Tracking down a mysterious skateboarder from 1979 | Hacker News Reader

Tracking down a mysterious skateboarder from 1979

ncrabbithole.com

186 pointszdw36 comments

One of the interesting things about this whole story is that Tony Hawk was born the year before Shaunda was, making them both 56 this year. Interesting that they were (in a way) contemporaries.

> Also, she had to learn what it meant to ride “goofy footed.” It’s when you ride a board with your right foot forward instead of your left. “Oh,” Shaunda says. “Well, I am left-handed.”

I am right handed but would ride a skateboard the same way. I never even tried with my left foot forward. Even visualizing it feels wrong. I wonder why this is the apparently uncommon stance? Some people I think prefer to use their dominant foot to push, but it’s easier to keep my balance when my dominant foot is on the board.

I skateboard "regular" but snowboard "goofy". Not that I'm amazing at either, but that's just what felt natural to me for each.

+1 on goofy snowboard. Just feel right.

Left-handed, and left foot forward for skateboard and snowboard. I associate my right foot with strength and my left with finesse

The classic way to tell if you're regular or goofy is to close your eyes and have someone shove you from behind, see which foot you try and catch yourself with. Probably works better if you don't know the shove is coming.

> I am right handed but would ride a skateboard the same way.

Yup was going to comment that I didn't know if left-handed were more likely to be goofy but back in my skateboarding days I definitely had right-handed friends who were goofy instead of regular.

> ... but it’s easier to keep my balance when my dominant foot is on the board

My daughter (who's not goofy but reglar), for a reason I don't understand, prefer to push with her front foot while keeping her back foot on the board. It's not how I told her.

Am left handed and I skate regular, however I do a ton of switch so take that as you will ;)

That’s called Mongo pushing ;)

Stance for board sports is nearly even, one analysis shows 56% regular vs 44% goofy [1]. It's not like handedness at all. Not sure why one was designated "normal" and the other "weird" when it's so close. My guess is that there was a very small group of skaters that came up with the name, and by chance most of them happened to be regular.

1. https://blog.benw.xyz/2013/11/the-real-goofy-vs-regular-a-lo...

Naming things is weird. In movement/dance description, the name of the typical walk is "contrabody", but if you move your right arm with your right leg, that's called "natural".

One theory is that "goofy-footed" came from the way Goofy surfed in an old Walt Disney cartoon: https://www.pacificlongboarder.com/news/Did-you-know-The-ter...

Oh yeah, I forgot about that

Like "handedness" there's also "footedness", and they're not strictly linked. Apparently around 40% of left-handers are right-footers but only ~3% of right-handers are left-footers.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-asymmetric-bra...

The above also notes there are similar (semi-)independent preferences for hearing and seeing too.

Same. Another variation is which foot you push off with. I always push off with my front foot, the right (strong) foot. So it makes sense to me to ride goofy.

First time I saw people push off with their back foot it seemed so weird. But I think they were mostly natural not goofies.

Fine, she doesn't know what skating goofy is, but she has to have known not to skate mongo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPV1dKMZltQ

I can only wonder if that board did get rust'ed by the water.

I've ridden in rain countless times and never had a problem. (Though that's modern boards with ball bearings specifically designed to prevent water ingress; perhaps the 1970's stuff was more vulnerable?)

Skating in the rain is great, everyone should try it!

I skated in the 80's and as I remember skating in the rain was pretty hard on the bearings. I would keep a beat up older board as a rain board.

Power slides were so much fun in the rain.

Actual branded skateboard bearings today are deliberately nerfed to allow the elements in, it sells more bearings. At least that's the case with all the ones they sell at the local skate shop here in Berkeley... one side has had the seal completely removed, the balls and cage are exposed. They rust very quickly ridden in the wet.

Boards were fine. As another person commented it's the wheels' bearings that didn't like water that that much. But these were easy to change once in a while.

To reflect on HN trends for a second: people seem to really like "uncovered" things. Like some lost song, or archeological piece or, as here, identity of a person in a mostly inconsequential context.

I also don't seem to recall these kinds of posts hitting front page much until recently. What is this? A new wave of nostalgia for long lost past on the internet? Hacker News demographic change? Discovery of a new marketing vector? Or just me seeing a pattern where there is none?

