Pete was involved with Apple from the very beginning. He helped build the park, worked in the pro shop for the first year it was open and skated there as much as anyone you can name. This interview was conducted over the phone on May 1, 2002 from his hangar in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Seems that Pete is a pilot down there these days. Read on for the definitive history of Apple Skatepark.
When did you first ever hear of Apple?
There was an ad in the local paper for a county commissioner's hearing regarding zoning for a skatepark. That was the first we ever heard of it.
When was that?
1978. I don't really remember how we found a phone number to call, but we ended up getting in touch with Michael Musgrave. I was in high school, I wanted to make a petition to bring before the city council to show there was support for a skatepark, and he thought that was a great idea. So, I went ahead and did that—I think we had maybe two hundred signatures. Me and a bunch of skating buddies went to the council meeting and presented our petition. While we where there, I was introduced to Gene Goldberg and, I believe, we met Michael Musgrave...
What did Michael have to do with it?
Michael worked for Gene. I don't really remember what he did. I think, at one time, he drove one of Gene's Charlie's Chips trucks. Gene Goldberg owned a Charlie's Chips (potato chips in cans) franchise in Columbus. They had routes, delivery people and a whole fleet of these trucks. That's where Gene made his money. He wasn't a millionaire by any standard, but he knew how to work money. Apple was a business venture and I'm sure he took out loans to fund it. I'm sure he had silent partners to put money into it, also. It's just that the timing was all wrong.
So, Gene owned Apple as a business, but not the building?
Yes. So, I met Michael Musgrave then—he was the person that was actually going to be the manager for Apple once it was built. He was also the person that introduced the idea of building a skatepark to Gene. Mike had been watching skating, always thought it was interesting and he liked kids. He thought it would be a great business venture. He approached Gene about this, who did research and saw there were a lot of skateparks being built. Apparently, they thought it would be a successful way to make money and they decided to investigate it. So, they developed a business plan and, before you know it, there we were in front of the city council meeting trying to get it passed. And it did, it did pass the zoning law allowing it to be built. I think Larry MacDonald—the actual developer for Apple—was there, also.
I interviewed Wally Hollyday, and he said there was some connection between Apple and Cherry Hill.
Well, Larry had done Cherry Hill. He was a contractor. He had to get all the permits and supply engineering drawings and things like that. He was part of Cherry Hill, as far as I remember.
Wasn't there someone named Drotlef?
That was Peter Drotlef, Wally's partner in crime—who could throw a mean dirt clod. I still have welts from getting hit by those things. So, we went to the meeting and got it passed. A couple of months went by and they were getting ready to break ground inside the building on Sinclair Road. When we were at the meeting, they said, "If you want to come by and try to get jobs or whatnot, come check it out." So, we did.
You mean jobs building Apple?
Yes, building it—day laborers. School was out and we were on Summer vacation. Jeff Kasson got hired, I did, Eric Melfi (a skater buddy of mine already out of high school) got hired. He was actually already a working carpenter by trade, so they used him to help build forms and things. A friend of mine from San Francisco, Keith Eastmead—who was probably one of the best skaters I've ever seen in my life—got hired. He was part of our little skate clique. Keith was much older—I think he was about twenty-three or twenty-four. He actually moved into my basement so he could drive to work to the skatepark with me every day. I didn't even have a driver's license then, so my parents let him take our spare car with me in it—that was kind of cool. Who else was in there? Ronn Dudley showed up. I don't know where they got ahold of him, but he ended up on the end of a shovel.
Did Dave Bush help?
Dave showed up much later. He wasn't there working digging ditches or anything with the rest of us. That was it—we were the guys following the backhoes with the shovels. When we showed up, they were just starting to cut the original floor out of the building with concrete saws. They had a backhoe with a huge weight on it breaking up the concrete, and we would pick it up, throw it in wheelbarrows and chuck it out the back door into piles. We did that for about two very long weeks, then they started sculpting the bowls out of the dirt—which was really neat to watch. It wasn't very scientific, either.
Wally told me they did it all by eye.
That's exactly what they did. He would sit there on the edge of the hole and throw a rock where he wanted the backhoe to take a little-bit more out. The day they sculpted the keyhole pool, Eric Melfi, Wally and Peter had apparently been up all night partying, and were still toasted when they showed up. Wally was half asleep throwing rocks down and the backhoe guy kept digging out of the side of the keyhole entrance—that's why that kink was there by the channel. If you ever looked at the keyhole, it wasn't perfectly round, it had a really nasty kink in it—that's how that came to be. It was pretty neat, though—Wally would get in there, mark a little X with a shovel or throw a rock and dig some more out here or there. It was all done by eye, including the halfpipe and everything—it was really amazing.
