Denise Danielson was introduced to skateboarding in the mid-1970s when she was 14 years-old while living in Louisiana near New Orleans. I’m so pleased that we had the opportunity to connect because her experience is not the typical SoCal origin story! Denise would become a pro competitive pool and bowl skater in the early 1980s with sponsors like Z, Mad Rats, Vans, and Tracker, and she chose an unconventional path to get there.
Denise had three younger brothers and one of them and his friend saw a skateboarding ad in a magazine, most likely by G&S. “They decided to each order a skateboard via mail. They were flat fiberglass decks, and of course the big deal at the time was they had these fancy new urethane wheels! Anyway, once my brother and his friend got their boards, several of the neighborhood kids, including me, decided we wanted one too. While we were in Louisiana, it was just a casual playing in the driveway and riding around on the local streets kind of thing.”
In our conversation on January 31, 2024, Denise noted that she was smaller for her age, and with all of the skaters in her neighbourhood being boys, “I had to hold my own.” One of her favourite tricks was a moving handstand on her skateboard going down the block and down a hill. It was curious because she couldn’t hold a handstand on flat ground, but the momentum of the skateboard helped, and she had briefly pursued gymnastics. There’s photos of Denise performing her handstands while visiting cousins in Bellingham, WA who had a gentle hill near their house.
Two years later, in 1976 after Denise and her family moved to Niagara Falls, NY, “my brother met a local guy who had a small ramp, and that started an interest in ramp skating, but in truth, we didn’t get much opportunity to ride the ramp so it was still mostly just learning tricks on flat ground and occasionally taking on one of the local hills (we didn’t have hills in Louisiana, so this was new).”
And then Denise made a bold decision, moving across the country to Western Washington, to “live with my grandparents for my last year of high school, establishing residency in Washington state for the purposes of attending the University of Washington at in-state tuition prices. I continued skating, doing more downhill and slalom since there were a lot of streets that made that possible…
Several classmates kept telling me about another classmate of ours that I ‘had to meet’ because he was seriously into skateboarding, but it wasn’t until just prior to graduation that I finally met him. That changed everything. By that point, I had had a fairly big wipeout at speed and had pretty much sworn off of downhill, but this classmate was plugged in to the vertical skate scene and knew who was who in the Pacific Northwest, where the ramps were, etc.”
Denise recalled how there “was one skatepark over in Eastern Washington and then a new one opened in Olympia, which was midway between where I was living with my grandparents near Grays Harbor, and Seattle where I was going to be going to school at the UW in the fall, so I started going there and getting to know the local scene. When I started my Freshman year at the UW in September, I discovered there was a skateboard shop, Ride-On on University Ave, and one of the top skaters in the Pacific Northwest at the time was the manager. I started hanging out there and continued skating at the Olympia skatepark when I could get there.”
But something exciting happened at the end of Denise’s Freshman year, when she decided to take a risk that ultimately changed her trajectory. Denise joined another female skater named Christy, “and the two of us decided to take a road trip to SoCal. She was mostly interested in meeting up with a guy who had moved back down there after being part of the Pacific Northwest scene. I wanted to see how I compared with the SoCal women skaters.”
What was supposed to be a two-week visit got sidetracked because of some jarring injuries that left massive bruises on Denise’s hips and required some healing, so obviously Denise needed more time to skate! Denise had a good attitude about injuries – she figured that if you’re not falling once in awhile, you’re not trying hard, so injuries were an accepted part of the experience.
Before the injury, “we had made a visit to the Big O skatepark in Orange, where I met Gerry Hurtado. Gerry made it a point to talk to me and encouraged me to ‘stick around, you could turn pro.’ By the end of our two weeks ‘visit,’ my friend and I were up in the Marina/Venice area. I made an impulse decision — not normal for me, but one I have never regretted — to stay in SoCal for the summer and let my friend return home alone. I didn’t have a job lined up yet for the summer in Washington, so I figured I could do that in SoCal and will forever be grateful that I was just young and naive enough to make that leap of faith!”
The experience being practically homeless wasn’t easy for Denise. She was 19 years-old but had a youthful appearance and looked closer to 14. “My recollection is that Dennis Ogden at Marina skatepark suspected I was a runaway, so when a 14-year-old girl who was a runaway showed up at the skatepark one day, he suggested she talk to me. Long story short, I eventually convinced her to contact an aunt of hers who lived in the area, and that aunt showed up and took both of us in for the summer.”
Denise emphasized to the runaway that someone out there was worried about her and that she needed to reach out. Her concern for the teen ended up leading to a rent-free situation at the girl’s aunt’s house, and she spent most of the summer at the Marina del Rey skatepark, with occasional visits to other parks.
Denise was grateful for the place to stay because right before her friend Christy returned to Olympia, WA, someone broke into the car stealing her last $50. “I had nothing except the clothes on my back, my skateboard, and no job, no nothing. Fortunately, one of the managers at the park agreed to lend me a little bit of money… we’re talking like 20 dollars.”
