Fairweather Skateboards

Skateboarding for us started in small ass Ohio towns and little dirt drops on surrounding maps like Hermitage, PA and Sissonville, WV or Newport, KY. Sissonville had a skateboarder named Dan Wheeler.  Dan looked like a high-school baseball catcher, chewin’ tobacco included with his spit bottle in his ass pocket to boot.  Next to skateboarding Dan’s favorite thing was being hyped.  He’d LET you know even when you landed a warm up manual, once even congratulatory tackling Mike Rudd after Mike tre-flipped over a milk crate.

Dan’s family owned some kind of national plumbing company, so he was always going on business trips with his dad to big cities.  He’d come back in town with mags, music, gear and videos, months, sometimes a year before our small ass local shop got’em.  Had it not been for Dan Wheeler, the town of Sissonville may have never known of the Notorious B.I.G.  In ’95 Dan got back from Seattle, and all he’d talk about was how they sold sushi in the grocery stores there  –  in the deli next to the lunch meat.There was a bank to ledge behind a Kroger’s grocery store in Spring Hill.  Dan would park his pickup beside the ledge, slide open the windows in the back of his truck and play Ol’Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers so loud they could hear it in the store’s back offices.  During one of the many times we were kicked out, Dan refused to turn off the stereo, shouting, “What! What! Y’all don’t even have sushi” as he kept trying a back tail slide despite the security guard’s foot, “Fuckin’ aint no sushi! I ain’t leavin’ till I’ve landed!”  Dan Wheeler, keeping that shit in the streets since ’95.