Earlier this evening I battled rush-hour traffic to attend a meeting of the Round Rock City Council. I joined forces with James Juneau and Darrell Lowrance to advocate for skateboarding. The city council members seemed very receptive to our input and we were invited to further discuss the matter in the hallway with the Assistant Director of RR PARD. As we walked out, a police officer gave us a thumbs-up on our presentation.

Everyone we talked to seemed genuinely enthusiastic about doing the right thing to support Round Rock’s skateboarding youth. The next step is to gather up Round Rock skaters in a steering committee to help provide input to PARD as they move forward with the skatepark process. Those interested in participating in this committee should contact Darrell Lowrance @ (512) 388.7204.

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I received this note from the Round Rock parent who’s spearheading the concrete skatepark lobbying campaign up there:

It’s critical that as many people show up as possible at this meeting. As
you can see in the meeting agenda (10.A.1) they will be discussing the
authorization of the engineering contract for the Greater Lake Creek Park
project, which is where the skatepark is to be built. It will be fresh in
the mayor’s mind, plus it might be our last chance to stop the madness.

Thanks for your support,

Darrell

512.388.7204

The meeting Darrell is referencing is to take place at the Round Rock City Hall on THURSDAY, APRIL 28, 2005, 7:00 P.M. The address is 221 EAST MAIN STREET, Round Rock and here is a map. Darrell encourages those interested in speaking at the meeting to arrive 10 minutes early to fill out a speaker’s card. He encourages skateboard advocates of all ages to attend and speak in support of Round Rock building a concrete public skatepark. People showing up at this meeting is going to represent the proverbial urethane hitting the road in the public skatepark process.

UPDATED

Hoping to provide a public skateboarding facility for area youth, the city of Round Rock, just a few minutes north of Austin, is about to embark on a plan to purchase prefabricated skate structures from a playground company. According to an email from Park Development Specialist David Buzzell, their budget for the skatepark component of the Greater Lake Creek Park project is $110,000. This is less than the cost of a single jungle-gym playscape structure, yet more than many concrete public skatepark implementations. The Vancouver, Canada, skate plaza which opened earlier this year cost $250,000 (Canadian) for a > 25,000 sq. ft. facility that is state-of-the-art. The newly-opened Carnation, Wa, public skatepark cost less than $100,000.

You can contact the decision makers before this is set in prefabricated sheetmetal:

Nyle Maxwell- mayor@round-rock.tx.us

Tom Nielson- council1_nielson@round-rock.tx.us

Alan McGraw- council2_mcgraw@round-rock.tx.us

Joe Clifford- council3_clifford@round-rock.tx.us

Scot Knight- council4_knight@round-rock.tx.us

Scott Rhode- council5_rhode@round-rock.tx.us

Gary Coe- council6_coe@round-rock.tx.us

Mary Jane Todd (Round Rock Leader Newspaper General Manager)- mj@rrleader.com

Mike Eddelman (Round Rock Leader Newspaper Managing Editor)- editor@rrleader.com

UPDATE
A parent of a Round Rock skateboarder has stepped forward to spearhead this lobbying effort. His name is Darrell Lowrance and if you are interested in helping him persuade the Round Rock city council to reconsider this misguided decision, you can contact him at djlhome[at]gmail.com or 512.388.7204. The Round Rock budget for Parks and Recreation Capital Improvement Projects (CIP) for the next four years totals approximately $36.3 million. That absolutely dwarfs Austin’s plans for CIP in the next 4 years. There’s no way they can claim with a straight face that they don’t have the money to build a real public skatepark.

Unlike Round Rock, the Dallas suburb of Allen, Tx. made a real committment to the skateboarders in its community and is nearing completion of its public skatepark. The 38,000 sq. foot concrete facility promises to be the largest public skatepark in Texas when opened and will be the first public skatepark in the Dallas area. The city of Allen, however, is planning to charge $12.00 per day for access, which blurrs the distinction of a private vs. public facility. Regardless, this type of facility is exactly the kind of thing that helps distinguish a suburb as a real magnet for families.

