Dodgerland

by Michael Fallon

  For Tom Fallon, 1977 was a tale of two realities. Despite the constantly dire economic predictions, Fallon’s hardware store was slowly, incrementally growing and providing a reasonable living for his family. Tom Fallon had come to California with an ability to work hard. And he had passed on the same work ethic to his children. All through 1977, as Tom’s sons Jim and Ken settled into the business, the three men were a whirling force of activity. If they weren’t busy building shelving and counters, moving truckloads of stock from one spot to another, shifting and selling and moving and transferring and expanding it all in the endless search for profitability, they were plotting bigger and better things. When the store became pressed for space, Tom checked around and discovered the owner of the business behind his store was looking to sell the larger space and the land it was situated on. He convinced his sons of the value of the buy and over the summer supervised the store’s move. Once there the three began the process of reconstructing and reshifting and rearranging the space all over again. This meant long, strenuous hours for everyone and stress on both of the young families of Tom’s sons. James in particular never seemed to rest. Even when he was home on rare occasions, he was a flurry of activity—building an extra patio on the back of a new house and transforming the raw, hard-packed dirt and rocks of Cucamonga into a yard with planters, a new lawn, rock gardens, and, after a swimming pool was added, a new redwood deck.

  As a result Tom Fallon was establishing himself as a pillar of this small suburban town, Cucamonga. And he was taking great joy in the fact that so many of his children and grandchildren had come to settle nearby. His two sons Kenneth and James had moved their families, including six grandchildren (two girls and four boys), to the region after buying partnership shares in the store, and a younger son, Patrick, had recently started working on an hourly basis at the store, hoping to save up enough money to buy his own partnership share. It all was something of a dream come true for Tom Fallon going back to his youth when, separated from his other four siblings—two sisters and two brothers—and enduring the abuse of the brutal nuns who ran his orphanage in Philadelphia, he swore someday he would always keep his family close by. If you don’t have family, Tom realized then and now, what do you have?

  Still, content as Tom Fallon was in the summer of 1977, he recognized that people across the Los Angeles area were in a funk. This was especially true, it seemed, of young people. Everywhere Tom went in L.A. that summer, the streets were overrun by unkempt boys and young men. With not much to do in the heat and with the bad economy, they lingered on sidewalks, at parks, in parking lots. Tom, who by nature had a kind and optimistic heart, was still annoyed at these boys. Often, on weekday afternoons, he would have to chase kids away from the parking lot behind his store, where they practiced moves on their skateboards and made an annoying ruckus for his customers. Even as he chased the kids away, however, Tom Fallon worried. He knew, after all, from long experience that things could always get worse. In fact, the signs were widespread. Several times in recent weeks, for instance, he had been awoken in the middle of the night by his store’s alarm service. And it was not just petty larceny that afflicted sleepy Cucamonga. One day that August, on a hot and dusty summer afternoon, one of Tom’s grandsons, who lived with his parents in a rental house just a few blocks from Tom’s own home, had been terrorized by two neighbor kids with a switchblade knife. “Let’s crucify him,” one of the kids had said to the other, before the two ran away laughing. It may have been an older kid’s idea of a joke, but it wasn’t at all funny to Tom.

  Mayor Tom Bradley well understood that the national—and localized—economic slump was affecting ordinary families and small businessmen like Tom Fallon. He also understood that this slump was very like any baseball slump, much of it caused by ingrained thinking, by gut-wrench defeatism. Bradley had become something of an expert in slumps since being swept to office in 1973, since he had gotten an earful of nearly constant complaint about the times. And while at first there was some merit to all the complaints, especially after the energy crisis of 1973 had led to the greatest economic downturn since the 1930s, by 1977 Bradley could see that much of the dejection in his city was self-created.

  For four years, then, between 1973 and 1977, Bradley worked hard to stabilize the leadership of his growing city. He was methodical in his approach. He opened up city hall in a way that had not been seen before, making city commissions and positions available to women, minorities, and the disabled. He met constantly with important interest groups and city scions, made appearances all over town, and methodically helped transform what had been a conservative white urban center into one of the most diverse and diversified cities in the United States. Over the next stretch of years, with Tom Bradley providing the impetus, Los Angeles would develop a brand-new skyline and revitalize its financial and business districts. Bradley spearheaded an effort to clean up, reconstruct, and modernize Los Angeles Harbor, turning it into a vibrant locus of international trade. Whatever his methods, in time Bradley, quietly and without touting his own role in the effort, helped turn Los Angeles into one of the world’s great metropolitan centers.

  Leaders around the rest of the nation in 1977 could have learned much from how Bradley had risen above the troubles of the times. Politicians everywhere across the nation in those years were widely loathed, paying the price for people’s frustrations in the post-Watergate era. By 1977 President Jimmy Carter was fast becoming the most visible focal point for this national upset. Though elected on a wave of hopeful sentiment by an electorate looking for change, the luster of Carter’s presidency did not last long. In the August 1977 article on the nation’s dragging investor confidence, Time had much to say about this. “The Carter Administration,” the magazine suggested, “seems unable to inspire any confidence in investors.” This, of course, was unfair. Jimmy Carter had assumed the office of the presidency just six months earlier, and the nation was struggling with a cold winter and shortages in heating fuel, as well as the continued fallout from the Watergate conspiracy, the Vietnam crisis, and continued economic malaise. Was it any wonder that Carter seemed stuck at the gate?

