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Zephyr, Z Boys, Dogtown. You could write a book. Make a documentary! In 1994, Craig Stecyk III wrote the intro to F%@#% You Heroes, a collection of Glen Friedman’s rap, punk and skate photos from 1976 – 1991.
That book included a lot of photos of Jay Adams, Tony Alva, Bob Biniak, Paul Constantineau, Shogo Kubo, Stacy Peralta and a lot of other 70s, LA-area skaters, along with Darby Crash, Ted Nugent, Jello Biafra, Henry Rollins, and other skaters, punks and rappers from the LA scene.
F%@#% You Heroes gave a taste of another Friedman/Stecyk collaboration, Dogtown – The Legend of the Z-Boys published in 2000 which Amazon describes like this:
In the early 1970s, the sport of skateboarding had so waned from its popularity in the 1960s that it was virtually non-existent. In the Dogtown area of west Los Angeles, a group of young surfers known as the Zephyr Team (Z-Boys) was experimenting with new and radical moves and styles in the water which they translated to the street. When competition skateboarding returned in 1975, the Z-Boys turned the skating world on its head. . Dogtown The Legend of the Z-Boys is a truly fascinating case study of just how an underground sport ascended on the world. These are the stories and images of a time that not only inspired a generation but changed the face of sport forever. The Legend of the Z-Boys has been described as “The Dogtown text book” and an insightful companion piece to the movie: “DogTown and Z-Boys”. . Spanning 1975 – 1985, the first section of the 240 page 
book includes the best of the “DogTown” articles written by C.R. Stecyk III as they originally appeared in SkateBoarder Magazine. The second half compiles 100’s of never before seen skate images from the archive of Glen E. Friedman – many of which appear in the movie.
There have been books, but there also have been documentaries on the impact of these young LA-area skateboarders in the 1970s. Most famously, Stacy Peralta’s Dogtown and Z=Boys in 2001 was the darling of the Sundance Film Festival and might have been partially responsible – along with Michael Moore – for launching the tsunami of documentaries that have come sense. In 2008, Peralta admitted to Steve Olson in Juice Magazine that Dogtown had sold over one million DVD and over 700,000 VHS.
Those kind of numbers attract Hollywood and that lead to the movie version of the documentary, Legends of Dogtown, which was released in Dogtown did well enough to inspire the feature film Lords of Dogtown, written by Stacy Peralta, and featuring Emile Hirsch, Heath Ledger and Rebecca de Mornay. Roger Ebert loved the doco but the movie, not so much:
Now we have “Lords of Dogtown,” a fiction film based on the very same material and indeed written by Peralta. Not only is there no need for this movie, but its weaknesses underline the strength of the doc. How and why Peralta found so much old footage of skateboarding in 1975 is a mystery, but he was able to give us a good sense of those kids at that time. Although Catherine Hardwicke, the director of “Lords of Dogtown,” has a good sense for the period and does what she can with her actors, we’ve seen the originals, and these aren’t the originals. Nobody in the fiction film pulls off stunts as spectacular as those we see for real in the documentary.
Several books, a very successful documentary and a movie that Roger Ebert didn’t like so much because the skateboarding wasn’t so great, but still featured Heath Ledger doing a scary-good impersonation of Skip Engblom.
Much has been written, re-written, filmed an
d re-filmed about the time in the 1970s, when the Zephyr Surf Shop in Santa Monica sponsored a surf and skate team who came to be known as the Z Boys.
It all began with these three chaps, Craig Stecyk, Skip Engblom and Jeff Ho and the short version goes like this: In 1971, Ho, Stecyk and Engblom opened Jeff Ho Surfboards and Zephyr Productions in the Venice Beach area of Santa Monica. These guys were all surfers who were skateboarding out of the 1960s but at first it was all about surfing. Ho and Engblom formed the Zephyr Surf Team, made up of local surfers who had established themselves at the defunct Pacific Ocean Park. As the urethane revolution hit, the Zephyr Skate Team evolved and they became known as the Z-Boys. The original members were Jay Adams, Tony Alva, Bob Biniak, Chris Cahill, Paul Constantineau, Shogo Kubo, Peggy Oki, Stacy Peralta, Nathan Pratt, Wentzle Ruml IV and Allen Sarlo.
