'Real skate shops are a dying breed'

For a decade, one small shop in Kalispell has maintained the spirit of skateboarding.

Clay Taylor took over Spirit Skate Shop in January 2010 from Mark Delorme. In May, the First Avenue East skateboard shop turned 10 years old.

Before Taylor, the shop carried more common brands. Taylor decided to change Spirit into an uncompromising skateboard utopia.

“Real skate shops are a dying breed,” Taylor said.

The Internet has driven prices down, slowly killing off local skate shops.

Taylor said Spirit is the only “core shop,” a purely skateboarding retailer, in the area. The next closest core shop is in Seattle or Portland, according to Taylor.

Taylor owned his first skateboard in 1975. He was 10 years old then; he’s 50 now.

He grew up in Southern California where skateboarding was originally defined and developed as a sport. Back then there were no videos and no Internet content to promote the sport. Taylor fed his passion with skateboarding magazines.

Taylor moved to Montana in 2003 in search of better air quality to cope with his son’s asthma. In moving to Montana, he thought he had said goodbye to skateboarding forever.

Several old magazine spreads and posters or banners hang from the walls and ceilings between exposed beams in his shop.

“And now I have a place to hang it all,” Taylor said.

In January, Spirit Skate Shop was featured in Thrasher Magazine, a popular and long-running skateboard magazine, as the Thrasher “Skate Shop of the Month.” Taylor owns every copy of Thrasher since the magazine first printed in 1981.

“Sometimes you just end up living the dream,” Taylor said. “I’m just happy with life.”

Taylor singlehandedly operates Spirit Skate Shop, making it all his own by design. Owning a core shop was actually one of his two dreams growing up. The other was owning a record store. Metal and punk-rock records are played during store hours. He has a small inventory of records for sale, mostly to feed his own record purchases, he said.

Taylor treasures the shop, the building and the location.

“It’s got a great vibe to it. It’s exactly what I would have wanted for a local shop,” he said.

What the local shop doesn’t include is an online presence. And Taylor isn’t heading that direction any time soon. He’s more interested in holding on to the authenticity of the shop.

“You have to come in here to really get the atmosphere. For me it’s not about the money; that’s the wrong reason to be here,” Taylor said.

During the winter months, Spirit doesn’t get the business it sees during the summer. Taylor closes the shop a few more days a week and generally tightens the budget.

“I starve in the winter,” Taylor laughs.

Taylor said the location is great for foot traffic and tourists. The building has maintained a lot of character since it was built in 1911 as a heavy materials import building near the railroad lines.

Today, the shop serves as a local hangout for area skateboarders — a safe haven for youths to be themselves, Taylor said. He sees a lot of the traits in the kids that he remembers from his own youth.

“I try to teach them to be patient, I know what they’re going through in life,” Taylor said. “The kids are judged as school, at home and on the sidewalk for being skateboarders. Here, they can just be themselves.”

Spirit sponsors a team of six area skateboarders, ranging in age from 16 to 25 plus one 40-year-old.

Major skateboard attractions locally are skate parks in Kalispell and Whitefish. The Dave Olsen Memorial Skate Park in Whitefish is world-class, Taylor said.

Other spots include skate parks in Polson, St. Ignatius and Browning.

At the Browning skate park, recently funded by Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament and known as Thunder Park, Taylor got another chance to contribute to his lifelong passion.

In coordination with a tribal group, he put 100 skateboards together (complete with trucks and wheels) that were donated to 100 young skateboarders unable to afford boards of their own. The board construction totaled about 40 hours of work for Taylor.

“What Clay did was very, very beneficial to the community,” said Larry Ground, a member of the Crazy Dog Society in Browning that helps coordinate community projects such as the skateboard donations. “There were a lot of kids who didn’t have the ability to use the new park because they didn’t have boards themselves. Now there’s something like 70 to 100 kids out there a day.”

In addition to the boards purchased by the Blackfeet Tribe and constructed by Taylor, 238 helmets were donated to youths to promote safety at the new skate park.

“I never thought in my life I’d be able to set 100 kids up like that,” Taylor said. “I took a loss but in the long run it will probably pay for itself.”

The only future focus Taylor has for the shop is to simply keep Spirit operating. His shop has been featured in one of his favorite magazines, he owns his own place and he has brought skateboarding to 100 youths who might not have had the opportunity.

“The only goal is to keep the doors open. That’s it. It will never be about the money.”

Reporter Seaborn Larson may be reached at 758-4441 or by email at slarson@dailyinterlake.com.