Scouts to Save Skateboard Park : Merger May Get Defunct Del Mar Facility Rolling Again

Hey, all you skate rats. Listen up. You’ll soon be pumping in the Kona bowl again, thanks to the Boy Scouts of America.

True to form, the Scouts are being loyal, honest, trustworthy, and very, very helpful. They are turning the Del Mar Skate Ranch into Explorer Post 741. There also will be a Scout troop and, for the younger fry, a Cub den.

The skateboard park, the only public one in San Diego County, closed abruptly on Aug. 30 when its operators learned that their liability insurance had been canceled. A search for another insuror proved fruitless, although the park had had no claims against it in its seven years of existence.

“It was really rad the way the guys acted when we closed,” Chip Morton said. Morton, who operates the skateboard park’s pro shop, said, “They walked around here like zombies. For some of the regulars, this was their whole life.”

Even now, eight weeks after the closing, a few of the regulars hang around the game room, looking lost and unhappy.

The rest are out on the streets on their four-wheeled boards, highballing through shopping malls to the dismay of shoppers and security guards, or barreling down to the beach for an alternative sport--surfing--that takes many of the same skills of coordination, balance and timing.

“Yeah, I’d do anything, even join the Boy Scouts, to get out there again,” said one teen-ager, who refused to give his name. Going cold turkey on skateboarding is about as bad as “coming down off a high,” he said.

Wayne Searle, manager of the Surf & Turf Recreation Center, which includes half a dozen other activities like miniature golf and tennis, soon will become post adviser, troop leader and den master of the 5,000 or so skateboarders who use the park each year.

“I think that this is the best solution we could come up with,” Searle said. “We will all have Scout titles, as advisers probably, but I don’t know if we will have to wear uniforms.”

Morton, 21, grimaced at the thought of uniforms and Scout regimen, but he agreed that anything was better than closing down the last skate park in the county.

Trevor Hylton, an Explorer regional spokesman, said that none of the paraphernalia traditionally associated with Scouting would accompany the formation of Post 741. No uniforms will be required. No merit badges will be earned. No Scout salutes.

Once Post 741 is approved by the national Scout authorities and issued an insurance certificate under the blanket coverage of the Boy Scouts of America, the park may open. The only difference that skateboarders may find is that they will be required to join a post, troop or den for $3.50 a year before being admitted.

“This is a special-interest group,” Hylton explained. “We will have no part in the operation of the facility.”

There will be training for the skateboard park employees, however. Hylton described the sessions as “educational,” designed to instruct the new Scout leaders in the goals and principles of Scouting: citizenship, patriotism, character building and such.

A few girls, less than half a dozen, skate at the park. They will be allowed to continue, a Scout spokesman said, because Scouting enrolls girls.

Dorothy Doan, whose Santa Ana-based Pelican Properties owns the recreational complex, has been invited by the staff to attend the first Scout indoctrination, because, one female employee pointed out, “she is the chief den mother.”

Doan couldn’t be happier that the park is going into Scouting because she and her husband have been involved in Boy Scout and Girl Scout higher echelons for years. But she admitted that she can’t take credit for the wedding of the skate park and the Boy Scouts. That credit goes to Frank Hawk of Carlsbad, a former Scout leader and now president of the National Skateboard Assn.

“Everyone is making too much of a to-do about this,” Hawk said. “This is nothing new. This is what Exploring is all about, sponsoring special interests. I can’t imagine that the park will have any problem getting under the Scouts’ umbrella insurance. They insure kids in canoes shooting the rapids and kids hacking with axes, so I can’t see any problem with skateboards.”

There have been Explorer posts at other skateboard parks, Hawk said. Now, the ones that had Explorer ties are gone, caught by a slump in skateboarding interest during the late 1970s and early 1980s, he said.

The Del Mar park, which opened in 1978, didn’t show much of a profit during its early years but, because of a state Coastal Commission regulation requiring the removal of the tons of cement that went into the bowls, ramps and tubes if the land is put to another use, the park stayed open.

Morton said that beginners don’t usually use the park, except to watch enviously.

“We get a lot of groupies here, mostly girls,” he said. “It’s a place where a lot of guys from all over hang out. It’s known all over the country and internationally, too. There’s five guys from Scotland and a bunch from the East Coast who come here and live in their cars or with friends just so they can skate out here.”

The professional skateboarders draw good crowds when they show up to practice and, although they won’t admit it, a lot of amateurs use the park’s concrete curves to show off.

Tony Magnusson, a 22-year-old San Diegan ranked among the top skateboarders in the nation who makes a living at the sport by manufacturing boards under his own label, does not rank the Del Mar park design high among the many he has skated. But Magnusson praised the park’s favorite spot, the Keyhole, as one of the best rides anywhere. And, he said, Del Mar Skateboard Ranch is still around when many of the other, flashier parks are history.

Searle attributes the park’s clean safety record to its design and its strict requirements for safety equipment.

“Most parks were designed by people who didn’t know anything about skateboarding,” he said. “Ours was designed to be like what the kids are used to, the places they learned to skate like drainage ditches and swimming pools.”

The reservoir, a warm-up spot, resembles a shallow swimming pool; the half-tube and the bank slalom are like drainage ditches, and the egg bowl and Kona bowl have steep sides that prevent the less-skilled from gaining enough momentum to perform beyond their abilities.

“Other parks have long, steep ramps that let a skater build up too much speed,” Searle said. That, he said, is when serious accidents happen.

Broken wrists are the most common injuries, Morton said. Broken bones aren’t uncommon, he said, “but we don’t get the really serious injuries here, no head injuries or broken backs.”

Wayne Tarvin, who works in the golf pro shop at the driving range, is a most interested bystander to the creation of Explorer Scout Post 741 next door. He can’t resist putting in a few digs about how the skateboard park employees are going to look in short pants and knee socks, but he believes that the Explorer-skate park merger is a winner.

The skate park, which had its best year ever in 1984, will get the one thing it lacks, liability insurance. And the Scouts will get hundreds of new members. And no one will lose in the arrangement because, Tarvin said, “Who would ever have the nerve to sue the Boy Scouts?”