I used to hate it when lazy magazine writers would use a popular old song title or tag line as the title to an article or TV segment, when I was younger. Now I'm that guy. "Happy Days are Here Again" is a 1929 song from the Big Band era, and came out right before the Great Depression, just in time. It was a much covered classic in the next few decades. But this video isn't about Big Band music, it's about skating curbs, slappies and board slides and such, having fun on little pieces of painted concrete that most people ignore.
I've never heard of Andale' bearings, which doesn't mean much, since I'm out of the loop on everything skating these days. As a BMX freestyler hanging out with freestyle skaters like Don Brown, Pierre Andre' and others, at the Huntington Beach Pier, in the late 1980's and into the 1990's, I did a little freestyle skating. Not much, but enough to have fun on a skateboard.
Later on, riding an Alphonzo Rawls board I got from a roommate, I learned to skate curbs some in the 1990's. Most of my memories of curb sessions were late at night in Westminster, when I lived at the P.O.W. BMX House, home of the Pro's Of Westminster, in 1992-1993. Usually well after dark, and a couple of beers, it would be Mike Griffin, the best skater in the house, and two or three more of us, that would head out for some slappy sessions on the curbs in the local grocery store parking lot. I'm pretty sure two of my wheels were on the ground most of the time while trying slappies then, but that's when I started doing a little curb skating. Later, living in another BMXer house, I went to the nearby Westminster Mall for some late night solo curb sessions, and my skills improved a bit.
In 1994, I lived in back in H.B., on Huntington Street, and I'd solo skate a curb with a wide corner I could grind around. The curb was really low, which was good, because I still wasn't much of a skater, but, again, I knew enough to have fun sessions. There was also a round painted curb on the end of an island at the local grocery store (now an Albertson's) by Beach and Adams, as well. It was on the side of the store, and I learned boardslides to fakie there. My slappy skills were pretty pathetic, but I love watching some great curb skating.
I stumbled across the video above on YouTube yesterday, doing research for another blog post. There's a series of these short, "Slappy Days" videos, form about 2021. These guys all rip, and these are the best curb skating videos I've seen. So I decided to share them all in a blog post. For anyone who was a fan of John Lucero and Jeff Grosso, and their curb skating skills back in the 1980's, for anyone who remembers what the P.O. Curb was in H.B., or any of the younger people who love to skate curbs, here are several great slappy/curb skating videos. Enjoy!
This blog is creeping up to the 1,000 blog post milestone, this is post #994
I've been doing a lot of longer form writing on a platform called Substack lately, which is designed for writers. Check it out.
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