Patti McGee, San Diego pro youth skateboarding pioneer, dies at 79 – San Diego Union-Tribune

Stand at the top of Loring Street Hill in Pacific Beach – one of the steepest in San Diego – and be transported back to the early 1960s, when children and teenagers rode down the steep hill on makeshift skateboards, the ocean stretching into the distance ahead.

They were some of the first skateboarding enthusiasts, children who helped pave the way for future generations of a sport that for decades was widely viewed as a social menace and a fringe subculture.

Among these skaters was Patti McGee. For the Point Loma teenager, skateboarding on Loring Street was just another way to kill time when the waves were blowing in the afternoon and she wasn’t ready to go home and do her homework.

Loring Street “was a challenge. It was like surfing a big wave if you can handle it” – McGee he told Juice skateboarding magazine in 2017

Seeking challenges and being active is part of what drew her to skateboarding. But McGee, who died Oct. 16 at her home in Brea at age 79 after a recent stroke, was also a natural.

Considered the world’s first professional female skateboarder, McGee made a name for herself in the sport when it was even more male-dominated than this is today.

Her career began in 1964, when she took first place at the inaugural National Skateboarding Championships in Santa Monica, winning with her signature trick, the handstand on a skateboard.

This move later became cemented in cultural history when she appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine in May 1965, with her legs in the air and a board rolling beneath her.

After winning Santa Monica, McGee signed a contract with skateboard manufacturer Hobie and traveled the country promoting his boards.

She was introduced to 2010 Skateboarding Hall of Fame. That same year, then-San Diego Councilmember Kevin Faulconer presented her with a special commendation recognizing her achievements.

But being a pioneer for women in skateboarding wasn’t McGee’s goal; evening stand in San Diego in 1965, she reported that she wanted to pursue an acting career or become a “movie stuntwoman”.

“She was a sweet angel, but she was also a wild woman,” her daughter Hailey Villa, 46, told the Union-Tribune last week. McGee also leaves behind a son, Forest Villa, 45, as well as two grandchildren and a brother, Jack.

“She did a lot of different things in her life,” Villa said, recalling the time when her mother worked in a turquoise mine and in leather goods, and even in a casino. “Skateboarding was just a bit of a bummer.”

McGee was born on August 23, 1945, in Fort Lewis, Washington, and her family moved to San Diego when she was approximately 5 years old. Her parents separated when she was young, and she was raised primarily by her mother, who worked at Montgomery Junior High School.

McGee’s youth was in many ways quintessential San Diego youth.

Like many 1960s skaters, she started out as a surfer, first surfing in 1958 and visiting places like Newport Street, North Beach and Ocean Beach, as well as La Jolla, the Coast and Windansea.

When she was 16, she went on further expeditions along the coast – to Tamarack, Oceanside, Doheny and County Line, she said Skateboarders’ magazine from 1965when she was on its cover.

McGee, president of the girls’ surf team in 1963, described herself as a “raucous surfer” – unafraid to be aggressive as one of the few girls in the water, while “guys would just push you out of the way or kick you in the ankles, saying, ‘My wave”” she told Juice.

McGee’s first introduction to skateboarding was in 1962 through a DIY project: her brother Jack stole her roller skate wheels and attached them to a wooden board he made in a workshop class.

She later rode a Bun Buster, equipped with the same wheels as her roller skates.

She and her friends roamed the streets of San Diego and even a garage in downtown San Diego – their Mount Everest, as she described it.

They were unruly and always getting into trouble.

“Thank you for helping pave the way for all of us when, in the 1960s, skateboarding was simply considered a ‘threat,'” wrote Tony Hawk in last post on Instagram dedicated to her memory.

McGee was also a member of the Pump House Gang, a group of teenage surfers who gathered around a sewage pumping station on Windansea Beach in the 1960s. Writer Tom Wolfe later wrote an essay about the group and named his 1968 collection of essays after them.

But winning the championship in Santa Monica in 1964 inexorably changed her life.

Her one-year, $250-a-month brand deal with skateboard manufacturer Hobie took her across the country, where she demonstrated skateboarding in department stores and malls, mostly to children.

Being on the cover of LIFE gave McGee another level of recognition. Shortly after the iconic shoot, she booked an appearance on the game show “What’s My Line?” and “The Mike Douglas Show” and taught Johnny Carson how to skate on “The Tonight Show.”

At that time, mainstream culture still dictated what it thought about skateboarding. Initially seen as a fun new fad for children and often called “pavement surfing”, by the late 1960s and 1970s it was more widely considered a nuisance, something for children that was not good.

McGee and her generation saw this change firsthand and are part of the reason skateboarding became so closely associated with punk, said Haley Watson, a director who was working on a documentary about McGee before her death.

“There is no way skateboarding as we know it would have taken the shape it did without Patti,” Watson said.

McGee returned to San Diego after her national tour in the mid-1960s, but didn’t stay long.

She soon moved to Lake Tahoe with her first husband, Glen Villa, where they mined turquoise and made leather goods. She later moved to Cave Creek, Arizona, where she raised two children and guided gold-digging tourists. There, she met her second husbandWilliam Chace, died in 2015.

But Villa remembers that there was little concrete in their rural town and few places to skateboard — her mother would take her and her brother to a nearby elementary school to skateboard.

When she was in third grade, her mother brought the skateboard team to her school to perform a demonstration. Among its members was Tony Hawk.

“I think that was the day I realized that my mom was special in the skateboarding world,” Villa recalled.

Villa became a skater herself, and she and McGee founded the Original Betty Skateboard Company, which spawned their own all-girl skateboarding team, sponsoring young female skaters, some of whom went on to compete in the Olympics.

The family connection was clear to Watson.

“It was obvious to me that she truly loved her family and that she had a special bond with her daughter,” the director said. “They had a lot of their own language.”

McGee’s story was brought to a younger, wider audience in 2021 when Orange County author and school librarian Tootie Nienow published the children’s book “There Goes Patti McGee! The Story of the First Women’s National Skateboarding Champion” illustrated by Erika Medina.

Nienow became close to McGee while writing the book.

Nienow said McGee can make a person feel like they are the only person in the room. The same sentiment was echoed by McGee’s friend and fellow skateboarder Di Dootson Rose, who was also inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame earlier this year.

She was “magnetic,” Rose said, recalling how McGee would connect with people by sometimes putting his hands on their faces and really looking into their eyes. “People would let her in.”

The skateboarder’s charm and talent delighted her friends and family – and the whole world.

Rose points to McGee’s 1965 cover of LIFE, which she says is very different from some of the more serious magazine covers of the time.

“One day they come out with a blue cover of a blonde upside down (handstand) – in a white capri and a red sweater,” Rose said. “If that’s not a breath of fresh air, I don’t know what is.”

The nonprofit organization Exposure Skate will hold a ceremony for McGee at the annual skate event for women and non-binary skaters in Encinitas this Saturday at 5 p.m.