Patti McGee, whose thrill-seeking activities as a teenager included surfing off the coast of San Diego and skateboarding on the city’s streets, and who ultimately became skating’s first female national champion, died on Oct. 16 at her home in Brea, Calif., in northern Orange County. She was 79.
Her daughter, Hailey Villa, who is also a skateboarder, said the cause was complications of a stroke.
“It’s like riding a surfboard on the sidewalk,” Ms. McGee told The Daily News of New York in 1965, when asked to explain the joy of skateboarding. “Or skiing down a slope without snow. It’s excitement. It’s kicks. It’s fun.”
Ms. McGee began surfing in 1958 and started skateboarding four years later. It didn’t take long for her to become deft enough, after a few events, to win the women’s division of the first National Skateboard Championships in Santa Monica, in December 1964.
Soon after her victory, she signed a one-year, $250-a-month contract to promote skateboards made by Hobie. The deal made her a professional, which ended her competitive career, and she became, however briefly, a national figure.
Traveling around the United States, Ms. McGee demonstrated her skills at department stores like Macy’s and Montgomery Ward, at malls and shopping centers, and in parking lots. She performed various maneuvers and tricks and took questions from the mostly young audiences that came to see her.
While she was touring West Virginia and Pennsylvania, Bill Eppridge, a Life magazine photographer, asked her to pose for him once she got to Pittsburgh. When she arrived, he took her to a park overlooking the city.
“They had asphalt and picnic tables and pine trees and we shot pictures all afternoon,” Ms. McGee told Juice, a magazine focused on skateboarding, surfing, art and music, in 2017. Soon after, she said, she got a call from a Macy’s representative, who told her: “You won over the Vietnam War and the tsunami in Alaska. It’s going to be on the cover of Life magazine!”
The cover of the May 14, 1965, issue showed Ms. McGee in a red top and white capri pants performing her signature move: a handstand on her skateboard. She said she repeated the maneuver numerous times, holding the pose for 20 seconds at a time, during the shoot.
But the photo essay dwelled less on her than on the dangers of skateboarding, as the sport’s popularity was spreading across the country. “That thing 19-year-old Pat McGee is balancing on is a skateboard,” the article began, “the most exhilarating and dangerous joyriding device this side of the hot rod.”
Over the next few weeks, Ms. McGee showed off her skills on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and “The Mike Douglas Show.” She was also on the game show “What’s My Line?,” where the actress Arlene Francis correctly guessed what Ms. McGee was known for before the three other panelists had a chance to ask any questions.
Patricia Ann McGee was born on Aug. 23, 1945, at Fort Lewis, an Army base near Tacoma, Wash., and grew up mainly in the Point Loma neighborhood of San Diego. She was raised largely by her mother, Esther (Steiner) McGee, who taught home economics and physical education at a junior high school and later sold Avon beauty products.
Her father, Jack, was an Army medic and then a pharmaceutical salesman. The McGees split up when Patti was young.
She began surfing in 1958 and was part of the Pump House Gang of teenage surfers that Tom Wolfe wrote about in 1965 for the Sunday magazine of The New York Herald Tribune. (The article became the title essay of a book he published in 1968.) She was also the captain of an all-girls surfing team.
Skateboarding became another adrenaline-fueled activity that filled her time. “I was never one to sit on the beach or hang out in the car,” she said in the Juice interview. “I had to be doing something, and skateboarding was perfect.”
When asked why, she said: “Well, it was action. You had to have some action.”
She rode without a helmet (or any other protection) on a Bun Buster board, with wheels removed from her roller skates by her brother, Jack. She and other skaters sailed up and down the streets and hills of San Diego; a parking garage with multiple levels became what she called their Mount Everest.
Skateboarding was still relatively new when Ms. McGee won her title and became one of the sport’s early ambassadors. But skateboarding — which years later would feature stars like Tony Hawk and become part of the Olympics — did not provide her with a living.
Over the next several decades, Ms. McGee held various jobs, including mining turquoise and making leather goods, while she lived in Lake Tahoe, Nev., with her first husband, Glenn Villa, from whom she was later divorced.
In Cave Creek, Ariz., she worked at an Old West attraction called Frontier Town, where she helped tourists pan for fool’s gold and worked in a store. She also owned a shoe store and sold gifts at Buffalo Bill’s Trading Post, where she met and married the owner, William Chace. He died in 2015.
But Ms. McGee did not entirely leave the skateboarding world. She and her daughter, Ms. Villa, started Original Betty, a skateboard and apparel company, in 2004 and sponsored female skaters. She also attended skating events, including the annual charity fund-raiser Mighty Mama Skate-O-Rama.
In 2010, she became the first woman to be inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame.
Asked if her mother fit the image of a tough skateboarder, Ms. Villa said: “Oh, my gosh, yes, but she was very sweet; she didn’t really cuss. So she was a badass and a goody two-shoes at the same time.”
In addition to Ms. Villa, Ms. McGee is survived by her son, Forest Villa; two grandchildren; and her brother, Jack.
“There Goes Patti McGee! The Story of the First Women’s National Skateboard Champion” (2021), a children’s picture book written by Tootie Nienow and illustrated by Erika Medina, tells Ms. McGee’s story, nearly 60 years after she became a skating star. The cover illustration shows a teenage Patti executing a handstand on her skateboard. Inside the book, as she races down a street, Ms. Nienow writes, “There goes Patti McGee! Bold! Confident! Courageous!” The words “Zip! Swish! Zoom!” follow in her wake.
Ms. Nienow, an elementary-school librarian in Tustin, Calif., had been thinking of writing a children’s book and was trying to decide whom to write about — a runner and a surfer first came to mind — when she read an article about Ms. McGee and Ms. Villa in a local magazine. She said to herself, “Oh, my gosh, I have to write about her.”
Ms. Nienow interviewed Ms. McGee five times. “I needed to know what her world was like in the ’60s and how to do all those tricks on the skateboard,” she said.
In the book, she described how Ms. McGee had mastered her handstand.
“Patti grasped her deck, ran a couple of steps and kicked up her feet. Feet together, toes pointed, she thought as she glided for four … five … six seconds.”
<
