When I was a kid, my dad Maurice and I built wonderful things together out of scraps. One that immediately springs to mind is an orange crate scooter with split steel wheel roller skates that I covered with bottle caps and raced with the neighborhood kids on the sidewalks. Maurice, also known as Mice, was a finish carpenter with the Southern Pacific Railroad, as well as a mechanic and fabricator. My grandpa Balma, who grew up in France right by the border of Italy, was a writer and a musician. My grandpa Claus, who was from Germany, was a very successful entrepreneur, tinkerer, and inventor. All three of them inspired me to be creative, too.

The Balma name is Italian. I was born in 1944 and grew up in Alhambra, California, which is in the San Gabriel Valley in the Los Angeles basin. My cousin Ron was the same age as me and lived right on the beach at Hermosa. It was a short drive from my house, and we bodysurfed and belly boarded all the time. The first time I saw stand-up surfers, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I started stand-up surfing in 1958 with a friend, Paul Jessup, whose family had a home in San Clemente that included a surfboard, an 8’ 6” Velzy pig.

I came home and built a skateboard that week, so I could practice surfing when I couldn’t get to the beach. I took a 2” x 8” piece of old-growth redwood, split apart a clamp-on steel wheel roller skate, and nailed it to the redwood deck. The 2” x 8” width added more stability; unlike most people, I never had an actual 2” x 4” skateboard. My second skateboard was made out of a 1” x 6” plank, which offered a lower center of gravity.

I moved to Pacific Beach, San Diego in 1966, where, although I skated a little bit, I went surfing most of the time. I was a telephone lineman for a couple of years, studied engineering, and became a machinist and fabricator and then a commercial fisherman for white sea bass and albacore, and I also trapped lobster.

By early 1973, I had moved to Leucadia. I was still a commercial fisherman patching lobster traps at my house when my friends came by and shouted, “Come on, we’re going skateboarding!” I said, “Skateboarding? What are you talking about? I haven’t skateboarded in years.” And they said, “No, we’ve got these new wheels!” They were talking about the new polyurethane Cadillac wheels that had just been introduced by Frank Nasworthy. We went up to La Costa, and the Cadillacs were awesome. Compared to the advancement from steel wheels to clay, the progression from clay to urethane was momentous. Insanely smooth and fast, urethane could even roll over a rock without screeching to a halt. I was so stoked, I immediately wanted a skateboard, so I bought some Sure Grip roller skate trucks, built one, and started riding again. The urethane wheel was nothing less than the Big Bang that set Tracker and all other modern skateboard companies in motion. I teamed up with Dave Dominy and Gary Dodds forming Tracker, we developed and launched the Tracker Fultrack truck in 1975 and the rest is history.