Icelandic Mafia

     The break room at Trader Joe's (my day job) has a constant flow of diverse literature... from 3 inch thick fantasy novels that are always volume five or six in a series of twenty seven, to muscle mags, to the weekly Portland periodicals like the willamete week or the portland murcury, with the odd national geographic thrown in. So I'm on my lunchbreak wading through piles of print, and as luck would have it I stumble upon a copy of Thrasher from a few years ago. Flipping through the pages I come across this picture of John Cardiel destroying a rail while wearing one of my shirts. I can't tell you how stoked I got. I remembered that John had picked up one of my shirts at Cal Skate here in Portland where I had a few on consignment. Before LOI I had a likkle ting called "Icelandic Mafia". My gramma on my dad's side is Icelandic, and was born in 1922, hence the 1922 on the shirt. Anyhoo, John got in touch with me through the shop, and I ended up doing a series of decks for Anti Hero. This was right before his gnarly injury.

John and I lost touch after the accident, but from the phone conversations we had and the ragga we exchanged I could tell he was a down to earth person. Much respect John!

One Love,

blakely