Ready to Roll

Jerry Conklin is on a roll.

The 66-year-old Westlake Village software consultant is a roller-skating purist, a fixture on the trail at Westlake. Four of every five days, he can be found zooming by in-line skaters and bicyclists on his clunky four-wheeled clodhoppers.

“Everyone’s smiling as I go by: ‘Look at the old man,’ ” Conklin said with a fair amount of self-deprecation and a still-discernible Brooklyn accent. “ ‘He should be doddering with a cane.’ ”

He is a one-man show, zipping along on his quads: those old-fashioned big feet on four wheels. They are thick and heavy, not sleek like the in-line skates that dominate park trails now.

So what if they call to mind short-shorts and ‘70s roller boogie, or long-ago summers of 7-year-olds with scraped knees?

They are fun.

“I’m making the moves, and I’m singing too,” Conklin said. “Otis Redding is great for skating.”

He has skated for only the last six months or so, inspired by his son’s girlfriend, who had found a pair of roller-skates over the Internet. They reminded him of his youth in Brooklyn in the 1930s and ‘40s, when kids in clamp-on skates ruled the blacktop.

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Subsequently, he sought out his own, first a pair over the Internet, and then a souped-up pair put together by a Venice designer. And now, he is reproducing those far-off Brooklyn days.

After 50 years, it has taken him awhile to get up to speed.

“I was kind of shaky,” Conklin said. “I started out just in my driveway.”

As a senior citizen, he keeps his balance better than he did at age 4, but he has taken his share of falls--enough to convince him that pads are a plus. And though his quads are outnumbered on the path by those newfangled in-lines, he is not alone in his appreciation for the classics.

“I think they’re hanging on,” said Kathy Finley, executive director of Indianapolis-based Roller Skating Assn. International. “I don’t think it’s just a retro trend. They have certain benefits: They corner better, you can stand up longer. They’re here to stay.”

About 11 million people roller-skate in this country, compared with 26 million in-line skaters, a number that took off when Rollerblade introduced a low-priced model in the early 1980s, Finley said.

Admittedly, Conklin is sticking to what he knows--he is nervous on the less stable in-lines. And roller skates took him through a childhood that could be the New York version of Dickens.

Abandoned by his mother--who left the big city to return to her hometown in West Virginia--he grew up a foster child in Brooklyn, living the kind of life one imagines of the Little Rascals or the Dead End Kids (although he declines to go into details).

He flirted with life as a hoodlum in a gang--until a run-in with a policeman on the Lower East Side in Manhattan convinced him that the straight and narrow path might be better.

In his late teens, he worked at a Catskills resort in upstate New York, and worked the pro boxing circuit there--until a hammering convinced him there had to be an easier way. He joined the Air Force, but just missed the Korean War, and earned enough from the GI Bill to head to Brooklyn College.

He became a computer programmer, made a brief foray into the hippie lifestyle and a side excursion into primal scream therapy, which brought him to California.

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He ended up in Westlake Village, worked in computers, and has since discovered, he said, that the software industry seems allergic to people over 50.

“There’s a tremendous need, and nobody would hire me,” he said. “Maybe they did me a favor. I had no choice.”

So he started his own business, QSPI--or Quantum Software Process Improvement. This initiative gave rise to the impetus he needed to devise his latest plan--an ambitious roller-skating trip all the way to San Diego, in a publicity stunt and fund-raiser to remind the world that a 66-year-old on wheels isn’t necessarily using a wheelchair or a walker.

He expects to make the trip over several days in April and after, he hopes, securing sponsors. The money he raises, he said, will be donated to an Agoura Hills-based program called Wheels for the World, which supplies wheelchairs to the needy.

It will take days, he knows. But he can already skate 22 miles in 2 hours and 45 minutes. With a little more work, it will be a doable challenge.

“It’s rejuvenating,” he said. “Running is just hard work.”

Wheels for the World officials say they are glad to have him help out--even if they are astonished at his plans.

“I think it’s crazy, but great,” said John Wern, director of Wheels for the World, a program subsidiary of the Christian organization JAF Ministries. “It’s quite an incredible feat. But all he says is, ‘Just keep praying and cheering me on.’ ”