Carter Dennis, of Skaters for Public Skateparks and the Sk8 San Antonio organizations, has posted photos online of the Allen skatepark still under construction.

Thasher has a couple of new videos coming out. Here is a trailer for something called Beer Helmet that looks promising. And here is a trailer for the much anticipated King of the Road video. If you’re only gonna check out one of these two trailers, go for Beer Helmet. Half of the KOTR trailer is spent on titles.

Jason Lee and Mike Vallely were in town for a contest at the Jeff Phillips skatepark. It was something like 1990. The skatepark locals were in full force drinking beer and skating late into the night. Out in the parking lot, the two pros had an impromptu ollie-to-manual contest that took them across the whole parking lot, out into the street, and down the block. Except for those mega-manuals, I can’t recall anything else they did that night. It was a long time ago, so it shouldn’t be surprising that my recollection of that evening would be hazy.

One moment that does cut through the haze, however, was something a friend of mine did. We weren’t so much friends as guys who were in the same group of people who skated together. And within this group, Donald D (aka Double D, Donald Diederich, and DD), was in the upper echelon. Shit. His skating put him in the upper echelon of any group of skaters. Street-skater gone vert, he was an all-terrain destroyer. On this evening, like so many others, he rolled around the park with a 40-oz’er of cheap beer. Who knows how intoxicated he was. He set the bottle down, rolled back from the open loading dock doors and gave it a few hard pushes, knees bent for an ollie. The picture at the left details the loading dock doors I’m speaking of. Only on this occaision, it’s dark outside. That photo, by the way, is not of Donald D. Before reaching the edge of the loading dock, he snapped his ollie and cleared the 6-ft.-wide sidewalk below. As he flew over the railing, he turned backside and bonked his front truck on it while rotating 180. He landed it to fakie and rolled away into the dark. The same dark where Jason Lee and Mike Vallely were holding their longest manual contest.

First-try makes were a Donald D hallmark. They had to be because the stuff he was doing didn’t come equipped with an escape route. For instance, he’d start out his vert runs with a drop-in frontside revert. That’s the kind of trick where anything less than 100% committment sends you to your head in the flatbottom, which is where he metaphorically finds himself now. Donald Diederich is serving an 8-year mandatory prison sentence related to drug trafficking. Four years down, four to go. The best I can make out is that someone got popped on a possession charge, the cops offered a plea bargain deal for naming a supplier, and so they worked their way along with each link in the case turning over on the next guy to avoid doing time. As Donnie describes it, when they got to him, he wasn’t going to snitch and the case against him was so meritless, he decided to go ahead and face it in court. Sadly, he didn’t have as good an attorney as ex-Dallas Cowboy Nate Newton had, and he got hit with a minimum of 8 years in an Ohio prison.

As bad as prison can be, it sounds like Donnie is making the best of things. He’s got a guitar and he’s playing in three different bands. He’s got a friend named ’shotgun’ who he hangs out with in the yard while strumming his guitar. He’s working on a college degree in restaurant and hotel management and has found buddhism. Things aren’t entirely blissful in the lockup, however. As he was writing a letter to me the other day, the prison guards were stripping down his cell searching for contraband. Confidently, he assured me in the letter that he “didn’t know what they’re looking for, but I don’t have shit.” I doubt I’ll ever ask him about the anal rapings and other tidings that are normally associated with the prison atmosphere. I got enough of those stories from J. Finley.

The Double D Contest

In the meantime, I’m launching a small contest in the hopes of bringing a smile to Donnie, even if for just a moment. It’s an easy one. If you wanna participate, just create a graphical homage to Double D, shoot a digital photo of it, and email it to me (seth[at]austinpublicskatepark.org). Feel free to be as simple, creative, or elaborate as you like. A chalk scribbling of “Double D Lives!” on a sidewalk is fine. As is the same slogan tattooed on your forehead. Austin Skate Notes readers from around the world are encouraged to submit an unlimited number of entries. After two weeks, I’ll pick the best work and mail the creator a Mike Crum skateboard deck and an ultra-limited edition Banana Farm t-shirt in long or shortsleeve in either medium or large size. Then I’ll also mail Donald D a copy of all the entries.