Maybe people are tired of the other stuff that's been crowding all the information channels (related to an event happening today) and are happy for some lighthearted news for a change?

I'm on a no-politics diet today, but I would have loved this article on any day. It's just a delightful story. I think in news jargon it would be called a "human interest" story, which when you really think about those words, really nails it for me. I am deeply interested in other humans, especially of the non-celebrity variety.

I can't speak to the trend, but for me, it's this idea that invalidates tastemakers and shows that good ideas inevitably stand on their own. Tony Hawk is widely respected, and yet, he's enamored with this forgotten photo of a young girl skateboarding in the rain. And she's holding an umbrella. We all agree-it's a wonderful photo.

Turns out, the girl–in the most respectful way–is just an ordinary person, and the photographer asked her to hold an umbrella, because he felt it would be a good idea. It was a good idea, and many years later the creative result has risen to the surface.

It's like when you go to a concert and witness a special moment that rocks you, and then years later you find out it has millions of views on YouTube. It's democratic validation that we are experiencing beautiful moments all the time, and that we don't need a Tony Hawk to validate them. You could argue that this wouldn't be seen without Tony, or you can reflect upon the many moments that aren't validated, and yet are filled with beauty.

I can only speak for myself, but the Internet regularly has me going down rabbit holes into unsolved mysteries that end with no solution. I find articles like this refreshing simply because I can close the tab with a smile rather than with more questions.

Is it a mostly inconsequential context? I think it's exactly the sort of context that is valuable and human and grounds us to events of our past.

That one photo (and the collection of photos from the 70s linked in the article) say a lot about culture, about identity, about life and how things have evolved (or not evolved, or devolved) since then.

It's a story too about celebrity, and how this picture exists in this moment, today, because a celebrity found and shared it. It's completely distorted this woman's day to day. While it seems like a positive for her, it highlights just how much power celebrity has in our mental economies. Should one person have the ability to completely blow up someone else's routine like this? I dunno! But social media definitely facilitates it!

There's a ton of very interesting topics to cover here, in addition to the ones you raise, and I don't think they really are that inconsequential!

I've thought of the related phenomenon as "the only thing you can't buy is time."

I.e. there's no amount of money you can spend today to make something 45 years old

So as we increasingly move into a materially post-scarcity developed world, time becomes the last scarce thing.

It overlaps with nostalgia, but there's also a big component of novelty/rarity. See previous example of tracking down that song that was written for the X-Files and playing in the background in a single bar scene.

Also, me blowing my friends' minds with a record I have of Richard Harris (now, "Dumbledore") reading selections from The Prophet: https://www.amazon.com/Kahlil-Gibran-Prophet-Musical-Interpr...

Oh I love this stuff. I went around searching for the members of the team who won the Crystal Maze https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmyoWIGw-kI&list=PLWdGI8jh26... (a light and fun reality adventure game show) and it was good fun to see.

What a reference. Incidentally, I started watching The Crystal Maze for the first time a few months ago after finding episodes of it on Archive.org. It's like watching adults running through Legends of The Hidden Temple, but with more urgency and charm. It's such a fun show

Oh that's fun. Were they surprised to be sought?

It's uncommon in the era of easily accessible information. Ditto for ARGs.

I have no data to back it up, but I believe HN saw a huge number of redditors moving here after the user protests a year or two ago.

This isn’t new on HN, these sort of stories have been here for years. If anything there have been less of them in more recent times.

I think many people here like the deep dives, and well written stories, about some specific interest.

I might be wrong, but I have the impression that this kind of post was always part of HN. Since, idk, 10 years ago.

One reason for the popularity of that growing could be the accumulation of online things old enough to care about and enough sources to be able to track things down. I mean, only a decade ago some things were still fresh while now they're worthy of some research. See for example Jeffiot working with the community to track down the source of the vision test pattern (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D7I7fmZdOA) or the trumpet skull gif (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYcHOEjGzPA). In 2000s the information wouldn't be out there for the first one and the tools and community would be missing too. The second one would be just one of millions of gifs that nobody really cares about yet.

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