Vernon - Danny Kass had his epiphany at the age of 17, although it’s doubtful he used that word to describe the moment when he beheld his future and saw that it was totally cool. He was still a student at Vernon Township High School at the time, but his real love was, as it had been since he was 9 years old, riding skateboards and snowboards and doing things on them that others would pay to see. “I started to get a little bit of money from skateboarding,” he recalled recently, when the two-time Olympic halfpipe silver medalist returned to his hometown area mountain, Mountain Creek, to challenge local amateur snowboarders in an event he created - the Grenade Strikes Back Tour. Kass has been riding for prize money since he was 15 or 16 years old. At 17, he had turned it into a contract with Vans Shoes to make skateboarding appearances. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to live on. “I didn’t want to go to college, and I realized I had a full-time job,” he said. It wasn’t the kind of job that guidance counselors recommend. And to Kass, it wasn’t a job at all, requiring only that he do exactly what he’d loved doing since he was 9 years old and first took up skateboarding. Any adult could have told him that sooner or later he was going to have to join the real world. If they had, they’d still be waiting, because Kass turned his love of a sport into two Olympic silver medals, a bunch of X-Games medals and his own company, Grenade Gloves, whose products, from outerwear to goggles to gloves, are sold in 25 countries, 600 retail outlets in the United States and online at www.grenadegloves.com. Kass’ elder brother, Matt, is the company’s CEO, and Kass is the vice president. They do their own designs, with the object, he laughed, being to scare the adults. This year, he said, it’s “loud, vibrant colors all mixed together like a paint spill.” Among his employees are “five or six” of his childhood friends from Vernon who work for him full time. It’s nothing that Kass envisioned when he set out to make a living having fun. “Me being 24 and competing professionally for eight or nine years is really wild,” he said. Snowboarding and skateboarding are young people’s sports, and Kass finds himself an elder statesman, which, he said, “is really cool.” He talked comfortably to a gathering of media in a conference room at the Appalachian Lodge at Mountain Creek. With him was a business partner and fellow snowboarder, Luke Trembath, a shaggy Aussie who answers to the name “Dingo.” Kass said he hasn’t changed over the years, but early in his career, he’d have just as soon gargled with boiling Clorox as sat down for an hour with the media. Back then, he had a reputation as being as arrogant as Donald Trump, but without the charm. “It got ugly,” he admits now, saying the perception was never true. Rather, he said, the snowboarding press turned on him because he preferred being on the slopes and messing around with young riders and brushed the media off. By the Torino Olympics last year, he had learned to deal with the media, and even made an appearance on the Today Show after he and Shaun “The Flying Tomato” White had taken silver and gold in the halfpipe and become national heroes. Kass has lived in California since turning pro, but, he said, “I’m Jersey to the bone.” He grew up in the Scenic Lakes section of Vernon. Because he had a Hamburg mailing address, that borough claimed him on signs at the town border, but, he says, he’s only lived in Vernon. He doesn’t get back often; his mother lives in California now while his father lives in Oak Ridge. “It is really, really nice to be here,” Kass said. “Seeing all my friends, getting a pizza at Tony’s.” Best, he said, is getting up in the morning and going to the Newfoundland Diner to get his favorite food - “a Taylor Ham and cheese sandwich on a roll with salt, pepper and ketchup.” California has a lot of things, but Taylor Ham is not one of them. Kass said that there have been times when he’s had such a craving for that Jersey diner specialty he’s had a six-pound log of it shipped to California. Most people in the sport are retired from serious competition by his age, but Kass said he’s going to try to make his third Olympic team in 2010, when the Games will be in Vancouver. “It should be a big battle to see who makes that team,” he said, noting that his biggest competition will probably be riders who are just in their mid-teens now.