Skateboards. Kids ride em, some adults do too. They flip them, go over swimming pools edges with them, jump over things with em, and all manner of tricks. And the boards are ergonomically correct, designed to do all those tricks, made out of specially fabricated, layered, composite materials that are hard to break. And they’re relatively light compared to the first skateboards.

I had one of the original skateboards. It was a block of wood maybe two and a half feet long and eight inches wide and an inch thick. It was pointed on the front and weighed an estimated five hundred pounds or so. And it had a set of four steel roller skate wheels, one at each corner. The wheels and trucks were metal, no composite, and heavy and well…metal-like hard steel. The original skateboards were actually weapons, If they got airborne there was a strong likelihood that someone was going to get hit and if the back of the board hit you on the head it would knock you out, if the pointed end got you, there was a good possibility that ambulances would be necessary.

I had one, it was one of my best prizes. We kids hadn’t figured out how to do tricks, the skateboards were too heavy to kickflip, so we rode them down hills. There was a sidewalk behind my house at Lowry Air Force Base NCO housing. It was not wide, maybe a foot and a half, and it went down a slight grade for a hundred feet or so, then, you had to make a ninety degree left turn onto the bigger, smoother main sidewalk that lined the parking lot for the apartments and continue downhill to the next walkway. There was another ninety degree left turn and it continued down to my back door, also about a hundred feet. It took a week of learning for me to be able to make it through both turns and ride the whole course.

The wheels slid on the concrete, they had no grip what so ever, and the boards weren’t very adept at turning. You had to drift the corners. I learned how after quite a few spectacular crashes, skinned knees, and bloody elbows. Then it was on for the time trials. We all learned how to go fast. And the competition was on. We couldn’t play marbles all day and needed another activity when we got tired of the crab apple wars and harassing Cindy, the 14-year-old neighborhood girl who had boobs, trying to get her to unbutton her blouse, (she did it for me once…I think…may have been a dream, I don’t know). What I remember most, besides Cindy, was the noise. The boards made a horrible racket, metal wheels rolling on the concrete which was not so smooth on the approach to the main sidewalk and then again on the next leg.

And that noise was nothing next to the noise of the four wheels sliding sideways in the corners, scraping like a snowplow on a concrete freeway. And though we inspected the course for hazards, every once in a while a pebble would appear on the course. It could be the size of a kernel of corn, but it would stop the board, but not the rider who would fly through the air no longer controlling his slide.

Many times kids’ heads would bang into the grille of Sargent Billings’ shiny black Cadillac. My dad used to tell me that the Sargent washed it every day hoping to be noticed by the base commander and given a medal for the cleanest car on base. If he caught a kid hitting his head on the grill, all shit would explode and he’d get out a hose to wash his car and screw up our racetrack with his confounded water and soap.

I watch today’s skateboarders do all the tricks they do, the noise muted because the wheels are a composite, that actually has some grip. It’s a long way down the road, science prevailed again giving us a development that furthers the quest for excellence in all things. But, the noise in my head of the steel wheels sliding over concrete, reminds me of the hair-on-fire kids who first braved the concrete courses of small-wheeled speed.