Melfi brought his moped to work one day. We were always sneaking in there after work, because they really had no way of securing the place. They had the big back doors open to move the heavy equipment in and out of the park and just had them kind of blocked with scrap plywood. So, we came back after work and brought his moped inside—this was after we had the egg pool dug out. I don't think there was any rebar laid down in it yet. We were riding the moped in the egg pool. Melfi was actually carving vert. He would have been doing tiles—if there had been any tiles—in the deep end of the egg pool on the moped. Totally insane.
Sometimes, you would be digging these pools out, and it was almost like digging fox holes. The dirt at Apple was very clumpy—perfect for throwing. It wasn't rock-hard—more like cow patties. So, we'd be down digging in a hole, and the next thing you knew, it would be like incoming shrapnel. Wally and Peter would be on the other side of the park just throwing clumps at us as hard as they could. Wally had a really long, lanky body, but Peter was a big guy. If you got hit by him, it would take you out for a while. The two of them would just nail us—we were really getting hit. We'd try and throw stuff back, but I don't think I could even throw that far. That was pretty intense—good fun stuff. They used to really raise hell with us. They brought in tapes with them—they were playing some of the first punk-rock stuff that we had ever heard around there. Then we started imitating them and their music—we were calling ourselves Pickmaster & The Shovelles, digging these ditches and singing their songs. It was pretty cool.
How long did the construction take? It was Summer, 1979.
Well, it was done right around when school started again.
Yeah, I thought I remembered going there for the first time in September. So, you started building in June?
Yeah, because I remember there were still no school nights when we stayed there overnight to drain the pools, pumping all the water out. I'd say it was the end of July, maybe August, when we were getting finished.
So, it only took a couple of months to build Apple?
Yeah, it didn't take that long. It took maybe a month to get it all carved out and the rebar laid down. We worked eight hours a day, five days a week, really busting our butts.
Did anyone shoot photos of the construction?
I don't remember anyone shooting any photos, which is a shame—that would have been pretty cool. I do remember that we were just about finished with laying the rebar down—which we all got involved in doing—then we laid the mesh down. After that, we picked the whole thing up and put lots of two-by-fours underneath the mesh to keep it off the ground so the concrete would flow underneath and the rebar and mesh would be in the middle of the layer of concrete. So, we got that all done, then these guys from Bigelow Construction Company in Texas showed up. These were mean, redneck guys—really big, really nasty. They just loved to cause trouble and brought in these machines to shoot the concrete. They mixed the concrete in a mixer outside and would pump it in with high pressure.
Was it shotcrete?
It was shotcrete, yeah. We were actually inside the bowls holding the hoses and trying to make sure there were no air pockets while they were shooting the concrete onto the walls. It shot with a lot of force, and every so often, one of the guys who was doing the mixing outside would put a sponge in the hose to help clean it out. But, it would slow the concrete down, the pressure would build up behind the sponge, and, all of sudden, it would be like a cannon going off, it would just go, "BOOM!" and blow the sponge and all of the rest of the concrete out of the hose. They would never tell us when they were going to do that and it would scare the crap out of us. Keith Eastmead was standing right next to the hose when it went off and it scared him so bad, he said, "That's it. I'm not going to do this anymore. I quit." He never came back. In fact, he got so mad at the rest of us who were still willing to do that kind of work that he didn't talk to us for a while. He thought we risking our lives. He left my basement and went back to the other side of town.
The park was open for a long time before Keith even came to skate, which was really weird. He was a black kid and I think these guys [Bigelow concrete workers] were really fuckin' with him and we just never knew, because he was really having problems, apparently. But, he left—that was the end of Keith Eastmead. Then it was just Jeff Kasson, Melfi and myself left working, doing this stuff with Ronn, the Bigelow crew, plus Pete and Wally. There was another guy that was there for a while helping with the rebar—he was just a contractor from Columbus. The following year, I was still in high school, and one of the few days I wasn't cutting class to go to Apple—because I think I cut about fifty days of school the first year that Apple was open—I looked up in study hall and here came the rebar guy as my substitute teacher. We partied together. So, that was way cool. He was there for a month, so it made it even easier to get out of school to go skate.
When the concrete was shot, did someone trowel it smooth?