Later members included Paul Cullen, Cris Dawson, Jose Galan, Dennis Harney, Paul Hoffman, Donnie Ohem and Tommy Waller.
The team practiced around Jeff Ho’s surf shop and on the streets of Santa Monica and Venice, including the banked walls at Paul Revere and Kenter schools in the Santa Moni
ca mountains and Bicknell Hill, which ran down to the ocean. Moving away from the nose wheelies and 360s and other freestyle moves of the 1960s, the Z-Boys found that urethane wheels and improved equipment allowed them to replicate the “anything is possible” surfing of Hawaiian surfers Larry Bertlemann and Buttons Kaluhiokalani.
The Z-Boys skated the banks at Paul Revere, Kenter and the geography-blessed schools of the Santa Monica mountains, they raided swimming pools all over Los Angeles during the drought years of the mid-1970s, and they ran wild in the streets of Venice and Santa Monica – an area dubbed Dogtown by Craig Stecyk.
They were just having fun and not trying to cause a big sensation, but the photography and journalism of Craig Stecyk, combined with their first public appearance at the 1975 Bahne-Cadillac National Championships at Del Mar – launched the Z-Boys into legend.
From: The Skateboard, The Good The Rad And The Gnarly
Written by Ben Marcus Photos by Lucia Griggi
TOM SIMS INTERVIEW PART 1:
Here is where I get confused because I seem to think Sims was run by Brad Dorfman and Vision in the 1980s?
By the late 70?s I got very busy getting snowboarding off the ground, and licensed Sims Skateboards to Brad Dorfman in 1981. At the time we had the #1 team with Brad Bowman, Dave Andrecht, Steve Rocco, Todd Swank, Pierre Andre, Chris Strople, Wally Inouye and a lot of the guys who would become very influential in skateboarding. Many of these guys were the Who’s Who of skateboarding. It’s amazing the guys who were on my team and what they went on to do later in life in the board sports world.
Pierre Andre started Etnies, and Steve Rocco took over everything. And another name you can put in there is Dave Swift, who became the editor of a big skateboard magazine. Muir formed Dogtown Skateboards, and Todd Swank formed TumYetos. Lamar went on to form Lamar Snowboards.
Sims Team Canada: Rick Tetz 1980 – 1st Place Freestyle, CalStreets.com AND Longboarder Labs Founder
But at that time, around 1981, I put my focus on snowboarding after Brad Dorfman took over the skateboard license. What’s funny in all of this is that just a couple of weeks ago, Brad Dorfman and Dale Smith made a new deal to license Sims Skateboards. They are spearheading the licensing of Sims Skateboards 25 years later.
When I licensed to Dorfman in 1981 there was a recession going on – 90% of the skate parks shut down and within 18 months skate shops were going bankrupt. And that was gnarly to the major skateboard companies, because it wasn’t COD back then. The bad debt was overwhelming. Stores could not pay their bills, and hundreds of shops and parks went out of business.
That was one of the reasons I licensed to Dorfman. Many of these shops would close down owing us $10,000 or $20,000. When Rocco went to COD, that took the risk out of the skateboard industry. He was smart.
Sims made a big surge in the early 1980s and then we were knocked off the mountain by Powell. Stacy Peralta came on board and built a tremendously strong team and product line with George Powell. He had Steve Caballero and Lance Mountain on the team, and stayed on top some time into the mid to late 80s until 
the day Stacy left, and that is the day Powell collapsed. Literally imploded because Stacy, Rodney and most of the team bailed.
