Word: skateboards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Leave it to California to take its own skateboard-that simple, sometimes dangerous and remarkably maneuverable device-and improve it. Improve it? Well make it part of the highway culture, anyway. With a 1¼-h.p. motor attached at the rear, a hand-held throttle that can act as a kind of brake and a 12-oz. gas tank, the new Motoboards, as they're called, can move a rider at up to 50 m.p.h. and cruise at 20 m.p.h. for about half an hour. They are already selling well both in the U.S. and abroad. "The beauty...
...impetus behind the new craze is an improved variety of skate. Borrowing the technology of precision ball-bearing polyurethane skateboard wheels, the new skate wheels offer the wearer an extraordinary maneuverability. Unlike the noisy, steel clamp-ons that kids used to wear, they are smooth and light, gliding over cracked pavement with silent grace and dispelling-deceptively-the fear of falling. Aficionados compare the sensation to that of skiing or surfing. The thrills are not exactly cheap: an assembled pair of wheels, skates and boots cost from $60 to $150, and customized ones can run as high...
...group of about 30 people that I have worked with again and again. I expect to work with them for the next ten years. We were the generation that discovered that alienation is funny. We found that if you take an existentialist, add a hot Camaro, a skateboard and a lot of dope, you have a working, vital existentialist who can get a job at the National Lampoon...
...SKATEBOARD...
...injury total, projected by Washington's Consumer Product Safety Commission, is double last year's and really moves skateboarding high up there on the list of hazardous leisure activities. For the first time, it is expected to result in more injuries than nonprofessional football (370,000) and will rank second only to bicycling accidents (with 90 million cyclists, 1.2 million injuries are anticipated for 1977). Fatalities are still a skateboarding rarity; the commission has noted only 24 in the past four years, the result of head injuries or collision with automobiles. The major causes of all those accidents...