  On February 2, 1977, just two weeks after his inauguration, President Carter give a televised address dressed in a sweater. In the speech Carter announced that the development of a national energy policy was urgent, suggesting the United States was the only major industrial country without one. He pledged to work on creating a clear policy and establishing a new energy department to consolidate efforts to deal with the nation’s energy needs, and he asked the nation for help in this effort. After the speech, the president was widely ridiculed, including on the superhip NBC TV program Saturday Night Live, indicating that Carter would have to get to work without the traditional honeymoon phase usually given to new presidents. A few months later, on April 18, 1977, Carter gave another more formal and far more dramatic televised address from the Oval Office to announce his national energy policy. “Tonight I want to have an [slight pause] unpleasant talk with you,” he said bluntly, “about a problem that’s unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. . . . It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century. . . . We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.”11

  By some measures this speech was more of a success than his previous one. It laid the groundwork for the establishment of the strategic petroleum reserve, the modern solar power industry, and the national conservation movement, and it encouraged millions of Americans to insulate their homes. But by other measures the speech failed miserably. It was a speech that people simply did not want to hear. They wanted solutions to the nation’s problems, not complicated acknowledgments of the extent of them. On May 5, 1977, in the aftermath of his speech, Carter pointedly vi
sited the poster child for energy overconsumption in America: the vast freeway-blanketed Southern Californian basin. A background chorus to his fact-finding tour of the region was an increasingly agitated U.S. Congress. And in California, meanwhile, at least one prominent local politician saw the flaw in Carter’s approach.

  On June 2, 1977, just a few weeks after Carter’s visit, former actor and governor of California Ronald Reagan addressed the energy crisis from his own vantage point. Speaking on his radio show to Californians who were stuck “sitting in long gas lines,” Reagan said he understood why people were “angry.” But it wasn’t the oil companies that were causing these problems; it was the Department of Energy, whose bureaucratic regulations were slowing the efficient production of gas for the nation’s consumers. In other words government was the problem. Get rid of the government, let the market regulate itself, and there would be plenty of oil for all.

  Whether Carter heard Reagan’s energy message is not on record. Having met with Tom Bradley, the popular Los Angeles mayor who was then cruising to victory in a bid for a second term, it is likely Carter wondered what the mayor’s secret was. Bradley was facing down many of the same problems as Carter—a seemingly intractable energy problem, which L.A. was feeling as acutely as anyplace in the country; nasty political opponents on all sides, including mayoral opponents who were levying racially charged accusations against him; an uncertain and disparate voting coalition as the base of his support; and strong ambivalence, if not antipathy, from the business community—yet he had somehow maintained a markedly high level of popularity. Carter marveled at his old ally from the previous election season and then headed back to the snake pit in DC, still no closer to an easy solution to his growing problems.

  Despite the seeming return of the energy crisis, Californians, especially young ones, still found ways to have fun and enjoy themselves in the hot summer of 1977. This was nothing new, of course. Though Tom Fallon was too old to have experienced the surf craze, his sons had been mad about the new surfing craze that engulfed California in the 1960s, and Fallon watched as the two boys’ lives quickly began to revolve around the surfer lifestyle. Of course, by 1977 the two Fallon brothers had given up the surfing habit, as had many young Californians. In fact, in the tough 1970s kids in depressed and gas-strapped families for the most part had to forego the beach and make due with more of a more landlocked fad: skateboards.

  Although skateboarding had first been popular way back in the 1950s, interest in the pastime fell off. Part of the problem was the fact that early skateboards were nothing more than cheap pieces of wood on which clay or metal skate wheels had been affixed. These boards were crude, poor at gripping the asphalt, and often lost their ball bearings in midride, which sent riders tumbling off the board. In 1970, however, a surfer named Frank Nasworthy saw the problem and decided to do something. Using the new, more technologically advanced urethane wheels being made for roller skates, he put them onto flexible wooden boards, in the process improving the ride, increasing comfort, and setting the stage for a resurgence of interest in skateboarding.

  A key development in local skateboard interest came in the early 1970s with the founding, in Southern California, of a competitive surf team composed of boys (and one girl) between the ages of twelve and sixteen. The Zephyr Competition Team, or Z-Boys, took its name from the Zephyr surfboard shop that was located in a rough, graffiti-strewn neighborhood of North Santa Monica called Dogtown. In its early days the Z-Boys team practiced surfing in and among the ruined Pacific Ocean Park pier. The emblematic failure of the former amusement park was the perfect locus for this group of scrappy, daring kids, whose hardscrabble lives were punctuated by street violence, broken homes, drug peddling, and failed dreams. Because the large tilted wood pilings and steel beams of the ruined pier jutted from the water, the local surf style relied on sharp cutbacks, daring bursts of speed, and an unreal sense of agility and bodily awareness to survive and thrive. And in time the Z-Boys became admired for their skill and agility.

