Buying In - (Page 27) buying in 27 Skateboarding was illegal in many of Orange County’s public spaces, and Templeton was arrested several times. Many of the skater kids that he hung out with overlapped with the Los Angeles punk scene of the 1980s. If a band could not get a show in a cool club, it would put on a show in a park; if skaters were not likely to be featured in a magazine, they would make their own zines. And if you couldn’t find (or afford) a skateboard with cool enough graphics, you made your own. The stickers and designs created by underground skateboard artists, reprinted in skate magazines, became potent symbols to many kids like Templeton. “I found out some of the guys that I really looked up to as skateboarders did their own graphics. And I thought that was the coolest thing ever.” Templeton decided he would do his own graphics, too. From that outcast loneliness, from something close to nothing, Templeton had begun to forge an identity and become an individual. He started looking at art books in mall bookstores. He went pro as a skater in 1990, which gave him the chance to go to Europe, where he actually spent some time in museums. And he started to paint. Today he is an underground skate legend, founder of his own board company, and a painter and photographer whose work sells in galleries in the United States and Europe. Skateboards or devices quite like them date back to the early 1900s, but the “outlaw aspect” of skateboarding can be traced to the 1970s, fifty miles up the California coast from Orange County, to a section of Venice Beach. In a neighborhood that was in terrible disrepair— an amusement park called Pacific Ocean Park had failed in 1967 and been demolished in 1973— assorted locals from hardscrabble backgrounds surfed and skated the urban ruins. Some, who would later become the
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