They did—they had flat paddles on poles that they would shape it with, and, as it dried, they actually used really fine britsle brooms to sweep it. It was amazing—the concrete was shot with such high pressure, it really didn't puddle. If they were really good at spraying it evenly, it was the same depth and thickness everywhere, so they didn't have to spend a whole lot of time smoothing it out to get it to the right shape.
After that, didn't they put plaster over it?
No, it wasn't plaster. That was the surface, they never plastered it—it was just a nice, brushed finish. It was really nice. I skated a lot of parks, and those Apple pools—especially the kidney—were really, really, really perfect and the halfpipe was just about flawless, except the turnaround in the back was a little funky.
The halfpipe was like glass.
It really was—it was amazing.
I remember the first time I rode down into it, I was shocked.
It was totally no effort to skate that and it was so smooth that you couldn't even feel where the transitions stopped and started. It was really weird, and none of us were really used to skating anything like that.
How was it made so smooth?
Nothing particular—it was carved out perfectly to start with, so when you shot the same layer of concrete around it, it wasn't that hard to smooth it out.
Since the halfpipe was just a perfect radius, did they use templates?
Nothing—that was all done by eye. They did string a line across it when we were carving it out. From the center of the line down was the radius line, and you would walk that up the side of the wall and try to keep the string touching the wall throughout the whole circumference.
How were the two-thirds pipe extensions built?
They were just built with forms. The radius was drawn on the forms, which were nailed all the way across where we wanted them, then they laid the rebar up and that was it. They just shot right against that and peeled the forms off. I never did grind or do any stalls on top of them—that just wasn't in my book.
Were all the runs filled with water?
Everything was filled with water. After the concrete was done, they were filled with water so they would dry from the inside out. They didn't want the outside surface to dry first, because they would tend to crack—at least that's what I was told. So, yeah, they were all filled with water...
For a month?
No, it wasn't that long—a week, maybe. We swam in everything. You could dive off the two-thirds pipe extension—although Mike Musgrave was totally freaking that we were doing that. He didn't want us in there, anyway. We pestered him and pestered him and, finally, he just kind of looked the other way and we were diving off the two-thirds pipe, and just running across the park and launching ourselves lengthwise into the halfpipe. It was kind of hard to get out of the pools—there were no ladders, or anything.
So, you guys actually had swimming sessions before you ever had skate sessions?
Yeah, we just swam. It was really cool to dive to the bottom of the pools—they were deep. The kidney and the egg were pretty deep stuff. I don't think I did any back flips into the halfpipe, but I'm sure somebody must have.
Were the banks filled, too?
Everything was—the L-bowl. Some bowls were built much sooner than others, so they got filled quicker. We had some runs that were dry, while others were still full of water—which was kind of neat. One by one, we got to drain them out with much anticipation—with buckets and mops ready. Nothing happened all at once, it was like, "This bowl's ready, we get to skate this," and then the next one was ready. So, that was pretty cool—it was sort of like unwrapping a present, because as the water came down, we were getting closer and closer and ready to skate it. Nobody had skated anything like this before, so nobody knew what to expect. None of us had really ever skated pools, other than maybe one or two times in our lives. None of us really knew how to skate a pool, so, carving was a new experience. We really wore ourselves out figuring out how to skate those bowls. We were skating until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. Every time a bowl was empty, we were there until we could figure it out. It was a lot of fun.
Who put the tiles in?
The guy who put the tiles in was the same guy that had the tile contract for all the Burger Kings in the Mid-West. He was an Italian guy, and he was really nice. In fact, he wanted to hire me to work for him. He needed one guy to help lay the tile and I was elected to do it. It was one of the last things that was done. We went around the top and painted on an adhesive, then laid the tile onto it and grouted over it. Then the coping got put in. Actually, Dudley put the coping on—he did that all himself. That was the first skatepark that had coping flush with the top of the floor, which was really cool, because you could roll right in. Cherry Hill wasn't like that—nothing else was built like that.
Didn't they concrete over the top of the coping blocks to make it smooth?
Yes, they did. They came around with a bucket of mud and did that all by hand—Dudley did it. That was pretty neat—nobody had bothered to do that in a park yet. That was Wally's idea—he was the one who wanted to try that. It worked, and everything is done that way now—all coping is flush with the top surface.
You mentioned to me before that Michael fed you pizza and Jack Daniels during the construction.
Yeah, and there was a lot of pot-smoking. That was Mike's choice-he was a big JD man. He came from a small town about an hour out in the farm country in Ohio. He actually dragged all of us kids out there and we spent a weekend at his house with his wife and sister-in-law, who ended up being the counter girl at Apple for a long time.
What was her name?