  Inevitably, the Z-Boys discovered the new skateboards. Because the wind shifted on the California coast around ten every morning, surfing would end early in the day. Out of sheer boredom some Z-Boys decided to try skateboarding, and they were impressed with how the polyurethane wheels allowed them to mimic their surfing style on local playgrounds, many of which had sloped retaining walls. By 1975 skateboarding had grown popular enough that promoters of the sport organized the first competitions since the heyday of the 1960s. And the so-called Del Mar Nationals, a skateboarding meet held at the Del Mar Fairgrounds in the seaside town of Del Mar, saw the national debut of the new Z-Boy style.

  While skateboarding eventually would become all but synonymous with teen rebellion, in 1975 the bulk of the competitors at the competition were relatively clean-cut, well-behaved types—mimics of the “young sportsmen” ideal of the classic 1960s surfers. Dressed in their team uniforms of blue Vans sports shoes, Levi’s jeans, and blue Zephyr T-shirts, however, the Z-Boys turned heads at the event even before competition began. In the “freestyle” competition in particular, which took place on a flat stretch of pavement somewhat like the ice rink of figure skating, Zephyr team member Jay Adams stunned the public with an idiosyncratically expressive display of twisting, spinning dance-like moves on his board. Afterward, just like that, skateboarding was reborn.

  By the late summer of 1977 the Z-Boy style had filtered out to Tom Fallon’s distant suburb of Cucamonga, causing him mild bemusement despite his familiarity with the surf life through his sons. Kids all across Southern California, even as far away as Cucamonga, adopted the Z-Boy attitude and style: Vans sneakers, Hang Ten shirts, long feathered hair, peach-fuzz facial hair, and so on. Local skaters would even, a few months later at the end of 1977, be able to hobnob with their heroes in Upland, just one town over from Cucamonga. The Upland Pipeline, one of the first great skateboard parks in California, became home to a generation of suburban skaters and host to occasional appearances by actual Zephyr team members.

  Had he been paying attention, Tom Wolfe may have appreciated the Z-Boys’ uniquely syncretic character, if not their particular aesthetic. In a long essay called “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” which Wolfe had written for Esquire back in 1963, he had chronicled the particularly Californian penchant for cross-pollinating influences—the local sunshine, beach culture, street chic, Latin gangs, and so on—in the service of spicing up one of the region’s dominant cultural preoccupations: working on and driving cars. Among the established cultural influences on the Z-Boys were the wild colors and flash of the hot-rodders, low-riders, van fetishists, and vehicle customizers who proliferated around Southern California at the time. The team also added elements from their own cultural preoccupations: the long and tousled hair of rock heroes like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, the casualness of California beach design, the tattoos and street looks adapted from gang graffiti, and so on. All of this is a long way of relaying the fact that the effect of the Z-Boys was greater than its parts. In sum, the group created a new model of how to be a kid in Southern California in the 1970s.

  As the Z-Boys’ influence grew, so did their confidence, and their skill and daring in maneuvering on banked surfaces advanced. In the summer of 1977 the Z-Boys suddenly got an extra nudge in their ongoing development from the weather. A long drought in Southern California that summer had desiccated the landscape and made water scarce, which in turn led to an intriguing discovery.12 Because of tight local restrictions on water use, many local residents had been forced to empty out their private swimming pools. To the Z-Boys these emptied structures would make a natural locus for their experiments. All that summer, whenever anyone heard rumor of a pool, the Z-Boys sneaked in, drained any excess water if necessary, and, until someone chased them away (or it grew too dark), skated the pool’s banks.

  Eventually, skateboarding enthusiasts and observers would look back at the summer of 1977 and view the guerrilla pool skating of the Z
-Boys as the birth of what came to be known as “vertical skating.” The exact tale of the birth of the phenomenon went something like this: As summer turned subtly to fall across the region, one day during a skating session at a pool in Santa Monica (which was so popular it was nicknamed “the Dogbowl”), a Z-Boy named Tony Alva invented a stunning new maneuver. While skating the banked edge of a pool, Alva cleared the lip at the top of the side of the pool with his board and, spinning back around in a full 180-degree circle, landed back on the wall of the pool and continued skating. This was the sport’s very first aerial trick and the launching point, literally and figuratively, for everything that would come—in skateboarding, in snowboarding, in wakeboarding, skiing, rollerblading, and so on. Not only had the Z-Boys, in the space of just three years, completely revived and revolutionized skateboarding, but in the drought of 1977 they laid the foundation for a whole range of daring “extreme” sports that would proliferate in the years ahead around the world.

  13

  The Right Stuff

  If you want to grow old as a pilot, you’ve got to know when to push it, and when to back off.

  —Chuck Yeager