The Town Crier: The skateboard and me

Published 8:30 am Friday, August 1, 2025

A while back, a year or so ago, I was in downtown Dalton and saw a couple of guys on skateboards and one older guy was videoing them. I watched the on-camera guy do a couple of cool stunts and then walked over. What was amazing to me was that the skateboards they were riding weren’t any normal skateboards I had ever seen. It was the Cyclops of skateboards!

This thing was a one-wheeled skateboard, with a fat wheel right in the middle of it. The rider’s feet were placed on either side of it and you steered it in a traditional manner by leaning side to side, but this futuristic gizmo ran on its own power, so you sped up or slowed down by leaning a little fore or aft.

Forward sped you up and leaning back a bit slowed you down. It turns out the older guy shooting the video was a drummer for a rock band and on his time off from touring was shooting a documentary on these types of skateboards, traveling around the country and finding the best riders in each of the areas he passed through. I had them explain the skateboard to me and how modern electronics allowed something like this to even exist.

They also have a type of electric skateboard that operates similarly, but has more than one wheel. They call it a hoverboard, named after the floating skateboard that Michael J. Fox rides in the “Back to the Future” movie.

The one in the movie was special effects. The hoverboard skateboards they sell now are the real deal and work on the same principle of leaning forward or back to accelerate or slow down. I’ve never tried one of those since every time I’ve seen one it’s been on “America’s Funniest Videos” and involves a kid getting one for Christmas and, inevitably, Grandma stands on one while everyone laughs, and then she loses control and goes flying into the Christmas tree, knocking it over and shorting out all the electricity in the neighborhood. Hardy-har-har.

This one-wheeled skateboard, though, looked like fun. Then I started thinking back about my own experiences here with skateboards and reconsidered before I jumped on.

Surfing started centuries ago in Polynesia, and Hawaii especially has a strong background in surfing. Mark Twain even tried it there in the mid-1800s. The sport made its way to California, and with the movie and TV industry there, once the first “Gidget” movie came out about a girl surfer in 1959, surfing became a craze that’s never gone away.

Skateboarding is a spinoff of surfing and was invented in the 1940s when California surfers tried to “surf” on land when the sea was waveless. The first manufactured skateboards came out in ’59 with a small, surfboard-shaped deck and metal roller skate wheels. As a kid, I got one of these skateboards, with the metal wheels like my “over-the-shoe” roller skates I had.

When I got that skateboard I was maybe 8, and thought it was going to make me “cool.” Instead, it made me “bruised.” I thought learning to ride a bike, with all that falling over and crashing, was hard.

And I already knew how to roller skate, having spent countless Saturday mornings at the Gaines Skating Rink. With roller skating, I started out falling a bit, but gradually worked up to getting around the rink and, finally, being able to skate nonstop around the disco ball-lit course. I still remember what it felt like when I took off those skates after a session and my feet felt like they weighed nothing.

But this skateboard was tough. With the metal wheels, every grain of sand felt like a pebble and every pebble like a boulder when you rolled over it. The deck was pretty small and the steering wasn’t so good. After having the board shoot out from under me countless times, I eventually gave it up.

Time and technology changed. Along came soft urethane wheels, better trucks, and the deck changed, adding control on all fronts. When this revolution came, I first got a ride on one of the new models when I was with friends in Florida on vacation. I spent hours in the parking lot, amazed at the new skateboard, the difference between this and my old metal wheel model echoing the difference between a Model T and a Ferrari.

By the end of the vacation I had gotten where I could stay onboard. Alas, I didn’t go home and buy one. And when I got back to Dalton, I’d spot the kids riding their boards along the sidewalks, getting reeeeeal good. The skateboard culture took on a lifestyle of its own. Now there are multimillionaire skateboarders, international championships, and skateboarding has even been added to the Olympics. 

I had a last hurrah with skateboards, though. About college age and home for the summer, me and a buddy noticed some big storm drains in town. We decided to explore.

I said storm drains, not sewers! So we started exploring them and realized they went on and on, but the drains got smaller the further upstream you went. We came up with the idea of getting skateboards and lying on them on our stomach so we could go up the narrow concrete pipes. This turned out to be a brilliant solution. And since we were lying down, there was no falling off. We spent hours exploring that drainage system on our skateboards, and if I told you where we started and where we ended up you’d be surprised how far underground we could travel. 

So, I never went to a skate park and impressed the other cool kids, but I never went to the ER either. And I still had fun on skateboards!

Mark Hannah is a Dalton native who works in the film and video industry.