Jake Phelps

James Kendall Phelps, known as Jake Phelps, was an American skateboarder and magazine editor, born on 24 September 1962 and died on 14 March 2019, who led Thrasher magazine as editor-in-chief for 27 years. He was born in San Francisco to Kitty and Kendall Phelps, lived there until eleven, and after his parents split up lived with his mother in Marblehead, Massachusetts. His parents called him J. K., which became Jake. He began skating at thirteen, in 1977 began working at Zero Gravity, a skate park in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and for a short time was hired by PepsiCo to do skate demos in schools. He dropped out of high school by the end of the 1970s, and in the early 1980s became friends with members of the hardcore punk band SSD.