Welcome to Episode 6. I’m trying to figure out who this mystery skater is with Tony Hawk. Now, there have been some major discoveries. This past weekend, I called up Patty McGee, the skateboarder on the cover of this life magazine, and I spoke to her for close to an hour about everything. Now, my goal from this conversation was to learn more about how hobbies skateboards operated. Here’s what Patty had to say.
Hobbies sent me out on a whirlwind tour and all these places in between.
Was the cover shot in California?
No, it was actually shot and Pittsburgh on my tour. Yeah, I think I was just one person and his camera. His name was Bill.
Yes. Bill Eppridge. That checks out. Yes.
Really a nice guy. Did.
You meet up with Bill in New York at any point? Did you ever see him there? I.
Don’t remember saying, I don’t think. Hello.
Next, I want to ask her about her hobby outfit. I want to see if she only wore that at hobbies sponsored events. A lot of photos you have on a red Hoby skateboard team shirts. Was this a uniform or did you just wear that all the time? Both.
So say it was all of the hobby gear. Was the warrant to promote the brand? I would say that it would probably classify as a uniform.
You were doing these demos, was that to promote hobbies, skateboards?
Sales tour. I.
Appreciate you taking the time. It means a lot. I know Tony is gonna be thrilled to know that this happened as well. Been.
A real sweetheart in my life. He’s, I’ve never really hung out with him for any particular reason except for maybe we were booked at the same place at the same time.
In 1965, Patty was on a sales tour promoting Hobbie skateboards. She’d go to department and toy stores doing demos, promoting hobbies, skateboards. They would talk about the boards and then she would come out and show people what you can do with them. And then if they wanted to, they could try the skateboards themselves. It was essentially a traveling infomercial. If we can place pets at any of these Central Park photos, that means there’s a very high chance that this was a part of a hoby demo. Finally, I had to ask Patty what we all want to know. This whole search right now that we’re trying to do is find this man in a suit that’s skateboarding. Can you say if you recognized him or if you didn’t recognize him? Just for the record?
No, I would have been delighted to meet him.
Now, fortunately, Patty didn’t know this guy, but she did give us a bunch of good information. Now, sticking to hobby, I spoke to the daughter of Steve Hilton. Now, Steve was a member of the hobbies skate team. In fact, this is him here. She asked her dad, Steve, all the questions that we wanted to know, but Steve was mainly on the hobbies skate team that serves the West Coast.
Next, I want to dive back into this photo. I wanna try to figure out where in New York City this photo was taken. I searched everywhere and I eventually found this photo, which has been clearly photoshopped on his hands. But everything else was fine. This was a different perspective. It was taken a little further back, which gave us more info on the edges of this shot.
Now, I know what some of you guys might be thinking, Dan, this could be AI. It’s not. Let me show you why. If we take this original photo and we zoom it out a bit, and then using AI, we generate a fill the entire outside of this photo. It gives us this and it can be relatively convincing at first, but when you zoom into the AI portion of this photo, you’ll notice a difference in quality. And this goes for most AI photos. It’s softer than the original photo. This is actually a good technique to use for majority of AI photos. If you think it’s fake, zoom in. Besides the hands in this photo, all of this is real.
This now told me that there are more photos like this out there. Later that night, I got a message from a girl named Maggie. Now, Maggie sent me this photo from that same moment.
Now, I looked into the photo that Maggie sent me, and after searching further, I was able to discover the entire film role from Bill Eppridge during this skateboard shoot. This is huge. We’re talking everything from that day, tons of them. The blurry ones, the accidental shots, they’re all there now. I looked at every single photo, which was more than 300 of them, and I came across more shots from this man in a suit. And in the background, I was finally able to see the store’s name.
Boom, Troutmans. Now I looked into troutmints and at its peak, it had more than 33 stores and was a chain of department source. This checks out. Patty was already on a cross country tour at department stores. So for her to be there, this being a department store, this was a part of the hobbies sales tour.
Next, I looked up every single location of troutmans and I came across a small spot in Greensberg, Pennsylvania. We know Patty was in Pittsburgh for the cover of this magazine. So for this to be Pennsylvania does check out next. I looked up churches in Greensburg and Bam Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church. That’s the spot from our photo, not New York City church in the background has the round window, the arch doorway, and right next door, you got that white building. In fact, when we look over this building, the bottom is the same. But when you look up, you can see the remnants of where the Troutman sign used to be. So these photos were taken right here on this sidewalk in Greensberg, Pennsylvania.
Next, I looked into every single person in the background of these photos. And as I near the end of these photos, I found this one. And if you zoom in behind this guy’s shoulder, oh, we have a new photo of our mystery skater. And I get it. It’s just his head. But the fact that there’s other photos out there that we didn’t know about. Massive.
I then found this one and then this one, and then this one, this one. And here’s what I was able to put together. This guy never came to the park that day with a board or a tie. The only time he has a tie on are on these shots going down the hill at the top of the hill at the start of this run. There’s no tie. Those were both likely borrowed for this shoot. And I’m pretty confident then. Here’s why. After organizing all the photos to be in order, I started to see a potential narrative from Bill Epperge’s shots. It’s pretty clear that when Bill went to Central Park that day, his goal was to capture photos of people that differed from the regular people you would see riding skateboards, which would be kids. We know that this photo was prompted. Which leaves the door open for other photos to also be prompted. Now, prompted doesn’t mean they’re fake. It just means that there is potential that Bill went up to them with a skateboard. Would you like to try this while I take some photos of you? We have an entire set of photos of this woman in a dress with her dog, and none of them were used for the article. We’ve got this girl, an adult and sweater with her friends not used in the article. You’ve got this guy in a suit, another one of a grown woman skateboarding. None of these were used in the article. Now, these, of course, make the photos way more eye catching than just a kid riding a skateboard. And that’s where our mystery skater comes in. He’s untraditional like the rest of them, but life magazine likely didn’t use any of those photos because they were possibly not fitting for the article that they were writing about skateboarding. Bill seems to have taken a more artistic approach with this, a vision that life magazine didn’t seem to share. Now putting these photos side by side, you can almost see a series of events of how this happened. We’ve got this group trying to figure out how they’re gonna ride down this hill. And here in the background is our mystery skater. Then you see this guy with a board and then our mystery skater looks over and he notices it. And then we’ve got him on the board beside the group ready to ride. Bill could have seen him in the background of these shots. And ash, hey, we wanna give it a try lastly in a couple of these shots, I noticed multiple journalists. This wasn’t just a thing that happened in Central Park. This was an event that possibly started as a demo, added to apartment store nearby and then they said, let’s all go over the Central Park to test these out. Remember, New York City is a very congested city. To have a bunch of people skateboarding outside on the street, just not likely to happen. What better place than Central Park? That is the strongest and most likely lead at this point.
The end of the search is near. The next episode I make for this will be the last one, whether I find him or I don’t, I’ll be wrapping it up in the next one. So that means over the next few days, I’m gonna continue this deep dive search into who this guy is and hopefully we can figure it out. Be sure like and follow if you enjoyed this video. Thank you so much for watching and I’ll catch you in the next one. See you guys later.