I know this post isn't boyactor or film related but I hope you don't mind me posting it anyways. While I was surfing the internet today I had learned of the death yesterday of one of the legendary Dogtown Z-Boys. Bob Biniak one of the original members of the Zephyr skateboard team died yesterday of a massive heart attack. This makes the second member of the Dogtown Z-Boys to pass away over the past year. Last year "Baby" Paul Cullin lost his battle to his long running addiction to drugs.

For those of you who don't know who the Dogtown Z-Boys were they are legends of the sport of skateboarding. They brought skating from horizontal to vertical and gave the sport its bad boy punk scene attitude. They re-invented the sport and made it what it is today as did many other skaters of that era.

Although I personally wasn't a member of this skate team I knew many of them, skated with them, and partied with them. They and others like them from that era were my people. These are the people and the sport I grew up with and the era I grew up in. So it's personal to me as it is with many other Southern California skaters who knew them or knew of them.

Naturally this made me a bit nostalgic and I started going through some old photos and old memories of one of the best eras in America. Contrary to what you may have seen in movies or on television about the '70's with such lame shows as "That 70's Show" I remember quite a different version of 1970's America. So I am going to present you with a little bit of my 1970's America Southern California style.

As I said before this post isn't boy actor or boy film related. However, if you think it doesn't have anything to do with boys then you don't know me to well yet. These are "real boys"...These are my boys. Southern California Boys circa 1970's. Some are "Val Rats" (skaters from the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles like me) and some from the Venice Beach area.

Caps on following post below:

Thanks for documenting this time and place and especially the boys who lived it. The 1970s was a unique decade and I miss it. Wonderful photos of real boys having real fun.

Off topic for sure, but nice. Reminds me of my own childhood...except skating was never as popular here as it was in California....

Quote:


My pleasure. Yeah, it was a unique decade which I don't think we'll ever see the likes of again. There was no shortage of cute boys then and I sure knew a lot of them. We knew how to have fun without electronic gadgets back then.

cal-Q-L8 wrote on 02. Mar 2010 at 18:16:


Always a pleasure. Yeah, those were the days for sure. In spite of everything that seemed to being going wrong it the world and some of the hard times we went through it was a much simpler and carefree era. There was no shortage of things to do and ways to have fun. People were friendlier and easier to meet and make friends with. People weren't as paronoid as they are today. You had a lot more privacy and anonimity prior to the advent of the information age and supercomputers.

I'm not sure exactly where we as a society. I guess it is a combination of several things that I could give an opinion on but that would involve going into a rant which I don't want to do at the moment. Although maybe I already touched on some of the things.

Yeah, that is true. You will see that he is also in the picture below this one too but only half of him. He's a real cutie. I haven't heard much of anything about those stereos since either.