Oh yeah, Donnie wanted me to extend shout-outs to the Bobans and Lee Brooks.

The Banana Farm is soon to be the benefactor of another local artist, Stephen Schwake. Mister Schwake lives close to the ramp complex in northern Austin—reportedly within several hundred yards—and is now a regular at BF sessions.

Banana Farm resident Travis Burk spied a drawing that Schwake penned on his grip tape and saw that it perfectly captured the Banana Farm feel.

On the spot, Burk asked Schwake to paint a similar image on the tall, curved wall to the right of the escalator. Schwake says we’ll soon see a painting of a five-foot-tall monkey hanging from a tree, grasping a banana-skateboard in its feet. The count of local craftsmen slated to improve the ramp now numbers two.

Several young artists leaving a nearby coffee shop passed by the ramp just as Burk asked Schwake to create the piece. The struggling artists, realizing their missed opportunity, became so maddened with envy that they mobbed and attacked Burk. From his hospital bed Burk told reporters that the hooligans painted a moustache on his upper lip and spelled out "bourgeois" on his forehead. The ruffian-artists are unidentified and are still at large.

I’m going to start this piece with a reference to years past not because I yearn for those days, but in order to give some context to the topic I’ll eventually get to: the game of SKATE I witnessed in Peyton’s carport.

My entry point to the world of skateboarding was riding a Rodney "Mutt" Mullen freestyle deck in 1985. I had seen the "Bones Brigade Video Show" at Murasaki Sports in Harajuku and had become fascinated with all the technical tricks available in freestyle skateboarding. I’d practice everyday outside my apartment building and also use the board for my daily transportation needs. On sundays I’d go down to Harajauku where the street is shut down and people dance in 1950’s clothes. Some other freestylers would also gather there and we’d practice together learning tricks like handstands, pogos, and a bunch of stuff I don’t even remember the names of.

Over the years I evolved from freestyle to street to ramp to not skating and then back to ramp again. It was my fondness for technical freestyle trickery, however, that really inspired me to check out the game of SKATE at Peyton’s carport friday night.

The competition broke down like this… Flat ground. 40 people paid $5 each to enter. The order was chosen at random. One guy does a trick. The next guy in order has to reproduce it. If he makes it, the next guy in line has to match it. When a skater fails to match the trick, then he is assigned a letter from the word "SKATE". The next skater in line then gets to attempt a trick without risk of earning a letter.

 

I saw everything: fakie ollie double kickflips (aka switch nollie double kickflips), bigspins, impossible tail grabs, bennihanas, no comply fingerflips, you name it. Since there was a ‘no repeat’ rule in effect, as the competition wore on, the remaining competitors were having difficulty introducing new tricks. At one point Shortbus threw down an ollie cannonball. Travis Burke, on announcing duty, frequently was without words to describe the tricks.

In the end, last man standing was Jon Erik who took home the pot of $200. Shortbus came in second, and I believe Andy Mack was third, but I could be wrong on that. Jason Schmale told me that was the best contest he had ever been to. Michael Sieben said he’s going to write his Thrasher column about it. I couldn’t find anyone who wasn’t planning to return next month.

Later on I went to see Warwulf at Emo’s. Good show. Storm the Tower also played. I talked to a DJ friend of mine named Mike Rodriguez. He beckoned for me and Kevin to come hang out at his house some time. He said, "All I do is have fun." After that pitch, we were sold.

The following afternoon, Adam, Dan and Shannon (from Lake Charles), John, Carjack, and I met up at a spot we wanted to check out where someone had laid concrete trannies in a ditch. It rode really well, but I think the concrete they used was defective because it was disintegrating as we skated it. Almost as bad as packed dirt. We followed up that session with some rides at the Town Lake Slab, then back to the Banana Farm for an evening session.

Here are the photos.