ABOUT UNION STREET SKATEBOARDS
Sean Mallard started skating in 1972 with his first board being a Black Night skateboard with clay wheels bought from his local Thrifty’s drug store. One year later in 1973 with the invention of the urethane wheel Sean got his then revolutionary Bigfoot skateboard and was hooked on and in skateboarding ever since. His next stop would be Hamburger Hill which was a nickname for the Santa Ana riverbed with his dad which is where he broke his first bone of many, his collarbone. He would tag along with his dad to deliver stickers to Pipeline and Concrete Wave which gave him the opportunity to be consistently skating the most advanced parks of the time. He always got dropped off at the Free Irvine Park near Adventure land and Fountain Valley Skate Park.
He also was filmed in a Movie with “Hobie” when he was seven and was featured in Wide World of Skateboarding magazine in a 1977 issue for the Ramp Rider brand when he was nine. When the skate parks started closing down because of lawsuits, he started skating the more natural urban terrain like the Flower ditch in Santa Ana and then the treacherous Corona ditch, not to mention many unknown backyard pools and the Nude bowl which was the favorite of many well known skaters. In the early 90’s he responded to an ad in the newspaper about a downhill skateboard race. Sean made the call and talked to the infamous Roger Hickey for the first time. Hickey asked Sean if he wanted to compete, and so Sean agreed. They met the next day in San Clemente at LaPlata Hill. That’s when Sean went 55 MPH for the first time. His first amateur race in 1995 he placed 3rd. In 1996, his first Pro Race against John Hutson, Roger Hickey and Biker Sherlock, he was placed in 4th. Soon after in 1996 he went for the world record attempt stand up downhill speed and one of the only humans to ever go over 60 mph at Tuscany Hills. Sean then went on to become the 1997 Extreme Downhill international champion. All the while during his championship career Sean had been thinking on the innovation and evolution of the skateboard design.
In 1998 Sean then competed in the radically new ESPN X games and got taken out in the downhill finals. Sean then went on to compete in the Australian X games and received a silver medal in the Street Luge and a silver medal in stand up downhill skateboarding. He also received a silver medal in the Japanese X games and competed in Switzerland and also in Canada. In 1999 Sean received a Gold Medal in Street Luge at Gravity Games. Sean has been designing and manufacturing the next evolutionary steps in skateboards since 1995 and has been creating handmade skateboard molds for the leading companies, most professional boards today come from Mallard Molds. His “Duck Cave” downhill mold has been the standard for most athletes in X games and Gravity Games and won gold medals as well as world records. He also helped design and test the revolutionary high speed “Cherry Bomb” urethane wheel. Sean stopped competing in 2002 due to countless injuries that have plagued him throughout his career. He has since gone on to tour the US and Europe playing guitar with the punk rock band The Smut Peddlers. Now after two movie soundtracks, video games, and toy deals Sean is currently hard at work designing new innovative skate products that are now and always been American made.
Gerard LaBrie grew up skating Southern California Backyard ramps, ditches and pools in the 1970’s around Seal Beach and surfing the Seal Beach pier Southside every chance he got. The Euclid “V” skate ditch and Brookhurst Park is where he was found skating in the 80’s and preferred the uncrowded big waves of Mexico to feed his appetite to surf unfound terrain. From 1977 on Gerard would spend months at a time exploring the Mexican coastline in search of waves, driving from Baja to the Yucatan Peninsula and on back to Southern California where he worked at his fathers trucking company.
Gerard bought his first big rig in 1983’ and started hauling freight for cash all over Southern California always with his skateboard and surfboard strapped to the inside of his 53′ foot trailer. Hitting all the spots from Ventura to SD was his daily ritual. Then in 1995 Gerard met up with IMG’s James Lietz and Chris Conrad who had CE Sports at the time and through these connections was introduced to Dave Duncan the legendary Alva team rider and host of the X-Games. Combined with Spohn Ranch skateparks they started producing the largest skate events ever seen in the world for the new ESPN 2. Their first large scale event was Destination Extreme with Slim Jim and Airwalk in South Padre Island TX in Spring Break 1995. This event would eventually transform into the X-games soon after.
Transporting and building these half pipes out of wood then turned into creating these skate type landscapes out of snow and since then Gerard has been running the operations for the largest skate, snow and surf events in the world. Traveling with Steve VanDoran and the Vans family has been the happiest times of his career. The Van’s Triple Crown series 97 through 07 skate, BMX and snow was almost a full time job. Gerard has also been running operations for X-Games, Gravity Games, Red Bull Illume, Dew Tour, and The U.S Open of Surfing. He also owned the renowned Area 51 Skate shop in Los Alamitos which truly kept him in the pulse of skateboarding. During this time he was still always looking to the Manufactures of the skate products for better equipment but it was now all moving steadily to China and Mexico to save cost at the price of quality. All of Gerard’s twenty years of experience in the production and manufacturing of the extreme sports world creates his personal grassroots and core substance, from creating companies and events to innovative products.
This is the history of how Union Street Skateboards has now become devoted to bringing the best quality products in the hands of the skaters and manufactured in Southern California were it all began!
Area 51 was a unique shop where kids would hang out all day and old schoolers could always find parts for there 70’s and 80’s boards. If you could not afford your board you could still work for a skateboard by submitting artwork or helping to clean up the shop. It was a shop of innovation as well there was always kids to try out new inventions and fads that we were busy creating there. Area 51 and Webb Trucks were then sponsoring over 30 young and up and coming skaters including a skate team at CASL (Ca. Amateur Skate League), an off road dirtboard team, and a downhill luge team that were all breaking world records. Gerard placed 5th in Big Bear at the first ever Dirtboard Championships in 1998. During this time a lawsuit ensued from a past investor that attempted to steal the company out from under it’s original owners. After much stress and loss of funds due to the Webb Truck lawsuit our much loved Area 51 skateboard shop was closed. After two years in court Webb Trucks was finally regained and a new rebuilding of the brand was begun.