In the mid seventies surfing and skateboarding were becoming very popular sports in the Pensacola Florida area and spawning it’s own early movements much like the movement’s in other towns around the world. When you look at documentaries like, ” Dogtown and Z boys, ” those unfamiliar with that era might assume all hard core skateboarding began with those people involved in that movement. The fact is, there were many such movements already taking place around the country. The Dogtown movement when it became so well known simply validated the sport rather than created it.

In Pensacola, which had an influx of people from all over the surfing and skateboarding world because of it’s old historical position as a Naval Air training station. Surfing had been a growing sport since the late fifties and skateboarding got it’s start in Pensacola about the same time as everywhere else.

One of the first early skateboard happenings started with Freddy Esposito, whose father worked for the city and would make legitimate arrangements to block off a parking lot at the old Roadway Inn in the Pensacola area just for skateboarding. Freddy who was also a longtime surfer, was already building his own model skateboards and shaping surfboards out of the local surfboard factory called, ” Islander. ”

As things would turn out, two local businessmen had noticed the movement with skateboarding surrounding this original crew and decided to see if they could find a way to capitalize on it’s growing popularity in the area.

Within the year they would build a large skateboard park at the top of Barrancas hill and name it, ” The Paved Wave, ” and hire Freddy as the manager and local pro skater. Espo became the first person in Pensacola to be paid for skateboarding. At nineteen years old Freddy was being paid five hundred dollars a week in 1976 money, was sponsored by Dick Brewer skateboards, and had a job whose description was to stay at the park as a draw and go skateboarding. He would literally be the envy of some others who were themselves attempting to build their own reputations and find a way to capitalize on the sport.

As Freddy remembers, ” I couldn’t believe it, I got free clothing, free skateboards and five hundred bucks a week to play. I hired my good friend Steve Forstall to be my assistant manager and began cultivating some of the other great surfer skaters from the area like Yancy Spencer and Ted Scarritt. ”

The difference in styles of skateboarding was already beginning to take shape. There was the old school like Freddy who were primarily surfers and wanted to ride skateboards, like they would surf on a wave. The other now emerging new school style and the forerunner to the street skating you see today was being done by other resident pros like Ted Scarritt. Ted was a freestyle skater, while Freddy remained a surfer style skater. It got quite competitive at the park at times between the two styles, but we never were enemies, we just pushed each other, he said.

The park was built like a long and winding concrete wave, with large high point banks, raceways and areas to do heavy banks like an off the lip. Some of the folks I really looked up to as surfers, were now having to play catch up to me as a skater. I couldn’t surf as good as them, but they couldn’t skate as good as me…and I was getting paid.

We were all basically surfers first and skaters second, but skateboarding was beginning to take hold as it’s own unique sport. I was very lucky to have the full support of my parents, unlike some of my friends whose parents saw both surfing and skateboarding as a negative sub culture.

In late 1978 Freddy and others were becoming disillusioned with the direction skateboarding at the park was going. It was all business now and felt like a job, so he left the Paved Wave, taking with him some of the more core of his buddies.  They began to search for swimmings pools and down hill ditches with concrete. With the departure of the core element, the park would close later that year, which in way also signaled the end of the surfing style of skateboarding.   The timing was ironic since Fred had already made the decision to leave skating for money forever.

Skaters were now building wooden ramps in their own back yards and having their friends over, or just skating on the street freestyle. While Freddy and his friends Marty Jacobs, Mike Seevers and others would attempt to keep the same spirit on wood they had with the concrete surfing.  Freddy remembers, wood just didn’t feel the same as concrete. Wood was noisy, it felt different, while concrete was quieter and rode smoother like a wave. To Freddy and some others, the soul had dropped out of skateboarding

Those early few years of the paved wave were a magical time that will likely never be repeated. Skateboard parks would become almost extinct for awhile and skateboarding would become as big a commercial sport as surfing. However, the magic captured in those few early formative years will remain fond memories etched in the minds of Pensacola’s first skate crew forever.

Says Freddy, ” much of what I had learned about the basics in life from courage to will power,  I learned from those early years of skateboarding and riding the paved wave. ”