Page 24 - THE ENDLESS WAVE | Skateboarding, Death & Spirituality

THE ENDLESS WAVE | PART ONE
“Thrasher magazine has had its detractors,” Mr. Brooke said. “Fausto and Thrasher, had no problem being very — how can I put this? — gnarly. There are swear words; there is a whole violent side to it. There are a lot of parents who forbid their children to read Thrasher.”
Fausto Vitello was born in Buenos Aires on Aug. 7, 1946, and came to the United States with his family as a boy. He grew up in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco and earned a bachelor’s degree in Spanish from San Francisco State University.
Mr. Vitello is survived by his wife, the former Gwynn Rose, and their children, Tony and Sally, all of Hillsborough; a sister, Lidia, of Elburn, Ill.; and his mother, Aurora, of San Francisco.
Today, skateboarding is a $2 billion industry, according to Mr. Brooke. And as the sport has been embraced by mainstream culture, including ESPN and the X Games, its roughest edges have been smoothed away.
This did not sway Mr. Vitello from his original vision. “Fausto never cleaned up,” Mr. Brooke said. “You open up Thrasher and it’s still guys drinking and shooting guns.”
Next up is Warren Bolster who was both an incredible photographer and editor of SkateBoarder Magazine. I could write at least four chapters about my ex- periences with Warren. Like Fausto, Warren died in 2006 and he too died at the same age — 59. In fact, they both died within 5 months of each other. Warren’s drive to build skateboarding during its second boom in the mid-70s almost took him out.
Unlike most of the people that I am discussing in this article, Warren Bolster wasn’t just someone I met briefly or conducted an interview with. I actually worked very closely with him for a period of a year. We worked on a book called The Legacy of Warren Bolster.
When I first met Warren, he was battling his addictions. He was also quite a curmudgeon. He had a temper and he wasn’t the easiest guy to work with. At
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