Evanston, Illinois *-- The bus driver passes the Tom Thumb Hobby Shop and cranes his head.

He spies Nathan Kipnis, an award-winning architect of environmentally responsible buildings, in jeans and plaid shirt, standing off the curb, just in the street. He has his skateboard out, preparing to demonstrate how to do a kickflip.

He pushes off on the board, generating speed, and then there is loud slap of asphalt as Kipnis tucks his right foot under the middle of the board and leaps, landing as the board flips around on its axis.

Kipnis, 42, is satisfied, even if the driver looks a bit startled as he heads his bus up Davis Street.

"I do this for the kids," Kipnis explained, "and they're like 'What did you just do?' It's not how they do it now. 'Old School,' they call it."

Old school, or new school, perhaps it's about time the latest generation of skateboarders pay homage to Kipnis, Tom Thumb owner Art Harris, and others who first helped popularize skateboarding in the Midwest.

Movies like "Dogtown and Z-Boys *" and "Lords of Dogtown *" have celebrated the start of the skateboard movement in California *'s Malibu and Venice beach * towns. But skateboarders here in the middle of America may have faced an even greater uphill fight getting their sport accepted, said Harris, who has owned Tom Thumb since 1965.

"Early on there wasn't a lot of information," he said. Skateboarder, the gritty magazine which chronicled the early history of the sport (one skater in Kipnis's crowd later would recite passages from memory) was almost exclusively devoted to West Coast happenings.

Skateboarding had its start in California in the 1960s when the surfing crowd began moving their sport to dry land, said Harris.

The sport became popular "almost overnight", with some 50 million boards sold within a three-year period. But after the novelty of the then-new skateboard wore off, the related businesses began to falter almost as quick, in part because of inferior equipment and safety issues, said Harris.

"These things are really tough to ride on steel or clay wheels *," he said. "You just slipped out from underneath."

Some say that the introduction of the urethane wheel * on boards with flexible mounts led to the sport's resurgence. In some circles the invention of the urethane wheel, has similar status to the discovery of fire or the invention of the telegraph.

"You had infinitely more control," Harris said. He said the new wheel helped transform the skateboard from something viewed as dangerous to a legitimate "piece of sports equipment."

Harris, ever the businessman, capitalized on the trend by stocking boards at his hobby shop beginning in the fall of 1974.

Naturally Kipnis, then 14 at the time, and friends began hanging out. Kipnis still has his first board, an orange Bahne with no kicktail and open ball bearings *. "If you could ride it, you could figure out how to ride anything," he said.

In between buying boards, Kipnis and his friends would still hang around the shop. "We'd be looking, looking, looking," he said.

Around 1976, Harris formed his skateboard team, slyly dropping notice during a newspaper interview that he was planning on holding tryouts. He figured 25 or so people would show up. The total was more like 250. "We were just blown away," Harris said. "They came from all over."

Aspiring team members filled the parking lot behind a bank, spilling out into the street. Skaters took numbers, waiting for their two-minute tryout. "We graded them informally, like we knew what we were doing," Harris said.

Kipnis and Lance Cutler, both of Highland Park, served on the original Tom Thumb Skateboard team assembled by Harris. The team also included Carl McCalla and Dave Harris (Art's son) of Evanston and Chicagoan Dave Holland *. Cathy Rumsley, a resident of Park Ridge and the only female member of the team joined later.

Harris would pack the group into his blue metallic Astro Van on weekends, and they would do "demos" at shopping center malls, or take part in competitions, where their fast-and-loose style "almost always won them trophies."

Then, RC Cola Co. signed on as a sponsor. In demonstrations, Harris and team would pull up to the scene in the Astro van, skateboard decals planted along the side. Then they'd perform on a makeshift half pipe * that nothing like the bolted down apparatus at today's specialized skate parks. At one mall, Harris estimated 4,500 people showed up, some watching from the balconies.

"It was definitely SRO," Harris said. Afterward, fans would approach team members for autographs. "For a kid it was heaven," said Kipnis, who was then known as "Nate the Skate".

The Evanston team's main rival was "Wheels of Progress," a team similar in age and makeup from "kind of the new hot shop from Oak Park," recalled Harris. They were "like the evil guys," Kipnis said, "but we hung out with them afterward."

In fact, the sport was blissfully free-spirited compared to such conventional sports as baseball and football.

Early skateboarders moved "to the beat of a different drummer", said Kipnis. They also had to scout for places to skate. Empty swimming pools and construction sites were ideal locations.

One pool that belonged to Helen Brach, the one-time candy heiress, became a favorite spot for Kipnis and friends until the estate's gardener paid them a visit one day. They left that one fast, scurrying into the nearby woods, Kipnis said.

In late fall, they found a construction site with 14-inch diameter sewer pipes in Evanston. "On cold days we'd have a fire going on inside of them and ride around there," Kipnis said. The team stayed together for three years from 1977 to 1979 until college led to their breakup.

Kipnis now has two children showing interest in the sport, Danny, 9 and Molly, 11.

This article was originally entitled "City once a skateboard epicenter" and was found at http://www.pioneerlocal.com/cgi-bin/ ppo-story/localnews/current/ ev/09-22-05-685895.html

Search this site for more about Skateboard One Illinois Skate Team *