These days skateboarding culture is almost too accessible. It really only depends on your internet speed, with instant consumption a mere @ or hashtag away, but depending on where you lived in the early 90s, when the internet was named the World Wide Web, required a dial-up modem and was only used for rudimentary emails and softcore pornography, immersing in skateboard culture could be a slog, especially in rural America. In the small West Virginia town where I grew up, you could consider yourself lucky if you lived near the one Kroger that carried Thrasher magazine, even luckier if you had a brother with an old skateboard(s) or a neighbor who’d been around for the heyday of Huntington, WV’s Iguana Skate Shop, but arguably the luckiest if you knew Wheeling, WV’s Chad Henry! A spryly teenager, Chad was an ambassador for skateboarding in West Virginia throughout the 1990’s.
I heard of Chad when I was 16, after Mike Patrick told me about a kid running his own skate shop of sorts in Wheeling. In 1996, West Virginia had 2.5 skateboard shops: S&E Boardroom, a mountain sports/skateboard shop in Charleston, WV and an Army|Navy store with skateboard decks, skate shirts and a back corner of skate shoes in Morgantown, WV, with the .5 shop being a Teacher Supply store in Fairmont, WV, that had a month long run of Acme decks in their Gym section. With the closing of Iguana Skate in the early 90’s and S&E changing owners three times in as many years starting in 1993, skateboard culture in West Virginia was dismal, sparse and held together by little more than a dozen skaters, so in the mid 90s, when the scene in West Virginia was drying up and he was only 17, Chad Henry opened a mail-order skateboard shop in his parents basement. // Some years ago, I interviewed Chad Henry regarding this golden nugget of West Virginia skateboard history.
Were there any skateboard shops near Wheeling, WV back in the day? Chad: No not really. When I started skating in ’90, ’91, there was a bike shop that sold some cool boards. There was another bike shop, that didn’t last long, over in Martins Ferry, OH. And Joe’s bike shop in Washington, PA. Didn’t you guys have a decent shop in Charleston back then? S & E?
Yeah, it was in the mall, but then they moved it, and made it that Mountain sport plus skateboard shop. They sold carabiners and mountain climbing rope in the same display case as skate wheels and trucks. Did you guys just mail order all your stuff back then? Chad: I always mail ordered. I’d order Blind, 101, World, Menace and Plan B from a few different mail orders. Church of Skatan stands out to me; in I think Santa Barbara, CA? I called them a lot. We used to ride a lot of blank decks. (Laughing) Do you remember blanks?
I remember ordering them from back ads in Thrasher. When did yinz start running the skate shop from your basement? It didn’t last long. We ran it for an entire year in 1996, and some in ’97. I made my first SF trip in ’97, and I remember it was pretty much done, when I got back.
Why did you guys do it? I think just to see if we could and sorta out of necessity. If you broke a board back then it’d be weeks before you could get another one, and any places nearby never had many choices of boards and sometimes carried boards from just one company, like Birdhouse or somethan.
How did you guys do it? I was a landline fiend in the ‘90s. I used to call up skater friends and talk every night. My mom would complain about the long distance charges on our bill. Me and Eric Longshaw, or Zac Berry down in Glen Dale. Glen Dale was three towns south of Wheeling, and Zach would get his Thrasher mag in the mail one day before me. I remember him reading me an entire Mike Carrol interview because I didn’t want to wait the extra day. Eli Lynch from Wexford would call me too and just talk about the Pittsburgh scene, and later the Charleston, WV scene, when he lived there. One of my favorite things in those days was to call companies direct, ask for their catalogs and stickers, and bug’em about when their new video was gonna drop. I became a regular with some of the smaller mail order shop guys too; Beach Plus, in Florida, was always stoked to hear from me. I got to interact with people back then over the phone which is nothing like now. Calling up South Shore Distribution was just an extension to my commitment and admiration for skateboarding.
South Shore? They were out of Texas, right? Yeah, Houston. Longshaw and I were talking one night, and were saying we should call one of the bigger distributors and just tell them we were a skate shop, and not just two guys—thinking we’d get better stuff than anything close by, cheaper on wholesale and more regular. I just took a chance and started calling places.
Was it easy? Everywhere immediately asked for a business license, which we obviously didn’t have, and cartoonishly listing off a bunch of numbers lotto style seemed less likely to work than just waiting a couple days, calling back and hoping they forgot the first call(s). We were wanting to use Eastern Distribution, in North Carolina. When we called South Shore, they didn’t ask for a license and never did after the first call, so I started my business relationship with them.
Did you have to give the shop a name? Yeah, they didn’t ask for a license, but we had to give them a shop name. (Laughing) It was called Wheeling Board. Oh shit! And CODs! You could cash on delivery anything back then. We’d order for just our crew, everyone knew each other back then. It was all the Wheeling dudes, a few Ohio homies like Dave Coyne, Longshaw, PatChuck, Ali and eventually Eli Lynch and Mike Patrick from down in Charleston. We’d just throw our money together.
I remember ordering some stuff through you, via Eli Lynch and Mike Patrick. What companies were you guys ordering back then? Yeah, I met Eli at the old Shady Skates in Wilkinsburg, PA in ’94. I kind of remember ordering Capital for a quick bit, maybe Silverstar, Nicotine Wheels, and I think Venture Trucks plus a couple west coast companies like Menace and Toy Machine. We’d get copies of new videos sometimes too.
You would get the 411 videos before the shop in Charleston. You guys had videos the shop in Charleston never got!! Eastern Exposure 3. Actually, Eastern Exposure 2, which is a pretty underground video, got me psyched on the East Coast. Those dudes were bringing back some tricks, and influenced a skate everything mentality, not just the school yards, which none of us had to begin with. The Sub Zero vid outta Philly was sick.
Even though short-lived, do you think Wheeling Board was influential toward a WV skateboard scene? I don’t think we influenced too many people to start skating. Skateboarding wasn’t popular back then, but I’m sure you remember. I think we just kept it in our crew and some other out of town dudes. It brought the skaters closer, which was real cool, and it was a way my friends and I could operate that made us feel like we were on the inside of an underground scene.
Do you think they ever knew you weren’t a shop? (Laughing) I think they knew from the first day. Phillip Vaughn was my sales rep. He was so chill. We had some bigger orders, but I remember calling him up once, and he let me order one copy of the new 411. I mean, what shop orders just one copy of a video to sale at their store; they had to know. Our dog got in the basement once when I was making an order. He kept barking, so I cupped the phone and loudly said, “Sir, there’s no dogs allowed in the shop.” They knew (laughing).
The Harbour County 
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