When George Leichtweis first opened Modern Skate & Surf, the modern kickflip had yet to be invented. It was 1979, six years before countless kids first saw Marty McFly’s chase scene in Back to the Future and begged their parents for a skateboard. In many ways, skateboarding was a bit more niche back then.
But Leichtweis, then 24, had already been skating, at least here and there, for a decade. He first stepped on a board as a young teen — a Roller Derby No. 20 with clay wheels and wobbly ball bearings — near his childhood home at Six Mile and Livernois.
He recalls taking it down the driveway and, when he was feeling extra daring, hitching on the back of friends’ cars for a block or two.
“The streets weren’t the best, and we didn’t have drainage ditches like they had out in California,” Leichtweis says.
As a young man, he finally took a trip to Venice Beach in the summer of ’79 to visit friends who had recently moved there. At the time, it was the mecca of skateboarding, surfing, and roller-skating. Earlier that decade, a group of local skaters that included Tony Alva and Stacy Peralta built Dogtown Skatepark (now lauded as the birthplace of modern skateboarding).
As Leichtweis wandered along the beach, amid the intoxicating sights and sounds, he began to have a vision. “I saw waves crashing, girls in bikinis, Muscle Beach, skateboarders, roller skaters,” he says. “And I thought, ‘Man, I’d like to bring this lifestyle back to Michigan.’”
Soon after he returned, he signed the lease for his first shop on Woodward and 10 Mile and opened for business that September (for reference, the building is no longer there — the Detroit Zoo parking structure now stands in its place). Altogether, he says, he was able to start the business with about $1,000. “I always tell people I’ve been trying to make that $1,000 back ever since,” Leichtweis adds with a chuckle.
In addition to boards, the original shop carried roller skates, servicing metro Detroit’s then-much larger community of roller-rink regulars, and ice skates, because it’s Michigan after all. Since then, the store has moved around quite a bit — over the years, it’s had locations in Ann Arbor, East Lansing, Grand Rapids, Novi, and Traverse City.
Besides spreading the culture in his home state, in 1988, Leichtweis helped inspire a generation of young skateboarders across the country with the instructional video Street Survival, which he helped to produce. Shot mostly in the Lansing area with some clips in Fort Lauderdale, it is possibly the first of its kind.
The hourlong VHS tape, once available at Blockbusters all over, featured Bill Danforth, arguably the most prominent pro skater to hail from Michigan. It taught viewers ollies, kickturns, grinds, wallrides, and various plants; how to “bail” properly and avoid “slams”; how to improve found skate spots; and even etiquette like “There are gonna be locals. Just be cool — don’t thrash their spot. Don’t snake ’em. Make some friends,” and “Don’t forget, cool skaters don’t trash their skate spots.” Today, it’s included in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and it has been cited as highly influential by pro skater and past Olympian Andy Anderson.
On that topic, the debut of skateboarding at the 2020 Summer Olympics was a result of meetings that Leichtweis attended as early as the ’90s. Modern Skate & Surf worked closely with the International Association of Skateboard Companies, which was tapped by the International Olympic Committee to sit in on the discussions. Even though it took years of back-and-forth to get to the Olympics, Leichtweis is happy.
“I knew that once little girls saw the girls skating in the Olympics, they were gonna be like, ‘I want to do that,’” Leichtweis says. “Female skateboarding has grown quite a bit in the last few years.”
It’s a trend he’s noticed — at age 69, he still teaches the “Modern method” of skateboarding to young learners at his current Royal Oak skate park that opened in 2008, which, at 60,000 square feet, he says is the third largest indoor skate park in the country. He also Rollerblades, rides BMX, and seasonally wakeboards and snowboards.
“My doctor told me to stay close to the ground, and I obey him most of the time — I just have to realize my limitations,” he says. “Sometimes I walk by the mirror and go, ‘Oh jeez, what the hell happened?’ Sometimes I forget that I’m not young anymore, but I still enjoy it all.”
The park, which he constructed himself, has held qualifiers for the X Games and the U.S. BMX Olympic team and hosted the U.S. Scooter Championships. Its 40th anniversary party in 2019 was attended by high-profile skateboarding icons like Bucky Lasek and Christian Hosoi — with a surprise skating demonstration by Tony Hawk.
Leichtweis has also helped build 17 public skate parks in Michigan. In Detroit, he had a hand in the Hawk-developed Chandler Park Skatepark, and in 2017, he built the Wayfinding skate park — designed by Hawk himself — at the Library Street Collective (it was later moved to the Adams Butzel Complex, a community center on the city’s west side). He’s also helped build parks in Traverse City, Grand Rapids, and Mount Pleasant, as well as Lansing’s Ranney Skatepark.
At this year’s 45th anniversary celebration in August, Leichtweis reconnected with his first customer, several former shop managers, and a group of about 20 dads in their 40s — the now grown-up Lansing skater kids who were involved in the building of Ranney Skatepark. While he says obstacles like the 2008 recession and the COVID-19 pandemic put his business on the precipice of closing for good, the celebration reminded him why he still does what he does.
“It was like a big family reunion,” he says. “I call them all my children. I have thousands of children. … I still love doing this. I think I can make it to the 50th anniversary. I’ve got some more years in me.”
This story originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our digital edition will be available on Dec. 9.
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