Collection: Lost Surf and Skate

Orange County in the 70’s was an incredible place to live for any teenager! Not digging the jock thing in high school I gravitated towards surfing and skateboarding. No rules, no uniforms and no buzzers! My friends and I rode our bikes all over OC in search of waves and places to skateboard. We wouldn’t have a dollar to our name or a bottle of water but somehow we survived. We would sleep on the beach for days with nothing but a beach towel and a surfboard. Sometimes we would venture to the HB Pier. To us it was like going to Hawaii’s North Shore! Very intimidating to an out of town grom. To us stepping into HB’s Main Street surf shops was like entering a most holy shrine…a shrine to everything cool. Surfboards, surf trunks, skateboards and pinball machines! Everything we only saw in our surf magazines was before our eyes! We skateboarded any non-level surface in OC we could find. Drainage ditches and parking ramps were everywhere. We trespassed a lot! One of the best underground skate spots in the 70’s was called the Fruit Bowl. Supposedly this deserted pool was part of a demolished Garden Grove insane asylum. It was falling apart for years but the pool was still intact! I will never forget the first time I went over the light and caught a little tile! Nirvana! For a while we thought we were the shit…then the Dog Town crew showed up. They had been doing this kind of skateboarding way before us. We got schooled! They figured out how to kick turn and pump to stay in the deep end as long as they want. We were witnessing skateboard history! We would even skate the Fruit Bowl at night. One time we lit a small fire in the deep end so we could see! Soon real skateboard parks were being built. They required skaters to wear protective gear but we didn’t care. We would have worn panty hose if that’s what it took to ride these places. I skated The Concrete Wave in Anaheim and Skatopia in Buena Park a lot. If I didn’t have any money somehow I snuck in and skated anyways. This collection is personal to me. It’s my youth that made me what I am today. For me it’s an honor to work with and represent all these brands and locations. Stay stoked.

Dave C Reynolds surfer/artist/dreamer