Publisher of Thrasher Rides on Crest of Success

They used to be young punks on skateboards. Now they’re thirty-something punks on skateboards who also happen to produce one of the most successful magazines on the topic.

“We get to perpetuate the teen-age existence,” said Kevin Thatcher, a 38-year-old publisher of Thrasher Magazine.

The groundbreaking monthly, with a paid circulation of 135,000 worldwide, is now 15 and the largest of three magazines that High Speed Productions Inc. publishes. The key to Thrasher’s success, said editor Jake Phelps, is that staffers live the skater’s life--even taking daily skate breaks at 9:45 a.m. and 3:15 p.m.

“Photos, words and attitude. Those are the three words of the Thrasher equation,” Phelps said.

Dressed in a pair of baggy cut-offs, the irreverent but affable Phelps reclined in an office cubicle, revealing multiple scars from wipes he’s taken in more than 20 years of skateboarding. Now 33, he doesn’t own a car and still isn’t above “leeching” a ride by grabbing onto a bus or car.

He’s surrounded at work by plastic dinosaur figurines, a poster of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and letters and drawings from “demented little kids,” as he likes to call them. The submissions the magazine gets end up in file boxes labeled “Never,” “Nope,” “Maybe” and “Yep.”

The first issue of Thrasher hit newsstands in January 1981 in a tabloid format. Thatcher, a commercial artist, drew the cover art.

Thrasher evolved to a slicker form that, at times, tops more than 130 pages--many filled with ads featuring professionals and the skating gear they back.

But that doesn’t mean they’ve sold out, Thatcher said.

“Skaters are nerds and geeks and town idiots and we don’t care,” he said. “Basically, it’s like, leave us alone.”

Over the years, competitors have cropped up. But “they tend to candy-coat it and make it like baseball or something,” Phelps said.

Still, High Speed Production is protecting its turf, publishing a second skateboarding magazine, called Slap. Questions about the difference between Thrasher and Slap are met with shrugs.

“If anybody’s going to get any more market share, it might as well be us,” Thatcher said.

While skateboarding’s roots go all the way back to the late 1950s, its big break came in 1974 with the advent of the urethane wheel. Since then, skateboarding’s popularity has become cyclical, Phelps said, seeming to peak at mid-decade.

And San Francisco, Thatcher claims, has become skateboarding’s Mecca.

“Kids pray to the West,” he said.

As in just about every other city, railings, steps and any other surface where a skateboard can land are covered with skid marks--much to the chagrin of business owners and city officials. Police officers regularly hand out tickets.

So be it, Thatcher said.

“Skaters damage property. Who cares?” he said. “Let ‘em have it. This could be the salvation for humanity.”

Thatcher is not alone in likening skateboarding to a faith, of sorts, for kids.

“Thrasher Magazine was the Bible in a sense to my friends and I,” professional skater Mike Vallely wrote in the magazine’s 15th anniversary issue. In the same issue, Phelps said skateboarding transformed him from a “sedated slug into an action addict.”

The word Thrasher has, in fact, become a synonym for skateboarder--even for a few in the tough Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood that is home to the High Speed Production offices.

“Everybody thinks it’s a white boy thing, but who cares?” said 12-year-old Jonathan Bohannon, one of the neighborhood’s few black skateboarders. He and his 14-year-old cousin, Jerime Yoki, hang out at High Speed after school and learn stunts from the staff.

Kids doing what they want and taking advantage of the tons of concrete that is poured every day is what skateboarding is all about, Thatcher said.

“I’ll do everything I can to make sure skateboarding doesn’t go to the Olympics,” he said. “We ride empty swimming pools in the [Oakland] Hills.

“That’s our sign of success.”