If someone skated during the past 27 years, Donnie Humes probably skated with and/or caught them pulling a trick that made their week.

Mr. Humes has been putting out at skateboard zine Smelly Curb since 1987.

Smelly Curb and Old Skool Skateboards are putting on a Halloween Curb Contest on October 26th at the Westerville Skatepark. Issue 44 of Smelly Curb is also on the way.

Humes laughed when I inquired about the content of Smelly Curb Issue one, replying. “The First Issue was really corny. Think about you being awkward and 17, thinking you know everything.”

We were standing on a hill above the Dodge Skate Park bowl on the West side of Columbus, that is part of Dodge Recreation Center. This is the skateboard wing of the Dodge Park Rec Center which Humes helped open and run from 1990-1995.

During these formative years of Columbus skateboarding, Humes and his buddies were pulling grinds on curbs around town on their way to punk shows at Staches.

They were blaring Suicidal Tendencies, Jesus Lizard, the Cows and Unsane while getting pestered by jocks and cops.

Humes laughed when I asked about harassment.“I have a scar here on my eye from getting hit after being called a skater-fag.” Humes responded matter of factly.

Naturally the Smelly Curb design inspiration came from the punk albums of the era, “Seeing album covers from punk bands with sleeves, sick and hand drawn. The fun xerox images they would put in there. Reagan stuff.”

He hustled the zine from the long-defunct shop Windbreakers.

Humes and his friends got the ball rolling on Dodge Park by circulating a petition utilizing the shop and Smelly Curb as their anchors. “87, 88, 89. And then 90. It took two to three years of community support and their red tape.

I was actually contacted. There was a lady, Maureen Lorenz, who was my boss. She was a landscape architect. She was totally rad...she understood real art, what skateboarding was.”

After three years, Frank Hawk was brought in to design the park. Frank Hawk is Tony Hawk’s father and obviously a skateboard advocate. The city modeled the concrete bowl after Stone Edge Park in Daytona, Florida.

Humes was offered a job running the park when it opened because of the behind the scenes work put into facilitating the park’s existence.

For a young skater, this was probably the best job one could have aside from being a professional skateboarder.

He recalled being stoked,“19 Years old. 20 Years old, getting handed that and just letting go wild with it. You can do whatever you want to make it rad. And that is exactly what I did.”

The park, and the zine helped build a national rapport with skateboarding for both Humes, and Dodge.

Eventually, he began to travel to California, and linked up with various companies and like-minded skateboarders when the weather got bad. The indoor section of Dodge, Sunsports, and the various garages did not always satiate Humes' skateboard needs when the ground was covered with sleet and slush.(There is an excellent video up on Streetcanoe.com that has Mr. Humes showing off zines he made for skateboard companies like Creature during his travels.)

Eventually, Humes stopped working at the park and pursued blue collar jobs such as working in a windmill, landscaping and building houses.

Smelly Curb has a team and makes limited-run shirts and decks.

He has photos from every era and hopes to make a book one day of locals and notables.

He continues to skate, make sculptures and obviously document skateboarding via Smelly Curb.

Currently, there is an ongoing discussion on building a new park within Columbus because skateboarding is so popular and every suburb has a public park while inside I-270 only has Dodge.

Humes went to some meetings but everything was so unfocused. “They want to build this super park with lights and everything as big as a football field. Yeah that's great. We want to build a series of three parks scattered across the city where they are all different and maybe connect on the bike path.”

Humes added there was an approval for a skater built park at Dodge but liability issues arose, “You can’t use power tools in the park.”

Building a concrete park with a screwdriver and duct tape seems problematic.

An idea he really likes for a park is building it out of recycled materials from other city and state construction projects. “Imagine a skatepark that was of 75 percent recycled materials. How rad would that be? We got the world’s first recycled skatepark.”