I'm drawing a blank. I'll remember it in a minute. I knew it before...Karen was Gene's daughter...it'll come to me. The first Apple ID card went to Gene's son. I think his first name was Greg, then Karen got the second card.
Do you know how much Apple cost to build?
You know, I used to. I think they spent like close to $300,000 building it—somewhere around there. An awful lot of money. They literally had these guys come all the way from Texas to do the shotcrete. It was a lot of concrete. I don't know what Wally and Peter made. I know the whole time they were here, Wally bought one or two '60s-era Mustangs and sent them to California, so they must have been doing pretty good—flashing a lot of cash around town.
If Apple would've been built in the mid-'80s, it might still be around.
Maybe, yeah. Although, that's a pretty prime piece of real estate, for Columbus. I don't know if it would have been worth it to keep Apple there. The name Apple, though, was Michael Musgrave's doing.
I thought it stemmed from Cherry Hill.
No, Michael's favorite record label was Apple. He was a Beatles freak and wanted something called Apple in his life, so it was named Apple Skatepark. Barb—that was his sister-in-law's name. That's who worked at the counter. Karen worked the counter every so often. When Apple finally opened, they let Dudley come in and work as an assistant manager, they kept me on to work in the pro-shop, and Dave Bush had showed up by then with Dudley, because Dave was a friend of his.
What was Dudley like?
He was a freak (laughs). He was a really nice guy, but we all thought he was totally strange at the time, because we didn't know any better. He was very smart, very goofy, sort of an introvert and smoked a lot of cigarettes. He had a dutchboy page haircut and was just very weird. He treated us fairly well—we never had any problems with Dudley. I don't really know what ever happened to him. I wonder...
Were you there on Apple's opening day?
Oh, yeah. I was there literally every day for the first year. There wasn't a day I did not go to Apple Skatepark.
How was the opening?
There was a lot of little kids, but not all the local skaters showed up. I think Mike Ohm did. It was crazy—they didn't have fences between the pools yet, and all these kids were just learning to skate this place, so there were boards flying everywhere between the pools. So, they gave us little badges and sent us out on skate patrols. All of sudden, we had this new authority and had an attitude, so we were there just annoying everybody, I'm sure. We were just trying to keep people from dropping-in on each other and going too crazy. Of course, we probably went more crazy than anybody else when we skated. The skate patrol didn't last very long.
Was the opening day pretty crowded?
Yeah, it was. They had free food and drinks and there must have been a couple hundred kids skating in there. Gene also put a game room in—that was the big thing, too. He had this game room in the concession area, because he wanted to bring people in to play games. He had an air hockey table at first, two foosball tables, a pinball machine...
Galaxians.
Oh yeah, that was there. Probably Pac Man, but I played Galaxians a lot—that was actually one of my favorite games. I think Centipede was there, too. So, there was the draw of the game room. They had drawings and stuff to win tokens and knee pads and things like that. There was this big controversy, though. Before Apple opened, they had ordered all this gear for the pro-shop and had it locked in one of the back rooms. Somebody broke in and stole all the wheels before the park ever opened. A lot of people got blamed for it, but nothing was ever proven. That was the very first Apple controversy—who stole the inventory of skateboard wheels?
It had to be someone that was involved with the park.
Yeah, they had to know the stuff was there. When it all originally arrived, it went to Mike's house, and we were all there doing whippits (laughs)—a lot of burnt brain cells back then. We got first dibs on all the cool helmets and Rector knee pads, and stuff. We were all, "We'll work it off. Take it out of our paychecks." So, we got the first new safety equipment, but no wheels, because they all went missing at first. But, they eventually got wheels in. I think we started out with Kryptonics—the green ones. That was our first wheel of choice. They were pretty quick. I ended up with some Powell wheels, but I became an OJ freak in the end. I always rode OJs. But, yeah, opening day was neat. I think a couple of kids broke bones. I know the first month we had kids breaking collar bones, a lot of broken wrists.
Would the ambulance show up?
Yeah, it would, but not as much as you'd think. A lot of the kids would just limp out and call their parents to come get 'em. But, a couple of times we had the rescue squad there, most definitely—that was kind of interesting. I never really got hurt at Apple. I learned to fall right away—go to the knees. I think the worst spill I ever took is when I dropped into the egg pool and did a frontside air in the deep-end, floated it out way too far to the middle of the pool and just dropped down to the bottom. Basically, I just landed on my ass and my tailbone was really fucked. It took me a couple of weeks before I could walk normally or sit down right. That was really my only big injury at Apple. But, people really screwed themselves up there. Jeff Kasson was out for a long time. I think he broke his ankle, but I remember helping carry him out of something—it might have been the halfpipe. He was fucked—we didn't see him for a long time, then he showed up again. He wasn't really part of our gang, but he was always around. He was nice guy, very nice person.
