Skateboard innovator and entrepreneur Larry Stevenson dies at 81 – Skateboarding News
Larry Stevenson, early skateboard innovator and entrepreneur, died in his room at Santa Monica’s Ronald Reagan-UCLA Medical Center in California, America, on Sunday afternoon, March 25.
According to his son Curt, Stevenson had been battling with pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease during the final 18 months of his life before eventually succumbing to it.
“My dad fought so hard over the past year and a half. The doctors wanted to let nature take its course, because he was so frail, but he made a comeback and was out of the hospital for 10 or 12 days. Then we had to rush him back,” said Curt.
The aggrieved son further added that his father passed away while listening to his favourite Perry Como CD.
Stevenson is known for his valuable contributions to skateboarding, the most prominent of which is to add a kick-tail feature to the board design. The feature served to create endless possibilities on the skateboard and it used in pulling off nearly all
the tricks.
Dale Smith, a skate historian, conceded that the modern concept and design of skateboards are pretty much a mimicry of the skate deck that was originally innovated by Stevenson in the late 1960s.
While kick-tail is one of his biggest contributions to the sport, it is not the only one. He was one of the first entrepreneurs who were involved in mass production of skateboards. Using the magazine “Surf Guide” that he published, he marketed his line of
skateboards called “Makaha boards” which served to increase the interest of public in the sport.
He capitalised on the increasing popularity of surfing during the time by linking skateboarding to the latter in order to get it accepted by the public.
Stevenson’s valuable innovation of the kick-tail design and mass production, along with marketing, of professional boards is what allowed the sport to rise from the status of kid’s time-pass to a proper professional sport, the same status that surfing managed
to attain.
Stevenson had played a crucial role in reviving skateboarding after it went through a period of drought from mid-to-late 1960s. The sport owes a lot to the Californian-native for reaching where it is today.
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