So, Christy left SoCal and Denise temporarily stayed on at a local skater’s house a in Venice but there was an incident that left her feeling unimpressed and vulnerable. The host evolved into a predator after a night of hard partying, and while she avoided the worst, Denise was wise to extract herself from that environment. And, after a bit of rough living for an “interesting couple of weeks,” Denise landed a safe place with the girl’s aunt and a waitressing job.
“At the end of the summer, I was getting ready to leave to head back to Seattle for my Sophomore year at UW, and Dennis ‘Polar Bear’ Agnew approached me, suggesting I show up at a big Pro/Am contest that was going to be happening in San Jose in October.” Denise was encouraged, so she completed a fall semester in Seattle, then blasted back down to San Jose for the October competition.
“I had planned to compete as an amateur, but Polar Bear and a couple other people convinced me to enter as a Pro, in part because otherwise Brenda Devine was a shoe-in for first place, and I was the only other woman there who had a chance to really challenge her. Polar Bear also gave me a new Z-Products board to ride in the comp. As it turned out, I fell in the comp and Brenda did win, but afterwards, as I was preparing to leave to return to Seattle, Polar Bear pulled me aside. He had just spoken with Z and told me that if I returned to Seattle, they could send me a board from time to time, but if I moved to SoCal, they would sponsor me as a pro skater.”
Denise weighed her options but “I was kind of disillusioned with school and realizing I was in college because that was what was expected of me and what I’d always been ‘programmed’ for, not because I had any clear objective. I figured, ‘How many times in my life am I going to get an offer like this?’ I returned to Seattle to finish up that current term, then withdrew / dropped out of college and moved to SoCal shortly after the new year. I moved to the Marina del Rey / Venice area, and Marina del Rey was my home skatepark. I competed in the Gold Cup comp series that year (1980).”
Contest results from Skateboarder mag (November 1979 & January 1980), and overall Gold Cup pro standings in 1980 from Skat’nNews (December 2, 1980.
In our conversation, Denise said that this move was one of the best decisions that she made because it completely broke with all expectation that she had to follow a regimented timeline to graduate high school, go to college, get a degree, etc. There was some parental concern, and one uncle suggested he would disown her, although not seriously, but Denise was completely unphased. And being in California, around unconventional skateboarders compared to “white bread, suburbia USA” was a culture shock and learning experience.
Denise recalled seeing a very young celebrity skater at Marina del Rey with long black hair right down to his waist, playing Pac-Man in the arcade asking his dad for a joint who responded, “‘You just had a joint,’ and my mind is blown. This is not part of my reality – these are preteen kids.” Denise even remembered hanging out with the same skater in central L.A., going to a condemned warehouse where he was living, finding it completely alien and eye-opening compared to her upbringing. But she noticed that they seemed happy following their path, and that had impact.
Denise embraced the scene and now all she needed was a competitive strategy, which was a learning curve! Denise recalled how, “I think I came in last place (near the bottom, anyway) in the first comp, at Oasis skatepark, because I was trying to axle drop and the coping on that pool was higher than I was used to and I hung up on the coping and took a header into the pool… separated my shoulder and probably gave myself a concussion but went back to the top of the pool and tried again. I don’t think any other girls were even trying to drop in at the time, so if I had done it clean and followed with a clean run, I would have done well. But that’s a good example of the error I seemed to make consistently in comps — unveiling tricks that I didn’t really have fully mastered yet and risking falls.”
But with every contest, Denise saw improvement and was motivated to challenge herself. In fact, she took 3rd place at Marina del Rey for the #4 Gold Cup contest behind Pattie Hoffman (who was dominating the pro category) and Cara-beth Burnside, ahead of Cindy Whitehead, Sue Smith and Joanna Field. Denise noted that there were some friendly rivalries but mostly supportive. She also acknowledged connecting with skateboarders, Gale Webb and Webb’s cousin, Gale Springer.
“Cara-beth and I used to skate together. She was a little bit younger than me – I think she like 14 or 15, and I was like 19 / 20, but we used to skate together… There was Sue Smith, and she was even younger, I think only like 12.” And it sounded like everyone was motivating each other to improve, for example, Denise recalled that Sue was one of the first girls to do a Miller flip a couple of times during a session – “If I remember correctly, we were at the Lakeside skatepark, which was her home park, and a couple of us were working on frontside inverts We all at least tried the Miller flip, too, after watching Sue do it. I don’t think anyone else besides Sue managed to land it but she definitely did – low on the wall, but clean.”
Denise shared that Pattie was likely getting direction from her Variflex team coach to only perform tricks that she could consistently land, and avoid tricks she hadn’t yet mastered, in contrast to Denise and some of the amateurs like Sue and Cara-beth. “I pushed the limits more and included harder and newer tricks, but often fell.” It was hard to resist not attempting a new trick that had the potential to push her into the top position, but eventually Denise started to hold back a little and leave out tricks like the frontside slider rock-n-roll that she had pulled off a few times in practice but wasn’t consistent enough with to be certain of doing it clean in competition.
