One day back in the late fifties a wonderful and strange new phenomenon occurred at school. A solitary figure was seen careening down a walkway on a hill while standing on a small board. There were wheels under this board. He looked like he was surfing down the hill. He was scooting along pretty fast and he was hooting and hollering and whooping with joy. All of us at Punahou School who had seen this exhibition were witnessing our first skateboard ride. We immediately ran up to this "sidewalk surfer" to see how such a miracle had been performed. This sidewalk surfboard was nothing more than a small plywood plank about five inches wide and a foot and a half long.
The heel and toe portions of a skate, the kind with metal wheels that you attach to your shoe, had been hammered flat and nailed to the bottom of the board. By leaning to the left or right while standing on the board you could get it to slowly turn. In this fashion you could gently slalom down a hill as long as the substrate was fairly smooth concrete or road-bed.
Within an hour or so of getting home from school, all the kids in our neighborhood had made themselves skateboards from their old skates. Roller skating was so passe'. That sissy stuff was for girls and stupid kids who were too oblivious to realize they were being totally dorky. But smashing one of your old skates flat and nailing it to the bottom of a small board; now that's totally cool.
Pictured, is the kind of skate we used to make our skateboards.
Comparing the skateboards of today to what we rode around on is like comparing a Corvette to a Model T. The old metal wheels of those skates weren't really up to the rigors for which they were being repurposed. As long as you were pushing yourself around on level roads and sidewalks you were OK. Things could get a little dicier on hills.
Timmy's Nose Dive Onto The A'a.
Behind our house was an extinct volcano called Koko Head. On its slopes, Henry Kaiser had built a subdivision called Koko Kai. Our little neighborhood road, Portlock ran along the edge of the ocean and was very flat. The new roads in the Koko Kai suburb had some fairly dramatic hills on them. We gave each of them names from our Hawaiian surfing lore. Pipeline, Sunset Beach, Waikiki etc. The steepness of the hill was matched by the seriousness of the surf spot. The gentlest hill was Waikiki. The steepest hill was called Waimea for the famous surf spot on the north shore of the island that got up to forty feet in the wintertime.
One day Timmy and I felt that we had mastered the art of skateboarding well enough to challenge the awesome downhill grade of Waimea. With skateboards in hand, we hiked up to the top of the hill. Making sure that no cars were coming (most of the new houses weren't occupied yet) we gave each other a nervous smile and in the words of young stupid siblings the world over we said to each other, "Here goes nothing. We're probably gonna get killed!" And with that salute we jumped on our boards and headed downhill. The idea was to slalom down the road so we didn't just head straight down which would have generated way too much speed. However, after the first few seconds we realized we were accelerating so quickly we could do nothing but go straight and hoped to God that we made it to the bottom intact.
As the big brother, Timmy had pushed off in front of me and I was about ten yards behind him. By the time we were halfway down Waimea we were traveling somewhere just below the speed of sound. Suddenly I heard the sound of metal grating on asphalt and I saw my brother lurch forward. One of his front wheels had come off and his skateboard came grinding to a halt. My brother also came grinding to a halt. Unfortunately his grinding consisted of pitching forward onto the asphalt in a prone position. I managed to avoid the carnage of broken skateboard and broken brother and coasted to a stop at the bottom of hill.
Pictured below is an artists rendering of that terrible day. In the lower left we see Timmy, briefly airborne, much to the horror of an innocent bystander with blond hair and a pink mini-skirt.
"Oh no. Oh God. Poor Timmy! This is gonna be bad; real bad!", I muttered to myself as I hurried back up the street to supply what little aid and succor I could. In those days our typical neighborhood "outfit" consisted of a pair of shorts and nothing else. As I got closer, I could hear the cries and anguished whimperings of poor brother Timmy. I could also see the damage that a forward dive onto the asphalt at just-below-the-speed-of-sound could do to a mostly unclothed body. Boy howdy, it was not pretty. Large portions of his front side had been scraped off and he looked like he was wearing a ragged suit of blood. Poor Timmy. Together we walked home with skateboards in hand; him (not so) softly whimpering and me clucking and making soothing cooing type sounds trying to comfort him (fat chance!).
"Hey Timmy; it could have been worse. You're not dead and hey! We can repair your skateboard!" I picked up the wheel that had fallen off. "You're young. You'll heal pretty quickly. Then we can go back up Waimea and show her who's boss. You know what they say; Ya gotta get back on the horse that threw ya! Just think; some day in the not-too-distant future when you're all healed up, we'll look back on this day and chuckle merrily as we remember Timmy's nose dive onto the A'a!" (Note to non-Hawaiian readers: A'a is the Hawaiian name for the sharp choppy kind of lava that is created when it flows slowly. It is very hard on tires and hiking shoes and certainly would be very hard on the tender naked flesh of a young mostly unclothed boy...) The real agony would begin tomorrow when the scabs started to dry up and Timmy would be swathed in bandages like Borlis Karloff in "The Mummy".