Do you remember any other gnarly injuries?
Some really good, bloody face plants where the nose was bleeding, blood down the face. A couple of front teeth knocked-out—that was always pretty nasty.
Wasn't the L-bowl shallower at one end?
Yeah, it was. The L-bowl was maybe five or six feet deep and the shallow was maybe three feet. The transition changed more than the depth. The transition got steeper in the deep-end and it was a lot more mellow in the shallow-end. Everybody skated the L-bowl.
You could blast airs over the hip.
Oh, yeah—you could do anything. Any trick you wanted to work on, you could work on in there.
It was grindable, right?
Oh, yeah—definitely. You could grind it, you could stall on it, you could do boardslides on it. I used to do backside axle stalls on it—it was just neat. It was a great place to learn footplants. It was fun to do doubles. There was this guy Blaze—who's dead now—he was another local skater who was always overlooked. He was really tall—maybe six-one or two-and he would skate like Spiderman. He had these really long legs and the board would always be stuck under his feet. He was faster than anybody—nobody could skate the pools and the L-bowl as fast as him, I mean, he just FLEW. He and I used to do doubles. He was goofy-foot like me, and we would do doubles in the L-bowl and in the kidney pool—that was just so much fun. It was insane.
What happened to that guy?
He was in Texas buying some weed, it went bad and he got shot in the face with a shotgun—him and his brother. They were all into drugs. That was the end of Blaze—he went out in a blaze of glory. I went to junior high school with him.
So, on the other side of the L-bowl was the peanut?
There were two little useless bowls. There was one behind the reservoir in the corner by the big garage door. That was more of a peanut, and then there was another one by the entrance of the halfpipe between the L-bowl and the halfpipe.
In between everything?
Everything.
Wasn't it a teardrop?
Yeah, I kind of forget the shape of that one—that was even more useless. I have no idea what they were trying to do with those two bowls.
So, if you walked out of the pro-shop, there was the L-bowl, then the peanut in the right corner, then the reservoir...
If you turned left, then by that was the halfpipe. The teardrop was right in the center of the park. Mostly, you just kind of dropped into that and scooted by to go somewhere else.
The reservoir was pretty good, though.
The reservoir was fun—you could do little stuff in it. The L-bowl was more fun—everybody used the L-bowl more. If you were really shy, you could go play in the reservoir, because you could still get speed carving around in it and, I don't remember if you could grind it or not, but I think you could. You could still work that a little bit, because some of the sessions in the L-bowl got pretty intense, and I'm sure some people were intimidated by that.
What do you remember happening in the keyhole?
Well, I remember the first time I ever dropped into it, I just tried to carve, got half way up and didn't know what to do. I had already lost all of my speed and I just kind of looked down at my board and thought, "What the hell?" No clue. Then I just got in there and started kickturning back and forth.
That's what I did—just started kickturning back and forth on coping right away.
Yeah, I didn't have any problem with that. We had all skated some pretty nasty ramps, so we could kickturn on vert, but we just had no clue how to carve and hold speed. Eventually, I figured it out—we all did—and the keyhole was the first pool that was emptied to skate. I just remember skating that 'til I was ready to drop. Mike would come over and say, "You've got to stop, you're just going to wear yourself out." I didn't wanna stop, didn't wanna go home. I had to keep going, had to keep skating—it was just that much fun.
Do you remember anything happening in the keyhole later? Did anyone blast tricks or lines in it?
The keyhole? No, nobody really sessioned it that much. It had a really fucked-up wall on the right, and it was kind of tight, so you really couldn't blast any big tricks. It was a good place to kind of warm-up a little bit, but as soon as you got to the bottom, you were already at the top of the other side. So, nobody really did much in it like big airs. I never really watched any of the pros shred it. Everybody went right to the L-bowl and then either stayed in the halfpipe, because they were so freaked at how perfect it was, or they rode the kidney and the egg.
What did you see go down in the egg pool?
The first big thing I saw was Chris Yandall rolling into the deep-end. That was just nuts, because we were nervous just doing axle stalls and elevator drops halfway into the deep-end of that pool. We were just getting comfortable doing that, then Chris showed up and just rolled right into the deep-end and blew our minds. The first really big sessions we saw were the guys from Sims who came in and were blasting frontside airs, handplants, really nasty grinds and fifty-fiftys around the pools—that was really neat stuff.
