Also this issue: Meet TIA -Bruce Schimmel Quitters Sometimes Win -William Lewis Letters to the Editor

November 14-20, 2002

pretzel logic

Ream's LOVE Dream

by Howard Altman

In what may be the greatest rural construction project since Roy Kinsella built a baseball diamond in a cornfield, action sports pioneer Gary Ream wants to create a replica of LOVE Park out in the sticks of Central Pennsylvania.

“We want to pay tribute to LOVE Park because it was a famous place to skateboarders and now it is gone,” says Ream, who runs Camp Woodward, an action sports camp nestled in the mountains just outside of State College.

Gone, in the sense that Mayor John Street -- via a million-dollar makeover and heavy police presence -- is determined to keep skateboarders out of LOVE.

But the park, as it was, is certainly not forgotten.

Not to Ream, who is a major player in a megabucks industry that brought Philadelphia the X-Games for two years.

“We need to provide for our children,” says Ream, who converted a former gymnastics camp into the world’s pre-eminent action sports camp. “For us to say no all the time is not the way to provide for them.”

Gary Ream first started thinking about saying yes to a new LOVE even before the mayor spurned the old one.

Ream says the idea to recreate LOVE first came up more than two years ago, when he was gearing up to build a Woodward camp in Stallion Springs, Calif. But the idea really took hold in the wake of a tragedy involving a 15-year-old named Patrick Kerr.

Kerr, an honor student at Roman Catholic High School, had been fighting hard to find safe, legal, public skateparks. The youngest member of the Franklin’s Paine nonprofit skating organization, he sold raffle tickets at the X-Games and gathered signatures on a petition asking for the creation of a skatepark in the Northeast. Last March, he gave Abington Township a $5,000 check toward a new skatepark with the money he raised from the X-Games raffles.

But on June 3, Patrick Kerr was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer while skateboarding.

Those are the memories of Patrick Kerr’s mother Liz, who worked for Ream as a nurse at Camp Woodward. She asked Ream and Ed Bacon, who conceived the original LOVE, to sit on the board of a college scholarship fund set up in Patrick’s name. Liz Kerr rounded up skating luminaries like Jack Weinert, executive director of the X-Games, skater Tony Hawk and others, such as Philadelphia Judge Seamus McCaffery, to join the board as well.

Aside from creating the first ever collegiate financial award geared solely to skateboarders, Liz Kerr’s energy brought Ream and Bacon together, and they began devising a new LOVE.

Mayor Street, in his way, moved things along.

“It came to a more serious head with the destruction of LOVE Park,” says Ream. “The Embarcadero [a famed San Francisco skate mecca] was gone. And now LOVE was gone.”

Bacon, who last month staged a protest against what’s happened to LOVE by skateboarding (with some assistance from yours truly) across the park, is just delighted with the idea.

He says Vincent Kling, the great architect who plotted out LOVE as a place to take in the splendors that lie between the Art Museum and City Hall, will provide the renderings.

And Bacon wants the city to provide the finishing touch.

“They have the benches,” he says in that raspy, gravelly voice, referring to the granite benches that were removed, in large part because they were so attractive to skateboarders looking to get air.

Bacon wants the city to turn over the benches so that skaters can use them in the new LOVE.

“I don’t see that as a problem,” says mayoral spokesman Frank Keel, who promises to get back to me with a definitive answer before press time.

At press time, we are still waiting.

Monday night, 13,000 people show up at the First Union Center to watch insane individuals like Tony Hawk, Bucky Lasek, Sergie Ventura, Dave Mirra and many others flip through the air. Sort of a Cirque du Soleil on wheels.

Tony Hawk’s Boom Boom HuckJam, which also featured a live show by the band Social Distortion, was a huge success, according to Maureen Quilter, a Comcast Spectacor spokeswoman.

“Action sports is a pretty good draw in Philadelphia,” says Quilter. “Tony talked about taking it on tour again. We’d love to have it back.”

So listen up, Mr. Mayor.

Tony Hawk has a message for you.

“Wake up. Get with the times,” says Hawk in an interview just before the show that would bring so much love into Philly pockets.

“It’s funny,” he says. Mayor Street “presented me with a proclamation the first year of the X-Games. I thought from the way he sounded, that something was happening here. But it doesn’t look like anything is happening.”

And that, says Hawk, is “ridiculous.”

No small wonder that Philly has earned a particularly bad rep in yet another industry that rakes in millions.

“We hear all these negative things about Philadelphia in particular and its view toward public skate parks,” says Hawk, a guy who knows the power of skating. “It’s ironic that the X-Games were here two years in a row.”

Maybe action sports’ next big Pennsylvania event will take place out in Woodward -- the place that is trying to bring LOVE back.

The Patrick Kerr Memorial Skateboarding Scholarship fund drive kicks off Sat., Nov. 16 at 7 p.m. with the premiere of a skateboarding documentary, Drive, in Drexel University’s main auditorium, and an outside concert immediately following. For more information or to send a donation, contact Liz Kerr at 215-663-9329.