FIXATIONS : Skate-Hoarder : Kurt Schneider of Huntington Beach is as laid-back about his collection as the ‘60s kids who used the toys for fun, not sport.

Kurt Schneider may be the most relaxed collector we’ve yet come across in Fixationland. His collection doesn’t number in the hundreds, isn’t worth squat, and he doesn’t spend hours each week networking on the phone to acquire more. Indeed, he doesn’t even profess to know much about the vintage skateboards he collects and suspects he may recently have traded his rarest board away for a mere magazine.

“I really love these skateboards and just enjoy them. I could never get too serious about the history of them,” Schneider said, chatting in his back yard recently, with many of his 40 or so boards spread out on the lawn. His laid-back attitude is commensurate with the subject: One doubts there’s much drama or pith to be uncovered in researching the history of the skateboard.

Instead he collects his ‘60s boards, he says, “just because the way they’re made reminds me of old times.” Asked to distill what the tenor of those old times were for him, Schneider succinctly answered, “Fun.”

And even for one such as myself--whose only fun in ‘60s encounters with skateboards came in picking at the big scabs on my knees for weeks afterward--there was no denying the simple dumb frolics embodied in Schneider’s boards.

There are ridiculously basic ones such as the pawn-shop-red Roller Derby, which looks like a midget fence slat on wheels. Another is an elegant laminate of mahogany and other warm woods, shaped like a surfboard. His first board, called a Rock Rider, has a drawing of a Beatle-like guitarist riding a musical note-shaped board. Others feature helmeted knights or race car designs.

One board is a simple plank, except for a metal foot pedal sticking up from it: a brake. That innovation, noted Schneider, “throws you off every time. You step on the brake; the board stops ; and you just keep going.”

None of them is anything more than what a kid and his dad could slap together in the garage for a few bucks. Schneider only collects boards with steel or clay wheels. He marks the advent of urethane wheels in the ‘70s as the turning point when skateboards began to get too serious.

“It used to just be kids riding them for fun, imitating surfers. Then it blew up into a real sport where now it’s all speed and tricks,” he said.

Where old skateboards were basically toys, ones nowadays can run from $110 to $150 at local emporiums such as Newport’s Lido Surf and Skate and El Toro’s Becker Surf and Sport. Salespeople at each say most of their boards are constructed from separate components chosen by the customer to achieve their ideal of performance.

While certainly speaking of progress and freedom of choice, that also seems deadly serious contrasted with the simple boards of the ‘60s. One is reminded a bit of Huxley’s “Brave New World” where all leisure sports were designed to employ the maximum amount of technology and materials. Maybe we’ve reached that point, since racing bicycles now can cost more than cars and there are separate shoes for running, walking, jogging, aerobics, every sport and even special shoes for biking (where, if memory serves, one’s feet never touch the ground). It’s enough to make one long for inefficient goofy stuff.

Schneider’s boards are particularly inefficient, since, he says, his feet are now too big to even fit on most them. He’s pretty tall, and about as affable as one can be while scarcely saying anything. He just happened to come across the Rock Rider board at a garage sale six years ago and knew it said something to him.

Since then, friends have given him boards they’ve found, and he’s picked up others at swap meets and thrift shops. He thinks they’re beginning to become collectors’ items, since the only calls he got when he placed a want ad was from people looking to buy some.

“They’ve been really hard to find lately,” he said. “Most of them probably went in the trash can or got worn down to nothing.”

Now 32, Schneider remembers first riding a skateboard when he was 5, pushing around on his knees like most beginners. He lived in Sacramento then, and when he moved to Huntington Beach at age 11, he knew he was in the right place. He liked the funky atmosphere and the way you could go from surfing in the ocean to surfing on land, with nothing but sidewalk cracks and curbs to mar the landscape.

He thinks Huntington has changed along with the skateboards. “With all the old buildings torn down on Main Street and the surfer image being phased out for all the new stuff, it doesn’t have the character it did,” he said.

His own house is a bit of a holdout, appointed in ‘60s decor and furniture he designs and builds himself out of concrete and broken tiles, in the style of the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi. He runs a business installing tile but is looking to open a furniture business this fall. He admits that his designs, while visually arresting, can be a tad hefty. One of them is a picnic table that weighs in somewhere between 150 and 200 pounds.

He isn’t seeking a particular Holy Grail of skateboards--he doesn’t even know what might be out there that he hasn’t seen--though he would like to get one of his old boards back. He had one made by an old surfer and board shaper named Ole that he traded two months to a San Diego County collector for a 1965 issue of the short-lived Skateboarder Magazine.

It is a fun magazine, full of skatin’ Kewpie dolls and photos of hairstyled poodles pulling kids on skateboards. There is a lengthy photo feature titled “Skateboarding in Paris,” which claims the sight of its two kids on the new sidewalk sensation caused a traffic jam by the Eiffel Tower. Most towns were rather lacking in an ocean in which to pursue real surfing, and skateboards allowed the landlocked to at least pretend they were in on the action, a view promulgated by Jan and Dean’s typically out-of-tune classic, “Sidewalk Surfin’ ”: “Don’t be afraid to try the newest sport around (bust yer buns, bust yer buns)/It’s catching on in every city and town/You can do the tricks the surfers do/Just try the Quasimodo and the Coffin too/Grab your board and go sidewalk surfin’ with me.”

When folks look back on the ‘60s now, it usually gets condensed into being this era of grand foment and change. But let’s not forget it also was a time when we were freer to be flawed: When guys like Jan Berry could sing flat on millions of records; when Huntington’s downtown didn’t have to look like a well-scrubbed mall; and when a pedal on a skateboard could send kids hurtling through the air.