At this time it was when Steve Rocco left SIMS and Rodney Mullen left Powell, and they joined to form what would become the biggest skateboard company – World Industries, and Plan B. Rodney and Rocco double handedly changed the sport of skateboarding from vert back to the streets.Sims Rocco 1980 – Gary Holl
When I asked a bunch of skateboarders to name transitional skateboards, Gary Holl sent me this image of a 1980s Sims Steve Rocco model. Were you still involved with the company when this board came out, and how is it transitional?
The SIMS Rocco skateboard changed the known universe at the time. Everything in skateboarding was about vertical riding on ramps and in pools, and then Sims introduced the Rocco board and wheel to the world, and it started a full revolution back to streets.
But that was on the cusp of when you were getting out of Sims Skateboards and into Sims Snowboards?
The mid to late 1970s is when the Sims company or product line or team or the whole deal had the most influence on the sports, from the wide decks when we ran our 3 Ways Wide ad. That was a revolutionary ad because the day we ran that ad on the back cover of SkateBoarder, every narrow skateboard in every warehouse and factory and store became obsolete. If I had been a better businessman, I would have unloaded all our inventory before running the 3 Ways Wide ad. It was a huge development, but Alva had a lot to do with skateboards going wider, and you can’t ignore that.
Why is the 3 Ways Wide ad significant?
This was the first ad showing a wide skateboard. Everything was really narrow prior to this ad. This ad changed the face of skateboarding. This was also the ad I was delivering to SkateBoarder Magazine after which Novak began accusing me of dirty tricks.
What is your side of that “Wonder Boy” story.
I made exactly one trip to SkateBoarder Magazine and that was to deliver the “SIMS 3 Ways Wide” advertisement. I made the drive from Santa Barbara to San Juan Capistrano, because if they received the ad the next day, I would have missed the deadline. When I walked into the room where the production crew was preparing all the ads for blue line, I said “Wow, look at all those ads!
Rich Novak of Santa Cruz Skateboards got wind of my appearance at SkateBoarder Magazine and spun this two-minute appearance into a convenient lie, to disparage me for decades in the skateboard and snowboard industries, and to exalt himself as a ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘safe keeper’ of the sports.
About this ad, Tom Sims said “The Quicksilver advertisement I sent you belongs in the Powell Skateboards section.
This was George Powell’s first advertisement, and we had a handshake deal that SIMS would be his Worldwide Exclusive Distributor. He promised me this enticing deal if I would promote his skateboards and be in his advertisements, and put my endorsement signature on the decks, as SIMS was the most prestigious name in the sport at the time. Without this ad as proof, it would be my word against his.” Ad courtesy Tom Sims.
Novak’s other stunts in business are actually far more repugnant. I will not discuss those here.
One of the reasons Novak was so pissed is because when I ran that ad, all the narrow boards were instantly outdated. If he had known about that ad he would have unloaded the tens of thousands of narrow skateboards he had in his warehouse. Novak was pissed because he didn’t see the wide thing coming. He got caught with his pants down, as did everyone. I should have dumped all my narrow boards at half off. I just wasn’t a greedy enough or savvy enough businessman.
Where are you from originally?
I was born in Los Angeles but grew up in New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island.
Sounds like you learned how to surf here and then were whisked away into exile on the East Coast?
No, we moved when I was two years old. My dad went back there to work at some company and we moved around. Technically born in LA, but grew up mostly in Jersey.
What year were you born?
1950.
This is starting to make sense, based on this whacko theory I came up with in Chapter One, about skateboarding being born in 1947 and then hitting puberty in 1959.
In 1960 we took a vacation back to visit my grandparents in Los Angeles – and to go to Disneyland. I saw some kids skateboarding on the sidewalk, and that changed my whole life. I ran into my grandparents’ garage and grabbed some ancient metal roller skates, cut them in half, mounted them to a 2” x 4” took one run and said: “This is it. I love sidewalk surfing.”
