1960s skateboards like this evolved from roller skates like this on display at THIS Skate Shop in Fargo.

Clay County Histories

Markus Krueger | Program Director HCSCC

What are the necessary ingredients for a skateboard? The thing itself is simple. You just need a board, some wheels, and hardware to attach the wheels to the board. The ancient Sumerians had all this stuff 7,500 years ago, but their teenagers never did kick-flips off the hanging gardens of Babylon. Why did this simple form of transportation that has become a lifestyle for millions only take off in the United States of America in the second half of the 20th century? After reading Four Wheels and a Board: The Smithsonian Illustrated History of Skateboarding, I learned of an additional set of ingredients needed for skateboarding as we know it today: Polynesian surfing, asphalt, and Gidget.
Many people seemingly invented skateboarding simultaneously. Here’s one origin story. In 1957, Jim Fitpatrick and the Wilson kids were annoying their dads as they tried to fix a car, so Mr. Wilson got out some wooden 2x4s and a pair of roller skates and told the kids to nail this to that and go play in the street. Ah, what a bygone age! The skateboard was born…or reborn? Turns out Mr. Wilson and Jim’s dad used to do this same thing when they were kids in the 1930s. How come skateboarding became a national craze in the 1960s but not the 1930s? We needed a few more things to make us ready for skateboarding.
Like decent asphalt roads, the kind that you find in 1960s suburbs but were rare in the 1930s. As the first pro skaters who tried to export America’s skateboarding craze overseas found out, skateboards don’t really work on Europe’s old cobblestone streets. Gravel, grass, mud, and most other materials used for roads in the olden days range from unpleasant to impossible for skateboarding. Smoother streets made skateboarding fun.
The next ingredient is you need a whole bunch of kids who want to be surfers. Polynesians have been surfing for millennia, but Duke Kahanamoku, an Olympic swimming star who moved from Hawaii to Hollywood to be a movie star, helped introduce non-Polynesians to the sport in the 1920s. By the 1960s, “sidewalk surfing” on skateboards is what California surfers did when they weren’t in the water.
Gidget, a popular 1959 movie, helped introduce California’s budding surfer culture to impressionable young Baby Boomers from coast to coast. A wave of surfer movies followed…Elvis, Frankie and Anette, Endless Summer. The Beach Boys and “Surf Guitar” rock also rode that wave and got a lot of Midwestern kids California Dreamin’. We don’t have oceans in Minnesota, but we sure do have wooden planks and roller skates.
By 1965, Wes Sorenson was riding the hills around Hawley High School on a skateboard his grandpa Loren “Bud” Claypool made for him by nailing a roller skate to a 1×6 pine board. Before Mark Hilde was a sailor, the First Mate of the Hjemkomst Viking Ship was a 1960s teenage skateboarder cruising the sidewalks of Island Park. Skateboarding’s first wave hit Clay County, Minnesota, and there were many waves afterwards that changed this simple vehicle into the Olympic sport we see today. If you want to read more, email me and I will share a long article that I wrote for our historical society’s newsletter that combines national and local skateboarding history up to today.