A friend of the shop and veteran skater named Mike hooked us up with two big photo albums full of skating from the 70’s and 80’s, featuring some insane backyard ramps, Kona, and Stone Edge skateparks. When I get big batches of photos, I have a few choices… I can either take them out of the album sleeves and scan them (which was out of the question for these, since I risked damaging them), or I could scan the album sleeves themselves and cut them up in Photoshop. I decided not to cut these up and upload them individually for two reasons… reason one: Mike sent us so many photos, it would take a few days for me to process them individually, and two: the pics make more sense when you look at them as a group. Check out Mike’s gallery here and you’ll see what I mean:

I really recommend that you go through each photo in the gallery… if you’re a skater, you’ll see that even though the boards, clothes, tricks and ramps are different, the heart of skating is exactly the same. I got the same notion from Phantom Dave’s pics a while back; the feeling we get from skating with our friends is the same feeling skaters from the 70’s had… we get the same adrenaline rush, the same close calls, the same excitement from landing a new trick, and the same bruises from not-quite-landing-right (aka busting our asses). There is no old school… there may be old skateboarders, but as long as we ride, we’re all getting educated.

…and yeah, Mike still skates.