Roger Adams, the son of roller-rink owners, who compensated for an unfulfilling career as a psychologist by inventing a twist on roller skates — sneakers with embedded wheels that popped out — died on March 24 at his home in Glenbrook, Nev., on the east shore of Lake Tahoe. He was 71.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, Robert Nachbar, a spokesman for the family, said.
In 1998, Mr. Adams was on vacation in Huntington Beach, Calif., seeking relief from two crises: he was going through a divorce after 21 years of marriage and he hated his job as a case manager at the department of mental health in Marion County, Ore.
The roller skaters, skateboarders and cyclists zipping past him on the boardwalk at the beach represented his past as well as his future. They reminded him of happier times at his family’s rink in Tacoma, Wash., and inspired a new idea — “a shoe that could roll on command by just shifting your body weight,” he told NBC News in 2004.
“It was like a flash,” he said. “The hair stood up on the back of my neck.”
A tinkerer who had toyed with automatic door openers and light sensors, Mr. Adams began building a prototype in a friend’s garage workshop. He cut out the heel of a sneaker and then ran “a rod through the heel,” he told NBC News, borrowing “one of the wheeled bearings that come on skateboards.”
After more experimentation — and more than a few tumbles, he said — he created a brand of rolling footwear that would be called Heelys.
“I wanted the wearer to be able to walk normally and then roll,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2007. “When you see a kid wearing them, you wouldn’t know there’s a wheel in the sneaker until they started to roll.”
Mr. Adams started Heelys in late 2000 with an investment from the venture capital firm Capital Southwest. The company quickly became a success. In 2004, it sold 697,000 pairs; four years later, sales peaked at 7.6 million. He holds several patents on Heelys.
Heelys were “unique,” George Leichtweis, the owner of Modern Skate & Surf, a store and skate park in Royal Oak, Mich., said in an interview, calling them “one of those fads that lasted a few years.”
But “I had a couple of kids in my store last month that had Heelys on,” he added, so “there was some longevity to the concept.”
The shoes’ early popularity prompted the R&B artist Usher to wear them in the video for his song “U Don’t Have to Call” in 2001. The same year, Wired magazine raved about Heelys, praising the way they allowed “teens, urban commuters and warehouse fulfillment monkeys to transition instantly from ordinary walking to a speedy, long-stepping roll.”
Heelys may have been a hit with the youth market, but they were less popular with doctors and child-safety advocates. In 2005, the Canada Safety Council called for banning them in arenas, malls and schools. The next year, the nonprofit group World Against Toys Causing Harm ranked Heelys first on its list of the 10 worst toys of 2006 because of the risks of head and spinal injuries they posed.
In 2007, the journal Pediatrics published an article documenting injuries sustained the year before by 67 children who had been wearing Heelys and similar footwear in Ireland over a 10-week period. The same year, the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission reported one death and at least 64 injuries that it attributed to the footwear.
Heelys countered by citing another study that used the commission’s own data to show that wearing the shoes was safer than participating in many sports.
Roger Ralph Adams was born on June 6, 1954, in Tacoma, Wash., to Roger and DoLores (Prengel) Adams, who owned and operated roller rinks in that city from 1947 to 1984.
He began skating when he was 9 months old and later worked with his parents at Tacoma Roller Bowl, the rink they owned, fixing skates and overseeing the room where customers stowed their street shoes.
He enrolled at Washington State University but dropped out in 1975 to work at the roller rink and for a roller-skate distributor. He later returned to school, studying psychology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma and earning a bachelor’s degree in 1979. He held several positions in Oregon as a psychologist and crisis counselor.
“I enjoyed working with people one-on-one,” he told NBC News. “But when I moved into management to make more money, it was a miserable time.”
Inventing Heelys provided him with a creative outlet — and riches, as well. In 2006, the company sold stock to the public, raising $135 million; an early stock surge vaulted Heelys to a market value of $1 billion. Mr. Adams sold $26 million in stock by the end of 2006 before the price of shares tumbled when the company reported disappointing sales projections.
For most of the company’s early years, Mr. Adams served as the president, and Michael Staffaroni, a former executive at LA Gear and Rollerblade, was the chief executive. In 2006, Mr. Adams became the director of research and development.
“We never tried to tie him to a desk,” Mr. Staffaroni told D, the Dallas magazine, in 2007.
He added: “There was never any real tension between us, because Roger realized early on that my skill set was different. The first time we went to a trade show and he started hearing about terms, discounts and marketing support, he was fine to step aside and let me deal with the customers.”
After Mr. Adams left the company in 2009, he stayed out of the public eye, filing patents for other wearable roller devices. Heelys, which has gone through a few ownership changes, is still in business.
He is survived by his daughter, Rae Adams; two sons, Ryan and Roger; and four grandchildren. His marriage to Lynn Bunselmeyer ended in divorce.
In 2001, Mr. Adams boasted to The News Tribune of Tacoma about how Heelys had started “to redefine the ways kids can get around.”
He added: “You can get from one end of the hallway to the other just by gravity. It’s like a stealth skate. Like Tom Cruise in ‘Risky Business’? It looks like you’re gliding on ice.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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