Old Guys Sk8boarding

A few days ago, Lew shot some pix of me skateboarding. It’s for a book by Jack Smith called Lives on Board – Memories of Skateboarding’s Generations. Jack, among other things, runs the online Skateboarders’ Journal. I wrote an article for the book about skating down a road on nearby Mt. Tamalpais at sunrise, and here’s a paragraph:

“I think it would be good in your book (and everywhere, for that matter), to encourage old guys to skate, especially if they skated as kids. The new boards, trucks, and wheels are magnitudes ahead of what was available 10, even 5 years ago. I started at age 65. I wish I’d started as a kid, but this was no reason not to start late in life. I think it’s good in many ways for an old guy to learn a new physical skill. Good for the brain. I think there’s a huge group of guys in 50s-60s with skating skills from younger years who don’t know about the new equipment, and could jump right in with a new longboard and start cruisin.”

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

2 Responses to Old Guys Sk8boarding

  1. Lloyd —

    You rock, man! I saw a story about you on the Loaded Boards site. That took me here, and to the Shelter site. I've now got a trio of your books and… well, I love those treehouses.

    -Hankk, astronomer and sk8boarder in Mexico City

    p.s. My parents used to have a copy of one of the Domebooks back a long time ago… I remember building model domes as a kid and thinking, maybe this is great theoretically, but there's something missing in the liveability of a dome. So, I read with great interest your articulate essays on precisely that subject…

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