Jim Barnum will skateboard until he dies.
Barnum, founding president/designer/project manager for North Vancouver's Spectrum Skateparks, recently visited Innisfail to pitch a potential skateboard park to replace the aging facility to council and stakeholders. If it goes ahead, Barnum may be asked to design the new local skateboard park to replace Innisfail's aging antiquated facility.
After his pitch to locals, it was clear there is more to Barnum than meets the eye.
“I started skateboarding at the age of 11 in North Vancouver where my family lived,” Barnum said. “My initial interest in skateboarding started in an unusual way. I was reading a skateboard story in an Archie comic book in 1980 and the last panel had Archie boarding with a psychedelic colour splash. I was hooked, it looked so cool.”
Barnum asked his parents for a skateboard for Christmas. He got it.
“Living in North Vancouver, there were lots of challenging skateboard parks for me to board at. We grew up with the snake runs from the 1970s, and as I got older, we learned about other parks in the area and skated those too. It was interesting that parks in Vancouver never got bulldozed; actually they never stopped building them. As a result, I never stopped as I went through high school,” added Barnum. “As a designer at age 40, I still skate, and I know guys 50-plus that are still active.”
For Barnum, his introduction to skateboard design was accidental.
“I was living in Whistler at the time, and skating the local park in 1996. The park concrete had gotten so bad that we had gone to the municipality and asked for a new park. They were tax rich and very progressive, so they asked us to design one for them, and they would build it,” Barnum remembered. “My dad was an architect so he helped with design and technical drawings, and I volunteered my time to fundraise, and help build the park.”
Barnum worked full time during the process, and one day he went to Whistler council and told them he could not do any more, that he would have to stop volunteering. The mayor thought he was already being paid, and upon finding out that he was not, hired him as lead hand on the project, and later as director of construction. Whistler boarders loved the park.
“Once the skate park was complete, and my life returned to normal, the phone began to ring with requests for me to help them build their parks. It turns out that word of mouth had spread so far that when interest was expressed in building a new park, Whistler recommended me, and I have never looked back.”
Since 1996, Spectrum Skateparks has designed and built 150 skate parks worldwide. There are 130-plus Barnum and team designs in Canada, 10 in the United States, one in England, two in Israel, and one in China. The phone keeps ringing.
“My passion for skateboarding drives me to keep designing parks that are more challenging, more inventive, and more progressive,” Barnum said. “We have won numerous awards for design, but we don't do this for awards. My team all loves boarding, and want to work with communities in partnership with the kids who will use the parks, from fundraising to design. Skateboarding for me has given me a lifetime of experiences, lifetime friends, and I want to share my passion for the sport with as many boarders as possible.”