I thought that board was long gone, but then my parents sold that house in Los Angeles – right after the LA Riots.
The Watts Riots in 1965 or the Rodney King riots?
The Rodney King riots. That was 1992. My parents sold their LA house in the early summer of 1992. That’s when I found that 2” x 4” skateboard, which I hadn’t seen since 1960. They were clearing out the house and there was the board sitting there, covered in dust in the garage.
About 10 years later, Stacy Peralta was interviewing me on my ranch while doing filming for the Dogtown movie. He saw the 2” x 4” board and flipped out. He said: ‘That’s the most prehistoric thing I’ve ever seen.’
But that trip from Jersey back to Los Angeles in 1960 is what got me into skateboarding. It didn’t exist on the East Coast and was just starting in LA and southern California. And that lead to everything else that happened to me.
Tom Sims first skateboard. Horizontal view of the 1960s skateboard that launched a 70s/80s empire. Skate courtesy Tom Sims.
Where in LA was this?
Those first kids I saw were coming down Plymouth Boulevard right near Hancock Park – two blocks from the Ebell Theater on the cement sidewalks. I took a couple runs on my 2×4 skateboard and it worked really bad, but I still could feel the magic. I asked those kids where they got their boards. They told me to go to Sears Roebuck on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. My dad got me a Roller Derby or a Roller Sport skateboard, I can’t remember, but I do remember the price: It was $14.99.
I don’t have that board anymore. I took it back east and showed it around to my friends and when I rode it people looked at me like I was an alien. No one had heard of a skateboard or seen a skateboard and you couldn’t buy them for a few years after that on the Eastern Seaboard.
So I had to make my own skateboards when they broke or when my wheels wore out. I was dead without a skateboard. There were good Chicago trucks on my first board. They were durable, but the wheels wore out very quickly. My dad took me to this rough neighborhood in Camden, New Jersey. We went to a roller skating rink to buy wheels which were old used ones off the rental roller skates. The rink manager charged me twenty-five cents for wheels and five dollars for a pair of used old roller skates, which had great trucks.
Composition wheels?
I bought a whole box of used roller skate wheels from that guy. I survived for a long time and started building skateboards for my friends – so I would have someone to go skateboarding with. I was building skateboards for buddies just to spread the fun.
I could make two skateboards from one pair of roller skates. That was my first commercial enterprise – I just wasn’t charging any money.
The hill I lived on was an unbelievably good skateboard hill – just paved with perfect asphalt. I had the ultimate setup growing up – a swimming pool in the backyard with Greenmount Road out front – everyone in town knew that was Skateboard Central.
You were skateboarding your swimming pool?
No we would play Marco Polo after skateboarding for hours on hot summer days. The pool was unskateable due to squared corners.
When did you start surfing?
In 1966 my dad bought me my first surfboard and that’s when my life changed even more, because I had rented surfboards the two previous summers and fell in love with surfing after just one wave. Now I had my own 9’ 4” Surfboards Hawaii nose rider. I was in heaven.
Where were you surfing back there?
The Jersey shore, mostly Long Beach Island and Ocean City.
Even before that, back in 1963 I built the first snowboard. In the winter you couldn’t skateboard everyday in South Jersey, so I tried to figure out how to make a skateboard for the snow. All I wanted to do was go skateboarding so I made a snowboard in woodshop to cure my addiction. I called it a Skiboard, and subsequent wood shop classes kids started to make their own Skiboards based on my design. This is all years before the Snurfer. Haddonfield New Jersey had the only snowboarders in the world for at least three winters until the Snurfer hit the stores in 66/67!
Skateboarding lead to everything for me: Snowboarding, Surfing, Skimboarding and Wakeboarding. I was living a “boarding lifestyle” long before the culture was born.
Where did you live in Jersey?
Haddonfield, across the river from Philadelphia. It’s a wealthy enclave of Colonial homes – where many of the Philadelphia Flyers now live. Haddonfield was a conservative, Colonial town. I got arrested just for skateboarding. I would love to get that police report.
