had been so popular and that had been so open
(35:30):
to girls and women, and suddenly, um, things like you know,
working on your footwork and flat tricks on pavement like
Patty McGee was so great at those are out. Street
skating is in, and girls are no longer considered real skaters.
It's sort of like the conversation that we have around
geek girls nowadays. Yeah, and girls in gaming, girls are
(35:51):
not real gamers, that whole real question coming up again
and again. Um. So from there we you know, we
mentioned the influence of VHS and you have guys recording
themselves and watching other guys do tricks and they're sharing in.
This culture is spreading and these dudes are really rebuilding
the industry. In the eighties and nineties, this is when
(36:12):
Tony Hawk and his pals really start to make an inroad,
and as it develops, the marketing starts to be focused
narrower and narrower onto specifically guys under eighteen, although of
course you do have exceptions. There is, for instance, Alyssa's Steamer,
known as the godmother of street skating. She was the
(36:36):
first pro street skater in the sense we think of
it today, and also a four time X Games gold medalists.
She has someone not to be messed with. Yeah, but
she was also the only female character that you could
be in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater video games. So it's like, well,
here is your one female idol or a mentor or
(36:57):
you know, role model that you get. You just get
the one, and I mean she's an awesome skater. But
it's like, oh, were there really no other girls skating
in the nineties? Not a lot? Yeah, no, definitely not
a lot. So by this point, then, sociologically speaking, skateboarding
has become not only a male dominated subculture, but girls
(37:18):
skating is almost a subculture within a subculture, which is
really interesting to think about too. So that was then,
you know, we're past the days of the VHS. Caroline. Well,
I don't know, maybe it's coming back just like a
cassette exactly who knows hanging out of those those VHS
as friends? So Caroline to borrow some VHS terminology. If
(37:40):
we fast forward to today, Um, you know, not only
do we have VHS, well no, no, we don't have
VHS anymore, but the Thrasher magazine is still around, and
we have the Internet. What's going on? Skateboard has become mainstream?
So has a gender balance been restored? No? Not really, No,
(38:04):
not really, even though more girls are skating, probably even
ever before. Yeah, and it's actually more girls internationally are skating. Yeah,
So Caroline, that pretty much covers skateboarding the past, But
in our next episode we need to talk about skateboarding
for women in the present and also rolling into the future.
(38:29):
And in the meantime, though, we want to hear from
listeners about their skateboarding experiences. Mom Stuff at how stuff
works dot Com is where you can email us. I
would loved to hear from any other listeners who have
a badass skateboarding mom like Michelle, or if you yourself
are a badass skateboarding mom, please email us, send us
(38:51):
pictures if you want to as well. Mom Stuff at
house Stuff works dot com again is email address. You
can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcasts or messages
on Facebook, and we got a couple of messages this
year with you. When we come right back from a
quick break. Well, I have a letter here from Nicole
(39:11):
in response to our man Caves episode. Uh subject line
lesbian response to man gives podcast so very straightforward love it.
Nicole says, I listened to your podcast about man caves
more than ready to raise my feminist flag in fury
and anger, but instead I found myself taking a different
perspective than before. With the perceived feminization of the workplace,
(39:35):
it's natural for men to want to masculinize the home,
even if most homes are already gender neutral by default.
That being said, I think the hyper masculine and expensive
man cave is unnecessary and if used as an escape, unhealthy.
I grew up in a family where the women had
craft rooms and the men had workshops. So if having
his own man cave is important to a man in
(39:56):
a heterosexual relationship, then his female companion deserves to have
a own equivalent as a married lesbian. I also want
to comment on She sheds my wife, and I decided
early on that having a private office for us to
use interchangeably is important, and that when in use, the
other is not allowed to enter. When we finally have kids,
they will not be allowed into the office either, which
(40:17):
I think is is pretty normal. And despite that both
of us being rather traditionally feminine, our home is still
very gender neutral, with the only indicator of our combined
girliness being the abundance of candles packed into every available space.
I can't imagine that our office or she should will
be anything other than a professional and polished area where
we can work in peace. As always, thank you for
(40:40):
all the hard work and research you both do. It's
helped make me a better and more open person. And
thank you Nikki. Sarah wrote us a letter subject line
my dad body. She writes, as soon as I heard
your podcast on dad Bods, I knew I had to
write in. I'm twenty one and going into my senior
year of college that has no fraternities or sororities. Since
(41:00):
the topic came up in the media, my friends can't
stop talking about it. My fitness obsessed and lesbian friends
don't get the appeal, but one of my roommates, who
as a boyfriend understands. She says, I love that he's fit,
but no, not more fit than me, and he'll raise
me to see who can eat more chicken wings. In
the spirit of disclosure, my dad himself doesn't have a
(41:21):
dad body. He's tall and skinny. But the guy I'm
currently interested in is the epitome of the term. He's
ever six ft tall and pushing to twenty, but it's
also a D three college athlete and is generally seen
as in shape and attractive. I asked my roommates if
they could think of a female equivalent of the dad body,
and one of them replied that I have it. I'm
(41:42):
about five seven and one twenty with a skinny waist
but wide hips. I have no visible muscle in my arms,
and tummy shure aren't town at all due to my
sporadic workout schedule and love of junk food. I'm just
lucky to have a quick metabolism, which enables me to
act like a guy who would normally get a dad
bought but still maintained physique of a quote unquote relatively
desirable college aged woman. I don't think this standard is
(42:05):
right or fair, but I had to write in and
tell you a little bit from a young adult perspective.
So thank you, Sarah. I love your letter, and um,
a chicken wing eating contest is the most romantic thing
I can imagine. So keep up that, Dad Bob. And
if you've got letters to send to us about Dad Bob, skateboarding,
(42:26):
She Sheds, or whatever's on your mind, Moms of a
House of Works dot com is where you can send
them and for links to all of our social media
as well as all of our blogs, videos and podcasts,
including this one with links to all of our skateboarding
her story sources. Head on over to Stuff Mom Never
Told You for more on this and thousands of other games.
(43:00):
Four
Stuff Mom Never Told You News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Samantha McVey
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.