Back In The Day, Part 9: More Estes Stickers Found..

This past weekend, I was again rummaging through the piles of accumulated stuff stored under the basement stairway, when I came across yet another object adorned with old Estes Industries stickers...

Only this is not a rocketry-related item.

It's my old skate board!

And we are talking 'Very Old School' here.  The Genesis of skate boards!

You Gen-X-ers and Millennial skaters in the blog-reading audience may not recognize such an antique, but us old Baby-Boomers know all about them.

So, here's the scoop...back in the late sixties, if you wanted a skateboard, you made one.  Literally.
All it took was a good, sturdy hardwood plank, a roller skate, and a handful of hardware.
The skate, of course, was one of those old metal-wheeled jobs that clamped over your shoe and was tightened with a key.   The skate was taken apart, bolted to the board, and...voila... you had yourself a skateboard!

These early skateboards were a beast to ride - nothing like the fancy boards available nowadays. 
The difficult part in riding one was that you had to carefully balance on an extremely narrow wheel-base.  The metal wheels were not very forgiving with sidewalk cracks and bumpy surfaces. Pretty rough ride...and noisy as all get-out!   They also did not lend themselves very well to performing flips, jumps, and all the other stunting seen with modern boards.
Basically, you just jumped on it and clattered down the sidewalk!

Anyway, this is the one I rode back in the day...and it was decorated with spare Estes stickers.   I must have had enough of those to plaster all over everything I owned....

Cheers!