Page 23 - THE ENDLESS WAVE | Skateboarding, Death & Spirituality

THE ENDLESS WAVE | PART ONE
The apparent cause was a heart attack, his family said.
Mr. Vitello was revered by skateboarders (and reviled by their parents) as a founder and the president of Thrasher magazine, which for a quarter-century has been the rebellious bible of the skateboarding subculture. He was also a founder of Independent Trucks, a leading manufacturer of skateboard equip- ment, clothing and accessories.
“He’s the godfather of punk-rock skateboarding,” Michael Brooke, the publisher of Concrete Wave, a skateboarding magazine based in Toronto, said in a tele- phone interview yesterday.
Published monthly, Thrasher has a circulation of about 175,000. Its Web site, thrashermagazine.com, features articles, interviews and, for school-age readers, a selection of downloadable term papers “to free up more time to skate.”
Skateboarding has been around since the early 1900s when some thrill-seeking child first nailed a two-by-four to a roller skate. Conditions improved in the late 1950s when the first commercial skateboards were marketed, and again in the early 70s, when urethane wheels and better boards made fancy maneuvers possible.
By the mid-70s, skateboarding was hugely popular among suburban boys, who performed in empty swimming pools and in specially built skateboard parks. By the end of the decade, however, many towns, concerned about liability, razed their parks, and the sport went into decline.
But it was still possible to skate in the streets, using features of the urban land- scape — curbs, steps, railings, benches — as launching pads from which to take flight. Mr. Vitello, a devoted skateboarder who had founded Independent Trucks in 1978, capitalized on the fledgling sport of street skating, starting Thrasher with several associates in 1981.
With its mantra “skate and destroy,” the magazine embodied the punk-rock ethos of the day, exhorting readers to devote their lives to their art. And if the pursuit of art happened to involve some imbibing and inhaling, it implied, that was all right, too.
17