BREEDING GROUNDS
Previous Page, Clockwise from
Far Left: Reggie Barnes cleans
the lip (seven feet of vert, mind
you) at the Ramp House. Here
it is folks, the world's first
wooden kidney pool, as ripped
upon by Bailey Webb.
Charlsetan municipal pool
before hurricane Hugo.
THE
RAMP HOUSE
SKATEBOARDING
WOOR
This Page, Clockwise from
Left: Dolores and Victor Haner,
proud parents of the Romp
House. Nomad Mike Frazier
visits the E.V. vert. Mute
tailage by an unknown
board dog in the Charleston
Municipal Pool. Sean Jones
gets ugly at Eastern Vert.
-2356
Coast
N
orth and South Carolina defi-
nitely have a place in history.
Charleston, SC, is the sight
where the first shots were fired in the Civil
War and recently hosted hurricane Hugo
which leveled a good portion of the his-
toric landscape. Up in NC, the Wright
Brothers got their first air in a plane on
the dunes at Kitty Hawk. It's well known in
the annals of surfing that Cape Hatteras
picks up the best swells on the whole
Eastern shore.
Skate history in the Carolina's however,
hasn't been documented so well. It's not
that towns like Raleigh and Charleston
50 THRASHER MAGAZINE
3
of the Carolinas
didn't have their share of parks (Myrtle
Beach had four in the 70s), ramps and
street life nor lack healthy skate scenes
today. Crews of traveling East Coasters
know very well what was going down at
David Dismukes' Farm Ramp on any
given weekend, or inside the Charleston
Municipal pool's nicely banked transitions
on a hot and muggy summer day.
We recently foraged our way to Raleigh,
North Carolina, based on a tip that two
new indoor parks in the region had been
the scene of mega sessioning by the bros
and nighttime moonshining by all.
Soon after touchdown at Raleigh Inter-
national we noticed two things that sure
as hell made the trip: southern hospitality
and pretty girls. Another thing that slaps
you in the face about the area is the over-
riding college atmosphere and the jock
itch that seems to be everywhere you go,
especially if it concerns basketball. I
wasn't at all surprised when my host Reg-
gie Barnes told me about a nightclub
called T.J. Hoops. The place featured 32
king-size pool tables, an 18-hole
miniature golf course and a hardwood
half-court basketball hoop right in the
premises. Yessirreebob!
My first stop on the skate side of things
was Reggies' very own mini-ramp which
is the focal point of backyard activity
among the local street rippers and skate
pirates. A small, stilted structure sur-
rounded by lush forest and grasses in
Reggies: backyard was convenient for a
morning wake-up session. Locals Pete
Thompson, Mike Sinclair, Ketan and Mike
Mann had the place wired. Even the big
shade trees didn't provide the necessary
protection from the 90+ temps and high
humidity that are standard in summer. It
was off to Eastern Vert, a highly
acclaimed indoor facility in nearby Win-
ston-Salem that featured new air condi-
tioning. Get down. That's exactly what
locals like Neil Hendrix, Sean Jones,
Mike Frazier, Tim Hammond and Brian
Wainwright (who, along with Brian's bro
Morris, designed and engineered the
Farm Ramp) and Wade Gullidge (the epit-
ome off the hardcore down home NC
skaters) were doing.
W
hen asked about the Eastern
Vert philosophy, Neil Hendrix
(he's also editor of the mag
with the same name) extrapolated. "Farm
Ramp is only about an hour and a half
from here and we had the usual local
mini-ramp in town, but we took a lot of
road trips. That's where the whole con-
cept behind Eastern Vert started. I like
traveling a lot and meeting different peo-
ple. Just checking out everybody else's
scene." Now Neil and park lord BK
Willard have quite a little scene going
themselves. "Brian Howard is a skater
from South Carolina who everyone's
going to be hearing about soon because
he's rad. Brian Boyd's a good friend.
Sean Jones is definitely a big air man,"
said Neil, just as Sean himself launched a
head-high frontside airwalk out of E.V.'s
slick, fast contest-caliber Masonite mon-
ster. Sean routinely flirted with the roof of
the warehouse on flights through the arti-
ficially cooled air. Neil continued to fill me
in. "It's fun watching everyone else
progress along with my own skating. All
these guys are totally into skating. The
guys I skate with are never going to stop.
There's a guy in there with a broken leg.
he's not going to be able to skate again
for six months and he's here every day.
There was a skatepark up the road that
got dozed about four years ago and some
people dropped out. But the people here
are just like, "Yeah, we're the survivors."
Mike Frazier was passing through on a
road trip that would take him up to the
51