Board and restless

Possibly inspired by The District’s Halloween issue about tall tales and urban legends in Long Beach, reporter Mike Horelick revisits the Signal Hill downhill skating competitions of the 1970s, in today’s Los Angeles Times.

There’s some awesome stuff here. Horelick discovers that after skater Terry Nails cheated death by getting hit by a car and living, he checked himself out of the hospital and came back to the races with a bottle of Jack Daniels.

(Nails remembered for us that the car which hit him was a ‘51 Chevy–but he forgot about the booze.) That detail really makes clear: it was the 1970s.

Horelick also discovers that after racer Tina Trefethen crashed in 1978, she was so badly injured that she had to have a lung removed. Her crash was the one that made sponsors start edging toward the door, making for a very quick, sad end to an uproarious contest that Horelick calls “the world’s first downhill skateboard race.”

Word of advice to the guys at the Times, though: in Long Beach, it’s Redondo Avenue–not Redondo Boulevard.

Tags: California, downhill skateboarding, Jim O'Mahoney, Long Beach, Los Angeles Times, Mike Horelick, Redondo Avenue, Signal Hill, Signal Hill Speed Run, Southern California, Terry Nails, The District Weekly, Theo Douglas, Tina Trefethen