Did anyone jump the channel in the egg?
The first person I saw jump the channel was, oh, what was his name? From Michigan...
Bill Fergusson? Bill Danforth? Chris O.P. Moore?
I can see the guy's face—he had kind of a baby face. I don't know if it was Bill Danforth or not. He had a really relaxed style. He was the first person I saw do a frontside air over it effortlessly. Then a lot of people started trying to do it—I remember Brett Martin doing that all the time. Every so often, I managed to land a frontside air over it. My big line was: carve the deep-end, come back, and I'd either do a really nasty, lap-over frontside grind from the mid-point all the way to the shallow-end of the pool, or I'd do a big frontside air on the right-hand side of the pool. Whatever speed I had left, I'd go over to the other side and do a stall and then go back into the deep-end and just carve around.
I remember right before Apple closed, there was hardly anyone there and I had the egg pool all to myself. I just carved around the bottom frontside, tried it a few more times and all of sudden I was carving tiles frontside—I was so stoked.
Yeah, that was a gnarly pool to carve frontside.
Did anyone go side-to-side much in the egg pool?
Yeah, Bert Lamar was really one of the first people that we saw doing handplants and stuff at the park. He was working it side-to-side, more like skating a big halfpipe. He was doing tricks on each side, which was really cool, because all of us had been just trying to do carve lines and throw in a trick here and there.
What do you remember happening in the kidney?
I think that was everybody's favorite pool, because it had a really cool, workable shallow-end. You could carve it more and hold more speed. The egg pool had a couple of kinks to it, where the kidney had none. The kidney was really perfect.
Did the egg drop down or was it tapered down?
It was tapered down—there was no drop-off in it. The kidney had a little-bit of a drop-off in it—not much, but a little. It was actually kind of friendly, you could drop-in, do a nice carve in the deep-end and it would shoot you out for any line you wanted in the shallow. You could go frontside or backside into the shallow-end. So, you could do figure-eights really easily, which was nice—that was really fun. Everybody used to love to just grind the hell out of that pool, cuz you could do frontside or backside carve-grinds easily, you could do nice airs in it—it was just a great pool to work. That was my favorite thing in the whole park.
Was it twelve feet deep?
I don't have the blueprints here in front of me. I want to send you those—they show the depth for all the pools. They're kind of rough blueprints as blueprints go, but they show the keyhole, the kidney, the L-bowl. They show side-view elevations and stuff like that—they're kind of neat. I also used to have one blueprint of the whole park, but I can't find it anywhere. That was just the neatest thing. Here in West Palm Beach [Florida], there's a park called Olsner Skatepark and it has concrete pools. It's got almost the same kidney as Apple, except it only has two inches of vert instead of two feet. But, it's perfect, it has almost the same shape, and it's flawless—there's really no kinks in it.
How much vert was on the egg and kidney at Apple?
Ah, two feet, easily—maybe more. I would say definitely more in the egg pool than the kidney. The flat walls in the egg pool toward the deep-end were just straight down, I mean, they were huge—at least three and a half feet of vert. I used to try frontside airs heading straight in [toward the face wall] and there was so much vert, it would throw you out so far. It was just insane—that was fun. If you could land it without floating out too far, you could get really great air. Most of the time, I landed way too far out—I tend to pull a lot. Yeah, there was a lot of vert in that skatepark.
What do you remember about the halfpipe sessions?
They were really cool. It was a good place for everybody to learn frontside and backside airs, because it was so friendly. You could drop-in and, instead of rolling out and rolling back in, you could do an air as your first trick. That's where I learned backside airs and where a lot of people learned to do their first frontside airs. It was nice, because if you wanted to roll out and roll in, it was really easy, it wasn't very scary and the transitions were so perfect, you never felt like you had this big, steep wall in front of you, or anything. It was just really easy.
Didn't the walls stop right as they touched vert?
It had a little bit—maybe an inch or two of vert. But, there was enough there where you could really do an air. The halfpipe was cool. Since it was such a safe run, we would always push each other really hard there. That's probably where all the heaviest local sessions were, where everyone was trying to outdo each other. I remember skating with Brad Kipp, Steve Kipp and Greg Mack, and all of us were trying to do frontside and backside airs higher than each other in the halfpipe all night long. We were feeding off each other, going higher and higher, making more and more tricks, then that led into, "Well, let's start doing them coming out of the two-thirds pipe." Next thing you know, I'm trying lien airs and stuff out of it. It was just fun, a good place to really push yourself—we all pushed ourselves in the halfpipe.