Vertical bottom view of the skateboard Tom Sims made in 1960
inspired by kids he saw in the streets of Los Angeles.
Board courtesy Tom Sims.
What year did you get arrested?
Right at the beginning. Right in that 1960, 1961 era.
Skateboarding is not a crime. You could have been the first.
They threw me in the squad car and they didn’t even know what skateboarding was. It was on my record, and my mom and dad were concerned: “What’s that thing you are using in the streets?” I told the police it was a skateboard. They huffed and puffed and kept staring at me as if I was a crook or something.
At what point did your fascination and avocation start to become a profession?
I started building four-foot skateboards in the mid-Sixties, to simulate surfing. At the time, surfboards were all over nine feet long so on those four-foot skateboards I could walk the nose and do kickturns and all that stuff. That went on until the late 1960s, when the short board phenomenon hit surfing in Hawaii, Santa Barbara and Australia. That too changed the world of surfing and even skateboarding. I started building surfboards in my parents’ garage which were the first short surfboards on the East Coast.
Were you doing this all in a vacuum?
I was following Surfer Magazine. I’m trying to think when I first saw a SkateBoarder Magazine. Can’t remember. My magazine collection was lost in a flood some years back here at our ranch.
I moved to California in 1971to find better waves and better skateboard hills, but I can’t remember when I first saw a skateboard magazine. I was just a skateboarder/surfer guy living in the foothills of Montecito outside of Santa Barbara. No TV, no radio – a little adobe hut for $50 a month. No bathroom, no shower. I used a hose for a shower and we had an outhouse.
My whole life revolved around skateboarding, surfing and snowboarding. By the mid 70s, I started building three and four-foot ash skateboards to sell, and my first dealer was the Channel Islands Surfboards shop – ironically now owned by Burton. My second dealer was Val Surf in the San Fernando Valley.
Ironic why?
Because Burton and I became fierce competitors in the snowboarding business years later. By 1976 I was selling Sims Skateboards in Japan Europe and Australia. We had several hundred dealers all screaming for more product. It was really hard to keep up with all the orders.
What were you selling exactly?
Those three and four-foot wood skateboards and then the 30-inch fiberglass boards that were like the Bahne boards. I couldn’t keep up with the wooden boards, but we could do unlimited fiberglass decks from a company in Burbank called Ampul Corp. I remember going to their factory and smelling all the resin and seeing fiberglass dust fill the air.
Basically the fiberglass boards by Bahne, G&S, Sims and Santa Cruz were all very similar until Sims started doing the multiple ply maple boards. My friend – Wee Willy Winkle’s father – had Canada’s largest wooded maple door factory in Toronto. Willy, who was a big Sims Skateboard fan and champion skateboarder in Canada called me up and said: “What do you think about laminated maple Sims Skateboards?”
I jumped on a plane to Toronto and the rest is history.
Thus spake Tom Sims: “The bottom board is one of my first production prototype four foot skateboard, which I test rode as one of my personal boards in 1972/73. The four-foot skateboards I had made in the mid 60?s were actually rectangular! The top board is one of the first production boards I was building myself to sell to the surf shops. The wheel wells are likely the very first wheel wells ever. The sand and resin textured top was the first skateboards with grip – which was the precursor to grip tape.” Boards courtesy Tom Sims.
You couldn’t keep up with the wood orders?
I was hiring “Mountain Drivers” (local people from Mountain Drive in Montecito) with band saws to cut them out, and then eventually in the mid 1970s somewhere I had to start buying fiberglass skateboard decks from Ampul. We would silk-screen the Sims name and sold them as ‘completes’.
I was buying skateboard trucks from some guy in Laguna Beach and then some hardware and stuff from Con Colburn down in Venice. I was buying ACS trucks and Metaflex wheels and eventually ACS and Bennetts. And then finally it was just Gull Wing, Tracker and Indy. I have all these old price lists and ads that are kind of classic.
