Point Loman Patti McGee Was World’s First Professional Female Skateboarder — May She Rest in Peace

It was 1965 and I remember very well staring at the cover of Life magazine. It had a young woman, a local Point Loman, on the cover doing a handstand on a skateboard. It was an amazing picture and even more of an amazing stunt. The young blond on the cover was Patti McGee.

Skateboards were brand new back in the mid-sixties and most kids who had them had made them themselves. Take the metal skates available and attach them to a wood board covered by a piece of carpeting. Voila! A skateboard.

Patti McGee has just passed; she was 79. She broke so many records, it’s difficult now to imagine a world without her. Fortunately for us, U-T writer Maura Fox has just laid out McGee’s history and significance, and to let the rest of us know that a nonprofit named Exposure Skate will hold a ceremony for McGee at its annual skate event for women and nonbinary skaters in Encinitas this Saturday, November 2 at 5 p.m.

McGee was amazing. She was considered the world’s first professional female skateboarder in a sport that was even more dominated by men than it is today.

Her career kicked off in 1964 when she took first place at the inaugural national skateboarding championships in Santa Monica, clinching the win with her signature trick, a handstand on the skateboard.

So, here’s Maura Fox’s article:

Stand at the top of the Loring Street hill in Pacific Beach — one of the steepest in San Diego — and let yourself be transported back to the early 1960s, when children and teenagers flew down the precipitous grade on makeshift skateboards, the ocean sprawled in the distance ahead. These were some of skateboarding’s first takers, the kids who helped pave the way for future generations of a sport that for decades was widely seen as a societal menace and a fringe subculture.

Among these skaters was Patti McGee. For the Point Loma teen, skateboarding down Loring Street was just another way to kill time when the surf blew out in the afternoon and she wasn’t ready to go home to do homework. Loring Street “was a challenge. That was like surfing a big wave, if you could make it,” McGee told the skateboarding magazine Juice in 2017. Seeking a challenge and staying active were part of what drew her to skateboarding. But McGee — who died Oct. 16 at her home in Brea at 79 following a recent stroke — was also a natural.

Her legacy was cemented into the culture’s history when she graced the cover of LIFE magazine in May 1965, feet high in the air, board rolling beneath her.

Maura Fox:

After the win in Santa Monica, McGee received a brand deal with skateboard manufacturer Hobie and traveled the country promoting its boards.

She was inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame in 2010. That year, San Diego’s then-Councilmember Kevin Faulconer gave her a special commendation honoring her achievements.

But becoming a trailblazer for women in skateboarding wasn’t exactly the goal for McGee; the San Diego Evening Tribune reported in 1965 that she wanted to pursue acting or be a “movie stunt girl.”

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

“She did a lot of different things in her life,” Villa said, pointing to her mother’s time working in turquoise mining and leather goods and even at a casino. “Skateboarding was just kind of a little blip.”

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

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

Like many skaters of the 1960s, she had begun as a surfer — first surfing in 1958 and hitting spots such as Newport Street, North Beach and Ocean Beach and in La Jolla, at the shores and Windansea.

When she was 16, she ventured up the coast for more — to Tamarack, Oceanside, Doheny and County Line, she told Skateboarder magazine in 1965, when she was on its cover.

The president of an all-girls surf team in 1963, McGee described herself as a “rowdy surfer” — unafraid to be aggressive as one of the few girls in the water, when “guys would just push you out of the way or kick out into your ankles, like, ‘My wave,’” she told Juice.

McGee first found her way to a skateboard in 1962 through a DIY project: Her brother, Jack, stole the wheels off her roller skates and attached them to a wooden board he’d made in shop class.

Later, she rode a Bun Buster, equipped with those same wheels from her roller skates.

She and her friends cruised the streets of San Diego, even the parking garage of downtown San Diego’s Concourse — their Mount Everest, as she described it.

They were unruly, and they always got in trouble.

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

McGee was also a member of the Pump House Gang, a group of teen surfers who gathered around a sewage pump house at Windansea Beach in the 1960s. The writer Tom Wolfe later wrote an essay about the group and named his 1968 collection of essays after it.

But her 1964 championship win in Santa Monica inexorably changed her life.

Her one-year, $250-a-month brand deal with skateboard maker Hobie took her around the country, where she demonstrated skateboarding in department stores and shopping malls, largely for audiences of children.

Landing the cover of LIFE propelled McGee to yet another level of recognition. Soon after the iconic shoot, she booked appearances on the game show “What’s My Line?” and the “Mike Douglas Show” and taught Johnny Carson to skate on “The Tonight Show.”

At the time, mainstream culture was still deciding how it felt about skateboarding. Initially seen as a fun new fad for kids and often dubbed “sidewalk surfing,” by the late 1960s and 70s it was more widely considered a nuisance, something for kids up to no good.

McGee and her generation saw that shift firsthand and are part of the reason that skateboarding became closely associated with punk, said Haley Watson, a filmmaker who was working on a documentary about McGee before she passed away.

“There’s no way that skateboarding as we know it would take the shape that it has without Patti,” Watson said.

McGee returned to San Diego after her national tour in the mid-’60s, but she didn’t stay long.

She soon moved to Lake Tahoe with her first husband, Glen Villa, where they mined turquoise and made leather goods. Later she moved to Cave Creek, Ariz., where she raised two children, gave tours to tourists panning for gold. There, she met her second husband, William Chace, who died in 2015.

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

And when she was in third grade, her mother brought a skateboard team to her school to give a demonstration. Among its members was Tony Hawk.

“I think that was the day I understood my mom was more special in the skateboarding realm,” Villa recalls.

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

Patti McGee, right, and her daughter, Hailey Villa, left, listen to remarks during the re-opening of the Brea skate park on Saturday, Sept. 10, 2022, in Brea, California. (Photo by Michael Kitada, Orange County Register contributing photographer)
The family bond was clear to Watson.

“It was very evident to me that she really loved her family and that she had a very special connection with her daughter,” the filmmaker said. “They had so much 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 Skateboard Champion,” illustrated by Erika Medina.

Nienow became close with McGee as she wrote the book.

McGee could make a person feel like they were the only one in the room, Nienow said — a sentiment echoed by McGee’s friend and skatemate 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, sometimes placing her hands on their faces and really looking them in the eyes. “People would let her in.”

The skateboarder’s charm and talent captivated her friends and family — and the world.

Rose points to McGee’s LIFE cover in 1965 — a far cry, she said, from some of the magazine’s more serious covers of that time.

“Then one day they come out with this sky blue cover of a blonde, upside down (doing a) handstand — white capris and a red sweater,” Rose said. “If that isn’t a breath of fresh air, then I don’t know what is.”

The nonprofit Exposure Skate will hold a ceremony for McGee at its annual skate event for women and nonbinary skaters in Encinitas this Saturday at 5 p.m.