The skateboarding councilor

Meet Jeff Erickson: skateboard designer, stay-at-home dad, substitute high school teacher, laundromat owner and new Scappoose City Councilman

By Kelly Moyer

The South County Spotlight, Nov 26, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (3 Reader comments)

Scappoose City Councilor-elect Jeff Erickson shows off a skateboard deck he designed. A newbie to politics, Erickson is a Scappoose native and will be the youngest member of the city council.

Kelly Moyer / The South County Spotlight

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If you were to pay a surprise visit to the newest member of the Scappoose City Council on a weekday, say around 1 o’clock, you might find him in his garage, a toothpick in his hand and a baby monitor in the corner.

Come again?

It makes perfect sense once you meet the new Scappoose city councilor-elect. At 35, Jeff Erickson will be the youngest member of the council beating the “other Jeff,” incumbent Jeff Bernhard, by just a couple years.

“We went to Scappoose High together,” Erickson says of Bernhard. “He was a couple grades above me.”

Being the youngest councilor isn’t the only thing that sets Erickson apart from the crowd. This father of two has an eclectic combination of careers, which include owning the local laundromat; substitute teaching at Scappoose High; and making custom skateboard decks for professional skaters and skateboard companies. Which brings us back to the toothpick and baby monitor – the toothpick is Erickson’s method of removing excess paint from his silkscreen design on the skateboard decks and the baby monitor allows him to work in his garage while his younger daughter, 3-year-old Kaleigh, takes an afternoon nap.

The mix of jobs, as well as the flexibility, helps him work both sides of his brain and will, he hopes, give him time to be an effective councilor, Erickson says.

“The laundromat is a good, stable business and my wife’s grandparents owned it, then gave it to my wife’s parents, who handed it over to us, so it’s been in the family, but it isn’t much of a creative outlet,” says Erickson, who is silk-screening the image of a Viking onto a hot pink skateboard deck. “Doing this (the skateboard design) gives me something creative to do, but it’s also sort of meditative. I can think about things while I do this. I get so many ideas while I’m out here working on the boards.”

It may have been one of those late-afternoon silk-screening sessions that prompted Erickson into the world of politics.

“You know, I grew up in Scappoose and I’ve been here all my life, except for four years when I went to Oregon State University,” Erickson says. “So I’ve seen the town change … I have a feel for what has and hasn’t worked here.”

There are two issues in particular that peak Erickson’s interest: making the city more attractive for small-business owners and making sure the city’s plans for revamping the Scappoose skateboard park go smoothly.

“I want to make sure the park doesn’t die,” Erickson says.

The new councilor-elect has been on every side of the skate park issue. As a teen growing up in Scappoose, he was fighting just to get a park; as a young father he organized the skateboarding club at Scappoose High and organized the teens he taught to advocate for a new and improved skate park. He’s sat across from city councilors and shared his knowledge of area skate parks. Now Erickson will join the council as they steer through the improvement and possible relocation of the park.

Erickson’s love of skateboarding is apparent throughout his Scappoose home. In the living room, past the mantle full of family photos of 3-year-old Kaleigh and 7-year-old Kamryn, a second-grader at Grant Watts Elementary School, is a framed letter from the Swedish Museum of Design, which recently selected one of Erickson’s board designs to be in the museum’s “skateboard design” show. In another corner, a signed skateboard deck Erickson designed for a professional rider – and one of his heroes when he was a teenager – hangs in a thick black frame.

“This is my corner of the room,” Erickson says. “I’ve been trying to decorate.”

It’s hard to pull of a masculine décor when you’re outnumbered by females three to one, but the Ericksons seem to have found a good balance – and Jeff can always retreat to the garage, which features a skateboard ramp and dozens of signed decks, not to mention a row of award ribbons from Erickson’s bow hunting days.

“Oh, yeah, those,” he says when asked about the bow hunting ribbons. “I was pretty good when I was in fourth or fifth grade. Then I discovered skateboarding.”

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