How was that bowl in the back of the halfpipe?
It was a little kinked. It was really just good for turning around and coming back the other way. There was a roll-in over there...
Did you ever jump that little channel?
No, but a lot of people did. I saw El Gato come off that wall, clear it and land in the transition of the corner—that was pretty insane.
Now I'm going to ask for some of your memories of pros skating at Apple.
Watching El Gato do axle stalls in the two-thirds pipe just effortlessly like...
It was a mini-ramp.
Yeah, really. It was just amazing. And doing frontside rock 'n' rolls on the two-thirds pipe.
Serious? He made that?
He made that—it was just insane. Those were pretty much the heaviest things I ever saw. I saw a lot of cool skating—Duane Peters, Steve Olson, David Andrecht were really cool to watch.
Did you see Andrecht do those boardslides all the way around the kidney?
Oh, yeah. It made a neat sound, too. He owned that pool, he really did. He did these axle stalls where he went up in a cess slide and ended up in an axle stall going backward grinding across the coping—it was just insane. David Andrecht was the guy that I thought was the most awesome skater. He just wanted to do nothing but explode coping—and that he did. He would do grinds and fifty-fiftys and you'd see shit flying—it was just amazing. I had never seen anyone attack it that hard. I mean, Steve Olson was cool to watch and he maybe had more style and more hip tricks and things, but Andrecht just really exploded it.
Any other crazy pro stunts?
That's pretty much it. I think the frontside rock 'n' roll was a stand-out. Fred Blood and Duke Rennie were pretty cool on rollerskates.
Yeah, I saw Duke Rennie there, maybe with Steve Olson.
Yeah, that was pretty hot.
I was standing right by the lip of the halfpipe and Duke—or maybe it was Fred Blood—popped-up, spun a 540 air right in front of my chest and dropped right back in.
Yeah, before anybody was really doing that.
That was three years before Mike McGill ever did it on a skateboard.
Yeah, it was so cool. I actually went and bought a pair of skates after I saw those guys. It was actually easier than skateboarding, cuz if you wanted an air, you just jumped. It was really a lot of fun.
Did you ever rollerskate with Rob Roskopp at Apple?
Yeah, I did, and another guy named Dave ended up getting free skates from Duke. I don't think they ever sponsored him, but he really took to rollerskating. Dave was Apple's regular rollerskater, besides Roskopp, because he lived there. He really shredded it up.
I'm going to ask about some Apple locals now, if you want to share some memories. How about Chris Phillips?
Well, Chris was an amazing little kid with no fear. His dad really pushed him to get into skating. He came in and got lessons to learn how to skate from me and Jeff Kasson. I taught Chris about his center of gravity. He was there every other day, watching all of us skate. He was an incredible little kid, good little skater. He had no fear of heights, he would drop-in anywhere, he would grind, but I don't remember him doing many airs, or anything. I just remember he was fearless.
How about Kenny Mollica?
He had his own ramp and used to skate the Arcadia reservoir with all of us. When Apple opened, he shredded.
I always heard he was really good.
He was. He was probably almost Apple's best skater, but his friend Mike Ohm skated with us more than Ken. It was Mike, Gnarly Charlie, the Kipp brothers, Greg Mack and Wayne Lyons. Those guys were all from Worthington Hills and they used to skate all the time. Charlie not as much as Mike and Mike not so much as the Kipp brothers and Greg and Wayne. But, they were all great skaters.
What about Marty Jimenez?
We knew Marty from street-skating for a long time before Apple opened. Marty surfed Apple more than he skated it, he was just so smooth. He was a surfer, and most of us were all mid-Westerners, so we didn't have that surf style—but he did. He was very low to the ground, doing these little cutbacks on imaginary waves everywhere he went. He lived out in Reynoldsburg and had a little ramp at the end of his street. He was very quiet and a really cool guy, very nice.
Dave Bush.
Dave couldn't skate when he first showed up at Apple. He was friends with Mike Ohm and was always sort of in the shadows. When he got hired working with Dudley at Apple, he was always timid, always afraid to fall. Then he woke-up one day and all of a sudden Dave Bush became somebody else—he was skating incredibly well. He got over the fear and just started pulling off tricks. I don't know if that was before or after Duane Peters showed up. But, Dave had this habit of becoming whoever the coolest person around him was.
