In 1963, the sidewalks of Southern California carried something that had never moved there before. Boys were riding boards—flat pieces of wood with wheels bolted underneath—rolling down driveways, parking lots, and any concrete slope that offered momentum. They called it sidewalk surfing. The wheels were clay mixed with crushed walnut shells, hard and smooth, with tiny ball bearings inside that rattled over every crack.
The boards had no grip, no brakes, and no way to turn sharply. Riders stopped by jumping off, running into something, or falling. Mostly falling. But the seconds of glide before the fall were worth the pain after it.
The first boards were homemade contraptions: roller-skate wheels bolted to rectangular planks. One man looked at them and saw a surfboard without water. His name was Larry Stevenson, and his story begins where no skateboard story should begin—in a state home for children in California. Stevenson was an orphan.
In 1939, when he was nine years old, a visitor came to the home. The visitor was Leo Carrillo, a famous actor who played Zorro’s sidekick in the movies. Carrillo brought gifts: simple wooden scooters with wheels, one for every child. Stevenson stood in line, received his scooter, and held it like the most important thing anyone had ever given him.
It was. Stevenson grew up, attended Venice High School, joined the Navy, and fought in Korea. On the way to the war, his ship stopped in Hawaii, where he saw a beach called Makaha on the western shore of Oahu. He loved the name and stored it in his memory.
He came home, became a lifeguard on Venice Beach, and married Helen, who had been crowned Miss Venice. He started a surfing magazine called Surf Guide. From his lifeguard chair, he watched surfers riding makeshift boards on the boardwalk below—roller-skate wheels, wooden planks, shaped like surfboards. They were trying to surf the concrete the way they surfed the water.
Stevenson went home and started building in his garage. His boards were shaped like surfboards: curved, tapered, with a pointed nose and a rounded tail. He replaced steel wheels with clay wheels, which were smoother and quieter on pavement and felt more like surfing. He called the company Makaha, after the beach he had seen from a Navy ship on the way to a war.
He sold the boards out of his garage, then through surf shops, stores, and catalogs. Demand grew so fast that he could not keep up. He set up a production line and hired workers. He went from a man in a garage to a man running a factory, selling 10 boards a week, then 10,000 boards a day.
Between 1963 and 1965, Makaha sold ten million dollars’ worth of skateboards. The first skateboard contest in history was held in Hermosa Beach, California, in 1963, organized by Makaha. The first professional skateboard team was sponsored by Makaha. The first skateboard to appear in a national magazine was a Makaha.
Life magazine ran a feature. Skateboarder magazine launched in 1964, the first publication dedicated entirely to the sport. The 1965 International Skateboarding Championships were broadcast on national television. Kids who had never seen the ocean were standing on Makaha boards in driveways in Ohio, Texas, Florida, and Maine.
The ride was the point. Then the world said no. Clay wheels could not grip the road. A pebble the size of a pea could stop a wheel dead and throw the rider over the nose of the board.
A crack in the sidewalk could catapult a child face-first into concrete. A wet patch from a garden hose turned a rolling board into a sliding board and a standing child into a falling one. Children were breaking arms, fracturing wrists, cracking collarbones, and splitting chins on curbs. Newspapers ran alarmist stories about skateboarding injuries.
The American Medical Association issued warnings. Schools banned skateboards from their property, then cities followed. More than twenty cities across the United States made it illegal to ride a skateboard on a public sidewalk or road. Police officers could stop a child and confiscate the board.
Insurance companies refused to cover retailers who sold skateboards. Store owners pulled them from shelves. Distributors canceled orders. On a single day in late 1965, Makaha received 75,000 order cancellations.
The phone rang all day. Every call said the same thing: cancel the order, send them back, it is over. Stevenson went back to lifeguarding. The garage was full of unsold boards.
The factory was quiet. By 1966, the industry had ceased to exist on a national level. Skateboarding was dead. But Stevenson kept thinking.
While the boards gathered dust and the cities kept their bans, he sat in his garage and designed something new. He took the back end of a skateboard and curved it upward—a gentle arc at the tail. He called it the kicktail. With a flat board, you could ride and turn.
With a kicktail, you could lift the front wheels off the ground, pivot on the rear wheels, and pop the board into the air with your feet. Turns became sharper, stops became controlled, and tricks became possible. Every ollie, every kickflip, every aerial ever performed by a skateboarder is only possible because Larry Stevenson curved the back of a board upward in a garage in Santa Monica while the rest of the world thought skateboarding was finished. He patented the kicktail in 1969.
A few competitors paid royalties; most refused. And when skateboarding came back, it came back as something completely different. In 1972, a surfer from Virginia named Frank Nasworthy discovered polyurethane wheels. The pebble that stopped a clay wheel dead bounced off urethane.
The crack that launched a rider off a clay board barely registered. The wet patch that turned clay into ice was manageable. Everything that had killed skateboarding—every pebble, every crack, every broken arm, every insurance cancellation, every city ban—was solved by a different material on the wheel. Skateboarding exploded again, bigger than before, in empty swimming pools, concrete drainage ditches, purpose-built skate parks, and half-pipes.
The Z-Boys of Dogtown—Tony Alva, Jay Adams, Stacy Peralta—became the most famous athletes in youth culture. Skateboarding became a sport, an industry, a lifestyle, a billion-dollar global phenomenon, and eventually an Olympic event. And every new board on every shelf had a kicktail. Almost none of the manufacturers paid for it.
Stevenson spent everything on lawsuits—his savings, his business profits, his future. He fought in court for years. In the end, his patent was ruled invalid. The design that appeared on every skateboard in the world was declared public property.
Stevenson owned nothing. The skaters who rode his boards became legends. The Z-Boys, whose names are in the Skateboarding Hall of Fame and whose stories are in documentaries and movies, started on Makaha boards. The most iconic skaters in the history of the sport began their careers on boards built by an orphan in a garage.
Stevenson was inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame in 2010. The citation called his kicktail an advancement of control and safety on par with the urethane wheel. Skate historian Dale Smith said that the conceptual design and dimensions of today’s modern skate deck essentially mimic Stevenson’s patented drawings from the late 1960s. Stevenson died on March 26, 2012, at the age of 81, at the Santa Monica UCLA Medical Center, a few miles from Venice Beach where he had been a lifeguard, a few blocks from the garage where he built the first Makaha skateboard, and a few minutes from the sidewalk where it all started.
Incorporated magazine wrote his obituary and described him in one sentence: he was the California guy. Every skateboard sold in every skate shop in every country in the world carries his design. The kicktail is on Tony Hawk’s board, on every kid’s board at every skate park, and on every Olympic skateboarder’s board. Larry Stevenson’s design is on every board in every country, and his name is on none of them.
The orphan boy who received a scooter from a movie star grew up and gave the world something bigger. The world took it, used it, put it on a hundred million boards, and never looked back at the garage in Santa Monica where a lifeguard who married a beauty queen bent the back of a board upward and changed the way humans move on concrete. That was Makaha.
That was Larry Stevenson.