Ocean Bowl: Paved into OC skateboarding culture

• Ocean Bowl is the nation's oldest continuously operated municipal skate park.
• Local skaters like Marc Emond and Chauncey Rhodes still skate the park today since 1976.
• The Dew Tour is gone from Ocean City but the resort's skateboarding culture lives on.

Scratchy, fizzy and broken blown-out speakers spilled music into the cool, late-June evening.

The sun was setting on the bay, casting silhouettes of skaters standing around the bowl.

Their heads swayed back and forth — almost bobbing with the rhythm of classic rock and metal guitar riffs — eying the lone skater taking his turn swooshing around the smooth concrete.

Other skaters tried the big vert ramp, and a few rolled up and down the walls of the open area.

But most eyes were on the big bowl.

The shadows were big, small, wide or thin — as different as the faces of the boys, girls and grown men.

At the Ocean Bowl, more of melting pot, the generations and cultures blend into one community that has been developing since 1976: skateboarders.

With the reflection of skaters grinding off his aviator sunglasses, former skate park manger Dave Messick leaned back and took in a familiar scene. A day like June 25 would have brought tons of skaters to the park in the last four years. But Dew Tour had left, and so had Messick after 23 years of managing the Ocean Bowl.

This trip was for an interview, to reminiscence.

"I've used this place since 1979," he said.

Back then, Messick was just an out-of-towner from Cambridge, Maryland, visiting in the summer on vacation and skateboarding every day. He never knew how much his life would revolve around the park.

In his 23 years as the Ocean Bowl Skate Park manager, Messick treated it like it was his own. This is the first summer he's not managing the park, leaving to run his business, Unscene Productions.

In those years since the summer of 1979, Messick has watched the nation's oldest continuously operated municipal skate park transform — even though the 17,000-square-foot concrete-based park has always had the same footprint, hugged by basketball courts, athletic grass fields on the corner of St. Louis Avenue and and Third Street in Ocean City.

"I've seen it change in three different phases. It started out as asphalt bowls, they were big and scary when you were a little kid," Messick said. "Then it turned, in the 1980s, into a big blue (vert) ramp where just about every skateboarder in the world came here.

"I mean, Tony Hawk came and spent the summer here."

The new kid in town

For a very long time, Ocean Bowl was the only skateboard park on the peninsula.Skaters from Salisbury, Rehoboth Beach and other Delmarva towns had only one option.

But in the summer of 2014, the skateboarders around Lewes and Rehoboth Beach could rejoice at Epworth United Methodist Church. Skate parents got together and raised funds to build a bowl and repair some ramps from 2008. In August 2014, the Skate Park at Epworth opened as Rehoboth Beach's free place to skate.

"There are a lot of skateboarders who are still ecstatic to have a park," said Susan Selph, who helped raise money so her son, Gallen, could have a place to skate.

"We haven't had any place to skate in Rehoboth since the 1970s."

The Selphs used to have to drive to Ocean City and wait in the car for hours while Gallen rode the bowl.

It's so much closer to home now, Selph said.

It was a quiet evening on June 30. Only three skateboarders sat around the edge of the bowl.

Jordan Stevenson, 17, of Lewes has been skating for seven years. The bowl at Epworth is a luxury, he said.

"It's pretty awesome because, when I first started skating, I would have to skate in my front yard," Stevenson said. "I didn't have anything awesome like this to skate unless we wanted to go down to Ocean City."

"Daycare to a bunch of kids"

Ocean Bowl has always had a facility with CPR-trained staff on duty during operating hours. That comes with a price, but the biggest factor of the park's success was that it was operated by the town, Messick said.

To pay $42 for the week, parents could drop off their kids from 9:30 a.m. to dark.

Having staff there allowed parents to feel safe about their kids skating there. And it allows the beginning skateboarder to practice in a safe environment.

"Always thought of it as professional babysitting — that's pretty cheap," Messick said.

Chauncey Rhodes, owner of Chauncey's Surf Shop on 30th Street in Ocean City, said he worries about kids these days.

But not at the park.

Rhodes, 51, has skated since the summer of 1976 with his older brother, Blair. Rhodes has seen kids not fitting in at school come to the Ocean Bowl and become friends with 20 people. He's talked to the parents to find this out.

He's always been an advocate for the park, meeting lifelong friends and watching others do the same. One of them is Marc Emond, who has skated the Ocean Bowl since it opened. He still skates the park to this day.

"It has been a daycare to a bunch of kids," Rhodes said. "The kids are here now, they're listening to classic rock, embracing the culture that came before them. I love it. I love this."

Ten minutes later, the music hadn't changed and Rhodes dropped in for a flashback of his youth.

The surf shop owner comes by a few times a week when he can, but Emond keeps him going.

Emond has been coming to the Ocean Bowl for just as long as Rhodes.

"Whole generations of kids have skated there," Emond said. "People who are all adults now — business owners, people in the community — all have some kind of relationship with the Ocean Bowl."

Whether it's Emond or Rhodes dropping in, no matter the age, they just become part of the circle of the bowl.

"OC was home away from home," Rhodes, a Washington, D.C., native, said. "Salt air, surfing and skateboarding — just a whole different culture."

And it's a culture that is surviving in 2015.

Pat Gaffney pretty much knows everyone who skates at the bowl. Even out-of-towners, like Gaffney, who is from Virginia but vacations in OC each summer, get along. That inclusive atmosphere isn't always the case at other parks, he said.

"Here it's more like a family," Gaffney added, before dropping in for his combination of tricks.

Dew Tour, a blessing

Messick has seen his share of kids come to the park for ages and then go.

Some had a lot of talent.

That was hyped in the previous four years when Dew Tour and a bunch of professional skaters descended on Ocean City. Ocean Bowl always had a free skate with pros like Bucky Lasek stopping by.

While the skate park offers lessons, camps and competitions, the Dew Tour's four years were a premier event.

There were no massive ramps and bowls on the beach at Ocean City in the last week of June this year, but Dew Tour's absence will not change anything, Messick said.

"The Dew Tour was a wonderful thing, but you have to look at it like, going into it, we already knew that if we got five years out of the Dew Tour that would be amazing," Messick said. "That's pretty much all they stay in one area."

It pushed kids to go bigger and follow their dreams.

But with a skateboarding culture like the one in Ocean City, skaters already have that.

Maybe one will skate at a Dew Tour event in the years to come, like Roman and Cedric Pabich, who moved out to California to follow their dream of being skaters, Emond said.

Messick has seen some kids with enough talent, but they didn't stick with it long enough or they got spooked after an injury.

After Messick left for the day, two 13-year-olds relentlessly dipped into the bowl, skidding on their adult-sized knee pads. Unafraid.

Zach Coch of Berlin and Wilson McLain of Ocean City have been skating for about two years and as many times a week as possible. Coch sports long blonde locks in dreads past his shoulder, and McLain's brown curls are matted down by his helmet.

They fit the skater mold.

But it's the passion that makes the difference.

"How much do you skate?"

"Every single day," McLain responded. "Unless it rains."

Editor's note: This story was updated on Aug. 19, 2016 for a name correction. Bucky Lasek was spelled as Buck Lasek. 

rmarshall@dmg.gannett.com

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