Category: 1970s
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Joanna Field
Joanna Field is from Pacific Palisades and was a skateboarder who worked at Marina Del Rey skatepark back in the late 1970s. Photo: James Takakura Joanna was good friends with all the regulars, including Christian Hosoi, Jay Adams, among others. She even used her creative talent to hand-draw a fun Christmas card (left) for the…
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Child Prodigies 1970s
Child prodigy skateboarders are fascinating, especially today in this highly visible realm of competition leading up to the Olympics. Back in the 1960s, since skateboarding was essentially branded a child’s toy, the majority of skaters were kids, while in the 1970s most of the sponsored pros were teenagers. There’s several names of youngsters that appear…
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Kerry Cooper
Kerry Cooper (Germain) was a 1970s skater who is mostly under the radar, but her name occasionally appeared in contest results, starting back in 1976. At the Ventura 2nd Annual Skateboard Championships, Kerry placed 2nd in freestyle behind Laura Thornhill for Girls 11-14, ahead of Tracy Alaway, Bonnie Kaplan, and Gloria Blanchard. Contests were still…
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Janet Church
Janet Church (Atkins) from Anaheim, CA was documented by her little brother, Dave Church (RIP), who was also an active skateboarder, carving the Fish Bowl in 1977, which is such a stylish and iconic photo. Janet was sponsored by Hobie at the time, rocking her Vans shoes and Hang-Ten socks, and I would love to…
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Denise Danielson
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…
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Debbi Bennett
Skateboarding needs people like Debbi Bennett of Hollywood, CA! In 1978, at age 24, Debbi was behind a petition called “FreeSkate L.A.” when she learned that her city council was considering making skateboarding illegal – not even allowing skateboarding in one’s own driveway let alone a street or sidewalk. Debbi wasn’t convinced that these laws…
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Bonnie Votaw
Bonnie Votaw was a child prodigy skater from the 1970s and had the opportunity to travel to England in 1978 at the age of 8, along with friend, Jacqueline Jones, age 14. Photos of the two girls from a skateboard demo at the Mad Dog bowl on Old Kent Road in London were printed in…
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Kelly Moran
Kelly Moran of Burbank, California was a skateboarder in the late 1970s, who had connections in the film industry considering that her sister played “Joanie Cunningham” in the sitcom, Happy Days. At age 19, Kelly became known as the “Skateboard Girl” for the soda brand Royal Crown (RC) Cola, appearing in commercials and advertisements, like…
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Judith Cohen
The original draft of this post from June 12, 2023, was an attempt to alert the skateboarding world that I was looking for Judith, as my internet sleuthing for one “Judy Cohen” was unsuccessful. And sure enough, a random Google search led Judith to my site and thankfully prompted her to write. Judith Cohen described…
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Peggy Oki
Peggy Oki almost needs no introduction considering her legacy as the lone female skateboarding member of the gritty Zephyr team, a Venice Beach crew which formed in the mid-1970s and took on mythic proportions thanks to the 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys (dir. Stacy Peralta) followed by a fictionalized version, Lords of Dogtown in 2005…
Womxn Skateboard History 