One other accident of note wasn't really an accident as much as foolish behavior on Timmy's part. In 1964 my brother decided, with the encouragement of an English teacher at our boarding school, that if Tom really wanted to be a writer the only place to go to school was back East where the bulk of the literary establishment dwelled. Besides, it would build character. To be a good writer, one must suffer. Or some such lofty drivel. My dad wanted us boys to go to Stanford. When my time came I did as I was asked and had a moderately marvelous time there. Timmy, at this point in his life, was in a contrary mood. By that I mean, whatever our dad wanted; Tom would do the opposite. So off he went to college in the East.
Williams College is one of the prestigious Ivy League schools. It's located in the extreme northwest corner of Massachusetts, far from civilization as the rest of us know it. I remember getting my first letter from him while I was in my junior year at our boarding school; "Dear Mickey, Fall in New England is everything it's cracked up to be. I decided to go out for the cross country team and we have been running through the glorious autumn countryside. I have enclosed a couple of the fall leaves, resplendent in their hues of orange and red and yellow. Enjoy. L&K, brother Timmy" (or words to that effect).
I turned over the envelope and out fluttered a few dried gray leaves. Timmy didn't take into account the long canoe ride that his letter was going to have to take in order to make it all the way from New England to Hawaii Prep. Academy in Kamuela, Hawaii.
Here's what Williams looked like in the fall. How lovely!
Soon old father Winter showed his doughty white beard at Williams. The temperature plunged, the snow fell and the sky lowered to the point where poor Timmy couldn't tell where the snow ended and the horizon began. This is when the outdoor activities ceased, everyone bundled up and stayed indoors until Spring. Assumedly, they were studying so they could graduate and take their place at the helm of their fathers' law firms and multi-national corporations, etc. At this time, like the other Ivy League schools, Williams was not co-ed. If you wished to enjoy the company of ladies, you had to visit what were called "The Seven Sisters" schools. Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, Wellesley etc. Because of the remoteness factor that meant traveling a fair distance and our hero did not have a car. These institutions of higher learning were sometimes called "suitcase schools" because if you hoped to have a chance for some nookie, you had to pack your suitcase and travel. In my brother's case it meant hitch-hiking.
Picture Timmy, a young innocent country mouse from a tropical climate, bundling up as best he could, donning his new galoshes and standing by the side of the road in the freezing snow with his thumb out. I ask you: WOULD YOU PICK HIM UP? No. I thought not. So apparently, Timmy spent a lot of time standing by the side of the road with the thumb of one mittened hand sticking out shivering in the snow. I never found out if he ever got lucky with a member of the opposite sex.
Williams College in Winter. Looks chilly doesn't it?
One of Timmy's best friends from boarding school also made the plunge and went to Williams. Curtis Tyler was a big affable fellow and he and my brother and a few others all hung together at our boarding school. Curty's dad worked for one of the big fruit packing corporations that preyed on Central and South America and the Caribbean. At the time the Tyler residence was in San Juan, Puerto Rico. So Timmy and Curtis headed down to Puerto Rico for that first Christmas vacation. To say that our hero was ready for a little sunny R&R would be an understatement.
On their first full day in P.R. they took the family water skiing boat out and spent the day water skiing and drinking in the lovely sun and clear tropical days that P.R. is known for when there are no hurricanes lurking about. My brother hadn't been in the sun, much less equatorial sun, in many months. I imagine he was as white as a sheet. At the end of that first day he looked (and felt) like a cooked lobster. In 1964, there was no such thing as sun block. The sun tan lotion that was available in those days, Sea and Ski, and the like, didn't provide much protection from the conditions that Timmy had just experienced that day.
That night, he was in serious pain with extreme sunburns over most of his torso. Even a shirt felt like torture. That night all he wore to bed was a pair of Madras Bermuda shorts and a pair of athletic socks. He couldn't sleep and finally at 3 AM he decided to seek some relief by bathing his over-cooked body in the soothing balm of the sea. Hey; why do you think they call it balmy? So off he ran in his shorts and socks through the streets of San Juan to find some seaside relief.
On Timmy's last visit to Happy Acres, I set up a movie camera in the backyard so we could drink and reminisce and perhaps chuckle a bit. I managed to make a little video out of the portion of the film that pertained to Timmy's Christmas trip to Puerto Rico. I'll let this YouTube snippet tell the rest of the story. Enjoy! I sure did. Next up: More bad stuff that happened to da Mayor! Timmy's off the hook, for now...
YouTube video link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWjlG_bnUkY
Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres
Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. pls note Williams is not on the list BSH
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