Pattie Hoffman recognized Denise and her competitive efforts. At the combi-pool in Upland (the final contest of the Gold Cup series), Pattie “said to me afterwards that she thought I should have won. It was the first comp where I had put enough pressure on her that she had a fall in one of her runs, and I had a clean run with some much more challenging tricks, including a couple of drop-ins into the square pool (which I had committed to doing when a visiting Kiwi skater said to me that ‘no girl would ever drop in’ to that pool).” Denise remembered the format allowed for the lowest score of three runs to be tossed, and then the remaining two were averaged, and Pattie’s average just edged her out even with Denise’s top score. Denise appreciated Pattie’s words but was completely content to have finished so close to the top.
“At the end of 1980, Z helped pay for a trip back to Niagara Falls, where my parents and brothers still lived, so I could spend Christmas with them. The ‘catch’ was I had to visit a couple of the skateparks back there — Cherry Hill in New Jersey, and Apple skatepark in Columbus, Ohio. It was a trippy experience being a ‘visiting pro’ and having locals asking me to sign their T-shirts and skateboards! Anyway, that was a fun trip, but things were nearing the end.”
Besides Z, Denise was sponsored by Mad Rats, Vans, and Tracker but it was more about the sponsors covering the cost of gear like shoes and boards, and skatepark memberships, to enable her to skate and progress, than as a lucrative pursuit – it was waitressing that paid the bills.
And then the industry downfall had a major effect on skateparks, with insurance issues forcing many to shut down, so by 1981 Denise only skated a few contests. And, with Marina del Rey closing and Del Mar being a trek from Venice, Denise suspected the opportunities were limited.
Denise experienced the height of skatepark popularity, a magic period from 1979-1981, so she preferred skating pools and bowls compared to flatland streetstyle, even if, as Brenda Devine said, there was no money in it for the girls, or the guys for that matter compared to the mid-1970s boom.
Plus, there were increasingly too few girls to form a contest category, but Denise wasn’t phased about competing against the guys. In fact, at a contest at the Olympia Skate Park in WA, Denise came in 3rd against the guys – “that was like almost better than my comp results against the women in California!” And when Denise said that she couldn’t believe her success, her buddy who came in second declared, “I can believe it!”
And then along came street style, which was growing in popularity. “I just wasn’t as excited by street style, and by now, I had been in California long enough to establish residency for college, and I was ready to return to school. I had never intended to drop out permanently, I just wanted to be more intentional about it when I did go back. So, I applied to UCLA and entered as a transfer student from the University of Washington in early 1982. I knew myself well enough to realize that if I didn’t hang up the skateboard completely, it would prove to be too much of a distraction from my studies, so I reluctantly put the board away.”
Denise needed to focus on her studies, although she did have a session at Del Mar for a day in 1983 when a guy that Denise was dating wanted to see her skate. “I went to one or two more events over the next few years as a spectator, and I’ve got to admit that to this day, every time I see a ramp or local skatepark, I am tempted… but I am now 64 and I really don’t need to break anything!”
Denise continued to pursue active and adventurous activities, discovering rock climbing as a student at UCLA, which became her new addiction. At the time, rock climbing was still a heavily male-dominated activity, and Denise noted that it was only with the introduction of rock climbing gyms in the 1990s that it seemed to become more accessible for women. Denise was there, pushing the boundaries, and she still rock climbs today. Denise also enjoys skiing, hiking and yoga, and is based out of Reno, NV.
Now here is a request from Denise… Does anyone have footage of a television episode that was filmed by a major network (like NBC or ABC) in the mid/late summer of 1980, possibly 1981 at Marina del Rey and remember seeing a female skater in it. I’ve scoured YouTube and haven’t had any luck, but this show featured Denise and she has never seen her own feature!
The filmmakers, “showed up at the park one day wanting to do a piece on a girl skater. I wasn’t there yet that day, but the manager at the park suggested they wait for me… I did show up an hour or so later and he pointed me to them. I thought it was going to be a 1 – 2 minute spot on a larger show, but apparently they used more of what they filmed than I had expected, and it ended up being the better part of a 1/2 hr segment. I only found out it had aired when I was on a bus headed to Marina del Rey and this woman and her kids kept staring at me… and when I got up to get off the bus, they asked ‘Didn’t we see you on TV last night?’ When I got into the skatepark, the manager told me he’d seen the episode the night before. I’m sure that film probably still exists in someone’s warehouse somewhere, but I have no idea how to go about finding it.”
Fingers crossed that someone source this footage, and thanks again Denise for your willingness to share your skateboarding journey!
Reference:
- Danielson, Denise. Personal interview. January 31, 2024.
- Danielson, Denise. Email correspondence. January 30, 2024 & March 2, 2024.
Womxn Skateboard History 