When Steve Olson came by, he hung-out with Olson, had his hair cut and bleached just like Olson with little white spikes and started wearing the sweaters and skating with gloves. When Duane came by, Dave bleached his hair white, got some Molly shorts and became little Duane. Dave sang for us in a band. He met Keith Morris from the Circle Jerks and a day later, Dave became Keith Morris. I don't know how he grew his hair long overnight, but he did—I'm not kidding. That's kind of how Dave is. I've known Dave for twenty years, although I probably haven't spoke with him maybe in the last three. We call him Psycho Dave, which he would acknowledge as pretty correct.
Rob Roskopp.
Rob used to show-up with Mike Grau. Rob was more of a rollerskater for the longest time. I guess with building his ramp and everything, he became this incredibly big, brutal skater overnight. He was another person that would attack the coping. He was always kind of a quiet-mannered person, too—you would not always notice him in a crowd at first.
Wayne Lyons.
Wayne was from upper Arlington and was part of the Mike Ohm, Steve and Brad Kipp group. They had a ramp in their area, and we'd visit and skate with them, and they'd visit our area and skate with us. He was a pretty good skater, a goofy-footer, if I remember. I had backside air contests with him. He was a nice guy.
You said that Geoff Hazleton showed up and was the first punker at Apple.
Yeah, it was probably the first couple of weeks the park was open—I don't think it was opening day—and this guy showed up in his red '63 Volkswagen Beetle that was painted with a roller. Geoff was wearing raggedy-ass clothes with safety pins all over and a Sex Pistols T-shirt. He had these wrap-around sunglasses on, and I forget what he was skating, but it was some deck that none of us had ever seen before. He was really smooth—he could skate all the little bowls and pools. He wasn't really grinding anything, but he was just really smooth and held all of his speed. Nobody knew who he was, and everybody was afraid to talk to him and stayed away from him. But, we eventually hooked-up and skated a lot and became best friends. We hung-out and did everything together. We ended up in two punk bands together. Geoff still skates.
Wasn't he from California?
He was from San Jose and used to skate Winchester. He invented a trick called the mailbox, which he did in the reservoir that was between the L-bowl and the back doors—just the big, shallow square bowl. It was a neat little pool—a square reservoir. It was maybe about three feet deep in the deep-end. A lot of people didn't even skate it, but he had a trick called the mailbox where he would kind of go up, let the board go over the lip, do sort of a layback and then let the board come back underneath him fakie, like the flag on a mailbox opening and closing—it was a really stupid trick.
Was there ever a scene of non-skaters, girls or whoever hanging-out at Apple?
There wasn't a whole lot of that, unfortunately.
Do you remember any of those sleep-over sessions?
No, because I wasn't working at Apple anymore by then.
You only worked there for a year?
I worked there about a year.
And it was open for another nine months.
Yeah, by then Geoff Hazleton and I were discovering street-skating again. We were going downtown and hitting the parking garages. We were doing that more than skating Apple.
Why did you stop skating Apple?
Can you believe at the time I would have said I was bored with it? I think I just didn't know how great it was. We were looking to skate other things.
Because you had been at Apple every day?
Been there every day, yeah. I can't remember the last time I skated Apple—the last session I had. I really wish I could.
Did you just quit working and skating there one day?
Well, I got fired.
For what?
Being an idiot. You're allowed to be an idiot once in your life, right? We'll leave it at that. But, after I got fired, I still skated there every day for a long time. Then Mike Musgrave got fired, Dudley was managing it, then Kevin Tate came in. I felt like I had been there for so long and now they had all these new people in. I no longer felt like I had my place there. At the time, we were also really getting heavily into punk-rock, trying to start a band and street-skating, so we just quit going—just like that, too.
So, Kevin Tate took-over after you were gone?
Yeah, but I just worked in the pro-shop, Mike Musgrave and Ronn Dudley were the managers when I was there.
How long was it before attendance at Apple dropped?
By the end of the first year, it really was sparse.
Did you hear that Apple was going to close?
No, I never did, but then we heard it had closed and we talked about going over and seeing what was left, but we never did.
So, you hadn't skated it for nine months?
Well, I don't know if it was that long, but for a few months, yeah.
Then all of a sudden, it was just gone.
It was gone.
You didn't get a last session?
No, not at all—which really sucked. That's why I've held on to these Apple blueprints to this day, because I figure if I ever win the lotto or get that successful, I'll buy the building Apple is in and dig up the pools.
I've heard that they may have just filled the pools in with dirt.
That's what I heard, too—that they just filled them in with debris and dirt and concreted over them.
Bryan Ridgeway went in there a year after it closed and said he could still see the shapes of the pools with concrete up to the edges. They didn't build a new floor over it.
Well, you know they would do it as cheaply as possible.