I virtually worshiped skateboarding and the whole experience. So basically what happened was from the early 70s I was kind of a guru of skateboarding. I mastered the hills of Montecito and the Tea Bowl – an iconic skateboard reservoir I found a few miles straight up the mountain from the swanky Biltmore Hotel. There was a huge reservoir built by a wealthy woman in the 1920’s, but it was now empty – luckily for me and my friends. And I was pretty much the undisputed founder and ruler of the Tea Bowl. I believe there is a scene in the movie ‘Freewheelin’ with Stacy Peralta and I at the Tea Bowl.
By 1977 CR Stecyk and SkateBoarder Magazine were referring to me as “The Godfather.” It was around this time that George Powell called SkateBoarder Magazine concerned with all the Sims exposure and said: “Sims must be paying you bribes.” He also said: “Whatever Sims is paying you I will pay more.” Warren Bolster, the editor of SkateBoarder magazine told me this story many times just laughing out loud hysterically.
During this era I was driving down to the different contests in So Cal and winning most everything the Sims team and I entered. That all peaked in 1975 when I won the World Skateboarding Championships.
Tom Sims taking one of his mid-1970s longboards to the top of a California reservoir – sucked bone-dry by drought. Photo courtesy Tom Sims.
Which event was that?
The Hang Ten World Skateboarding Championship down at the LA Arena in September of 1975. When I won there I was on top of the world, then all of a sudden Tony Alva comes along and dethrones me within a very short time. He won the World Championships in a following year and then all of a sudden Alva skateboards were in huge demand. I had to work hard just to sell skateboards after that, because so many wanted Alva due to his mystique and prowess in empty pools just as the Dogtown movie depicts him.
He really was the best pool rider of that era. He changed the whole paradigm for me and the sport. One moment I couldn’t make skateboards fast enough, and then when Alva came along, I had to work to sell skateboards, because everyone wanted Alva. He was an earthshaking phenomenon. Sims dominated the skateboard mags and then Alva came along and took over, there and in the magazines and the business world.
An interesting thing happened just before this time in skateboard history. Many of the Dogtown skateboarders from the Zephyr Team quit Zephyr to join the Sims Team when their sponsor got into difficulties. Jay Adams, Bob Biniak, Jim Muir, Paul Constantineau and Wentzle Ruml all became Sims teamriders – most of those guys were using Sims wheels anyway so when they left Zephyr they came to me: “Will you sponsor me?”
And I was willing to sponsor them – especially Jay and Biniak and the other guys – because they had surfing as their underlying motive for skateboarding. 
They rode skateboards as if they were surfing and had a style I loved too.
I couldn’t relate to the San Diego skateboard scene – the freestyle thing and only doing 360s and click clacks and this and that. We were looking for banks and bowls and pools. So I related with the Dogtown guys. We did photo shoots in drainage pipes and we’d go to Hemet and all the way to Arizona – to Big Surf in Tempe. We hung out and skated places like the Escondido Reservoir – any ditch or pool we could find.
Many times SkateBoarder or Transworld, or Thrasher Magazine staff showed up as if it was ‘in the wind’ that the Sims team was riding somewhere.
My skateboard team riders were mostly Ventura and Venice-based surfers: Stevie Monahan, Frank Blood, Davey Miller, Richie Vanderwyk and John Drury and the Venice Rats. Lots of those guys were hot surfers, so it made sense for me to sponsor those Dogtown guys for a while. It felt right, and everything was going great and then… Muir busted off to officially form Dogtown Skateboards. I had to say bye to my Santa Monica and Venice crew.
Published in SkateBoarder 2#3, the results of the Hang Ten World Pro/Am Skateboard Championships show Tom Sims placing in the Top Three in three divisions – and also who was riding for who in September of 1975. Ad courtesy Jim Goodrich and Surfer Publishing Group.
