I was up in my garage here in the Okanogan where we live now, looking to retrieve a ladder, when I spied a wooden scooter I had made for one of my daughters some years ago. I had made this one with a nailgun and drywall screws with smooth urathane wheels. As I stood looking at this modern version of our old roller-skate scooters I recalled to mind the feeling of racing down the sidewalks of Berendo with them, jumping cracks with a motion that made the scooter one with my left foot. I could see us out there in front of Larry's house jumping pop bottles and other odd and assorted stuff trying to see who could jump the highest with our scooters. Remember how we'd put wide boards on the bottom 2x4 so we could sit on them and go down hills scooter-backwards? Occasionally we mounted boxes on that same board to get the feel of riding a "putt-putt" but then you had to put your foot way up front and it usually cramped my style. One time, in my Soap Box Derby dreaming days, I even put a break pedal astride my scooter. I'd wrapped tire rubber around it so it would be more efficient. It actually worked but it was just extra cargo and left a lot of black marks on the sidewalks. I remember installing a little glove-compartment door between the two triangle wood supports so we could stash goodies we had bought at "the little store". I remember there for a time we all (the boys that is) got competitive about how sharp ones scooter could turn to the right AND to the left. They'd usually turn better one way better than the other. I recall guffawing Ray during one of these rallies. He was out in their garage for hours very precisely installing his front and back skate wheels using a carpenters square so that he would get equally good turning both ways (I presume). I had never seen this kind of high tech engineering before and it seemed like overkill on our old wood scooters. Of course I would have been the first one to use this method if I knew it would have led me to Cal Tech eventually. I wonder now in my AARP years what the neighbors on Berendo thought of that loud metallic skate wheel noise resounding out of the wood scooters as we zoomed up and down the neighborhood.

- Dave Dumas

  I enjoyed recalling the scooters. I had forgotten about the brake pedal and the little glove box. I never did get the hang of jumping the cracks. All I could do was pull up an the handle and get the front wheels to jump, and the devil take the hindmost, as they say. No wonder I had to re-nail my skates all the time. I think one time I didn't even clear the front wheels and the scooter stayed at the crack while I continued forward.

   I marvel at what the skateboarder's can do today.  I loved that scene in "Back to the Future" where Michael Fox breaks the handle off the scooter to make his getaway.

   We used to wear those stamped steel wheels out pretty fast. One of us (Dave?) had a set with solid steel wheels about one quarter inch thick at the rim. I don't think we ever wore those out. It seems like the wheels that turned the sharpest were the ones that would lean over the most, so we would always pick the skates that were the loosest. We used to go down to the Southside theater and ride on their smooth Terra Cotta walk way. It was so smooth we could get a nice ride just going down the slight slope from the entrance doors to the curb. If it was wet from washing, we could even sideslip on a sharp turn. Those things were pretty noisy all right. Dave was the fastest. You could hear him coming down the way with little breaks of silence while leaping cracks. Three or four of us in a row must have drove the old folks batty. I wonder if they were as loud as today's Hot Wheels?   Marla says she can remember David giving Judy a ride on his scooter. That was when she was small enough to sit near the handle facing backwards. Dave, speaking of backwards riding, do you remember when we used to ride our bikes sitting backwards on the handlebars? We used to go pretty fast. I can still do it but I need a wide area and go real slow. We used to go down the sidewalks like that. It's enough to give Ralph Nader a heart attack.

- Alex Magdaleno