IT’S BEEN A LONG STRANGE RIDE

In the 1970s, Calgary wasn’t exactly a welcoming place for skateboarders. The 1980s and 1990s were not much better. But now that long-lived bans on backyard ramps and skating on sidewalks have fallen, it’s time to acknowledge those who kept pushing the lo

In the 1970s, Calgary wasn’t exactly a welcoming place for skateboarders. The 1980s and 1990s were not much better. But now that long-lived bans on backyard ramps and skating on sidewalks have fallen, it’s time to acknowledge those who kept pushing the local scene uphill.

It’s after dark on a Saturday night in downtown Calgary in the mid-1980s. John and Barry Hiebert and their friends have had a few beers and they’re ready to tackle their favourite weekend activity: racing down the Med Centre parkade. There are five parkades downtown worth riding, but the one attached to the 8th and 8th Medical Clinic is the gnarliest. Its five levels form a descending loop that really kicks into gear toward the bottom. “Coming down to the main floor, it’d be down, flat, down, flat then down, down, down,” John recalls. “Hopefully, cars aren’t coming in.” Whoosh, the group of skaters races down, hoping they survive the ride without skidding out or sending their board flying down several stories (no board ever survived the fall). They also want to escape the attention of the security guard, so they can go back to the top and scream down again. Before Shaw Millennium Park, before there were four community skate parks (and three more on the way), Calgary skateboarders had to get creative if they wanted to ride. Sure, beginning in the late 1970s there were a handful of indoor skate parks, but none stayed in business for more than a few years. Then there were more obvious problems: a ban on backyard ramps was put in place in 1986, and in the 1990s, skateboarding on streets and sidewalks was prohibited. Despite these constraints—or maybe because of them—skaters found a way, and a scene flourished far from the sport’s origins on the sidewalks and in the empty pools of California.

Chuck

Bell would become a fixture of the scene, but in 1972 he was a nine-year-old who wanted to skateboard. He had seen a kid riding in his neighbourhood, but been refused when he asked to try the board. Then, one day as he walked to school, Bell noticed a clay-wheeled skateboard perched on top of a woodpile in an alley. It remained there the next day and the next. “Every day, I’d walk by and I’d see this skateboard sitting there,” Bell, now 53, says. “After a while, there’s snow on the skateboard. I’m like, ‘That guy doesn’t want that skateboard.’” He lifted the board, but was too scared to ride it outdoors in case he ran into the former owner.

When his family moved to Silver Springs, Bell figured he was safe leaving his basement to practise on the sloped curbs of his new neighbourhood. As he became more confident in his abilities, he searched out the meeting place of the better skaters on the north side of the city: the pedestrian tunnel in Confederation Park that ran underneath 10th Street. The banked concrete at one end of the tunnel mimicked a half-pipe, and was the perfect place to test out tricks. “That’s where the cool guys went to skate,” Bell says.

But finding the places that were key to the scene was only one of Bell’s challenges. The real problem for him and other Calgary skaters in the early ’70s was finding gear. There were no dedicated skateboard shops, so Bell and his friends had to rely on places like SunBum Shops, which catered to water skiers but occasionally brought in skateboards, although not enough to meet demand.