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Skull Skates Hackett Street Sicle: Baby Skeletons In The Vatican

SKULL SKATES HACKETT STREET SICLE: BABY SKELETONS IN THE VATICAN

Interview with Dave Hackett by Dan Levy

Tell me the history behind the Hackett Street Sicle?

I designed that board in 1986, and Skull Skates produced it. The street scene was starting to get really heavy in ’84 and ’85, and I had a friend that had just come back from Italy. Her name was Elizabetta Rogiani, and I met her through Olson. She was a fashion stylist; one of the best in the world. She went to Italy to the Vatican and went down underneath the Vatican to the catacombs and there was this collection of thousands of skulls from all the monks and priests that worked for the Vatican over thousands of years. She took all these pictures down there, which you weren’t really supposed to do. She showed me the pictures and one of them was this baby skeleton holding a sickle in one hand and a scale in the other hand, so that’s the graphic on that board. It’s from a photo of a baby skeleton holding a scale and that’s why it’s called the Hackett Street Sicle.

That is crazy.

To make the graphic, I turned the photo into a black and white hardline graphic and then I burned a screen off that and put color behind it and put all those little bones pieces around it. That board is only 30 inches long and it has a 16 inch wheelbase and it’s 9.75 inches wide. It’s almost 10 inches wide. It’s the perfect board for a wall jam because it has no nose. The trucks are right up on the nose. My comment on that board is, “Ride this board and go back to the future. This board is so old it’s new again!”

That story is epic!

We used to sell about 2,000 of that board a month for about a year.

What?

Yeah! I was making like $4,000 a month off that thing. That was one of the most favorite boards that Skull Skates ever produced. PD at Skull Skates is a super awesome dude. Next to Dave Duncan, he’s the most core skateboarder I know. PD has always kept it real. He’s from the hardcore punk world of skateboarding. When he called me and said, “What do you think about re-issuing the Hackett Street Sicle?” I said, “Yeah! We did a reissue last year of the red ones and they sold out in a week, so we just did a re-release of it in a limited run in purple. They’re probably close to all gone now.

That’s the craziest story of a graphic. It’s based on a baby skeleton from the Vatican?

Ha! Yeah! The Iron Cross that I use on a lot of my graphics also came from the Vatican. There was a picture of a duke standing in front of a wall of skulls holding an iron cross. It was the most badass graphic ever. If you look at my graphics from over 40 years of professional skateboarding, all of my graphics are hardcore and gnarly. You want something you can look at and go, “Oh, shit!” I”m not making some little pink elephant with a flower on it. I’m bordering on evil and rock n’ roll gnarly.


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FOR MORE INFO: 

Skull Skates has reissued the seminal Hackett Street Sicle deck measuring in at 9.75 x 30″ with a 16″ wheelbase. The legendary and fearsome Hackett Street Sicle with its classic macabre graphic and intimidating punk wall jam nose is easily a favorite deck among many Skull Skates aficionados. Functional quality shape featuring O.G. V-concave, made in Canada. Get some at  http://www.skullskates.com/

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