Held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the competition drew 84 skateboaders who raced around cones in the slalom, performed figure-eights and vied in a timed freestyle event in which McGee triumphed with her signature trick, a handstand on wheels.
McGee had been doing handstands on a diving board ever since she was 12 and said she adapted the trick to a skateboard while training at a rink in Pasadena, going “all the way around the rink without touching down.”
After the national championships, she began doing her handstand at Macy’s, Montgomery Ward and other department stores around the country, making $250 a month while promoting a line of Hobie skateboards released by the California juice company Vita-Pakt.
“I practically lived on my board for a year and a half,” she recalled in a 2011 interview with the website I Skate, Therefore I Am.
At the time, skateboards were being reclassified as sporting goods instead of toys. McGee would do a few kick turns, jump over a stick and stand on her head, then treat the audience to a Q&A. She advised novices to “stay away from hills, bumps and cracks that could cause spills.”
Between demonstrations in Pittsburgh and West Virginia, McGee posed for the cover of Life magazine, doing her handstand in white capri pants and a vermilion sweater. The May 1965 cover story, on “the craze and the menace of skateboards,” described the new boards as “the most exhilarating and dangerous joy-riding device this side of the hot rod.”
“It yields to the skillful user the excitements of skiing or surfing,” the magazine declared. “To the unskilled it gives the effect of having stepped on a banana peel while dashing down the back stairs.”
The cover story made McGee a national celebrity, leading to appearances on What’s My Line?, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and The Mike Douglas Show, where she taught the host how to ride.
Later that year, she was also photographed for the cover of Skateboarder Magazine, skateboarding barefoot by a pool while seeming to be the embodiment of counterculture cool, wearing a psychedelic cropped shirt, teal shorts and a red bow in her blond hair. “Skateboarding,” she told the magazine, “is 100 per cent just as much for girls as it is for boys.”
The older of two children, Patricia Ann McGee was born at Fort Lewis, an Army base near Tacoma, Washington, on August 23, 1945. Her father was an Army medic and pharmaceutical salesman whose job took the family to San Diego, where they settled in the seaside neighbourhood of Point Loma.
She was young when her parents separated, and she was raised mainly by her mother, who taught home economics and physical education, and later sold beauty products for Avon.
McGee sailed with her parents before turning to surfing, competing in contests up and down the West Coast and serving as captain of an all-girls surf team. “I was just a rowdy surfer,” she recalled in a 2017 interview with the skateboarding magazine Juice, explaining that “girls had to be aggressive because guys would just push you out of the way or kick out into your ankles, like, ‘My wave.’”
When it came to skateboarding, at least, she said she never encountered any issues from the guys around her. “She was the life of the party,” said her brother, Jack McGee, who skated with her early on as a member of the Bun Buster team.
By the late 1960s, the popularity of skateboarding had dipped amid mounting safety concerns. “There were lots of broken arms,” McGee recalled. She turned from skateboarding to skiing and moved to Lake Tahoe, on the California-Nevada border, where she lived with her first husband, Glenn Villa, and supported herself with jobs mining turquoise and making leather goods.
McGee later moved to the desert town of Cave Creek, Arizona, where she raised two children. “My kids grew up on my old skateboards going around on the floor,” she told the Eureka (California) Times-Standard in 2018. “We didn’t have any pavement out in the desert.”
After her marriage ended in divorce, McGee worked at a gift shop, Buffalo Bill’s Trading Post, where she sold Native American art, Mexican blankets, cow skulls and fake rattlesnake eggs, among other odds and ends, with Bill Chace, who became her second husband. He died in 2015.
By then, McGee had started to return to prominence in the skateboarding world. She and her daughter, fellow skateboarder Hailey Villa, started their own skateboard and apparel company, Original Betty.
McGee would occasionally ride with her daughter — though her handstand days were behind her — and became a fixture at skateboarding events, speaking at skateboard shops and attending the Mighty Mama Skate-O-Rama, an annual Southern California charity event for women skateboarders.
In 2010, she became the first woman inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame. One of her early skateboards, the Hobie Super Surfer, is now part of the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. She was the subject of a picture-book biography, There Goes Patti McGee!, in 2021.
According to her daughter, McGee died at home in Brea, California, of complications from a stroke. In addition to her daughter, survivors include a son, Forest Villa; her brother; and two grandchildren.
Interviewed by the women’s skateboarding blog GROW SK8 Life in 2013, McGee was asked if she had any advice for women skateboarders. “Be aggressive when you skate,” she replied. “Be nice while you’re out in the world.” And “wear your helmet,” she added, “so you can live to skate another day.”
The Washington Post.
