What Was the First Commercially Produced Skateboard? Part 2
Friday, 25 November 2011
Still, other skateboards may have arrived earlier. Historian Iain Borden
claims in his Skateboard, Space and the City: Art and the Body (2001)
that 1956 was the first year: “The first commercial skateboards—like the
Humco five-ply deck with ‘Sidewalk Swinger’ spring-loaded trucks
(1956), the Sport Flite, and the Roller Derby (late 1950s to early
1960s)—came with steel wheels around 50mm in diameter and 10mm wide.” In
his book Skateboard Retrospective: A Collector’s Guide, Rhyn Noll
points out a two-wheeled contraption from the 1930s owned by Randy Beck
from Chatsworth, California. This machine has two wheels attached to a
piece of wood, but if we’re using the strict definition of four wheels
and two trucks, this doesn’t quite fit in.
Noll
also mentions a Mr. Carl Jensen: “I hear tales of Mr. Carl Jensen in
the late fifties, a man who built early skateboards and brought them
into my dad’s shop, Greg Noll Surfboards. Greg recalls Mr. Jensen as the
first to sell skateboards to his Hermosa Beach shop in 1958, and
considers him a founder of the commercial skateboard.” The book also
points to 1958 as the year A. C. Boyden “better known as Humco, patented
one of the earliest recognizable skateboards.” Looking through the
collections of Todd Huber, Paul Naude, Gordon & Smith, and others,
there are numerous odd-looking skateboards—some made of metal, some made
of wood—that seem to have come out of the 1950s. There are boards by
the Chicago Roller Skate Company, and it would make sense that it would
be among the first to manufacture a skateboard, as it was one of the Big
Four that controlled roller-skate production in the 1950s.
So
which came first? Skee Skate? Roller Derby? Chicago? Humco? Or that
Carl Jensen chap? I talked with Greg Noll, who made a good argument that
Carl Jensen was the first guy to make a commercial·
skateboard—and Noll himself may have been there at the start as well.
Now, I don’t really care about this all that much and I don’t want to go
around claiming that I made the first commercial boards, but first of
all, in the 1950s we called those board “bun boards,” because when you
fell you were always busting your ass. I opened my first shop on Pacific
Coast Highway across from Center Street School in Hermosa Beach. At the
time there was this guy Jensen who had five or six guys rolling around
on the strand on the north side of the Hermosa Beach pier, riding these
boards that had old roller-skate equipment with steel wheels.
Jensen
brought them to the shop and said, “This is going to be a good thing.”
Well, I got so tired of hearing all this BS, but I put a couple in the
showcase and they sold. So then I started making some outlines and
laminating them and I had a rubber stamp that said “Greg Noll
Surfboards,” but all the time I was thinking, “These things will never
sell.” I sold maybe fifty of the boards over the course of a year, but I
didn’t really see the potential in it and as usual I was left standing
at the train station as the train was pulling away, because then Hobie
and Makaha and Gordon & Smith came along and of course they sold
millions of the things—everyone’s making a bunch of dough.
I
don’t have one of those original Greg Noll stamped skateboards and I
wish I did. But just this year Element came out with a special edition
of those bun boards, and they look pretty much the same as what we were
making back there in the late 1950s, early 1960s. So am I the first guy
to make a commercial skateboard? I don’t give a damn. All I know is, a
lot of guys got rich from something I didn’t think was going anywhere.
Written By Ben Marcus
The Good The Bad And The Gnarly
Rip The RIPPER 
skateboards.” Looking through the
collections of Todd Huber, Paul Naude, Gordon & Smith, and others,
there are numerous odd-looking skateboards—some made of metal, some made
of wood—that seem to have come out of the 1950s. There are boards by
the Chicago Roller Skate Company, and it would make sense that it would
be among the first to manufacture a skateboard, as it was one of the Big
Four that controlled roller-skate production in the 1950s.
Jensen
brought them to the shop and said, “This is going to be a good thing.”
Well, I got so tired of hearing all this BS, but I put a couple in the
showcase and they sold. So then I started making some outlines and
laminating them and I had a rubber stamp that said “Greg Noll
Surfboards,” but all the time I was thinking, “These things will never
sell.” I sold maybe fifty of the boards over the course of a year, but I
didn’t really see the potential in it and as usual I was left standing
at the train station as the train was pulling away, because then Hobie
and Makaha and Gordon & Smith came along and of course they sold
millions of the things—everyone’s making a bunch of dough.