Skateboarding is not a crime!

Here's some pictures of budding Woodward family skaters roaming around in front our house in Shanghai. There are no Tony Hawks in our crew, but everybody seems to have a good time regardless of whether they’re standing, sitting or lying on a skateboard.

The skateboard is a 47 inch Original Skateboards longboard and we manage to get two or three people on it most of the time. This board actually replaced an older Sector 9 longboard that I bought on my 31st birthday while I was living in LA. I lived in this super tiny studio apartment above a garage on Almayo Avenue, close to the intersection of Pico and Beverly Glen. It turned out to that the little neighborhood near Almayo was a perfect place for a long skateboard because it had some long gentle hills. If you walked up to the top of Tennessee Avenue you had a couple of pretty good blocks of fairly mellow cruising. Anyway, that first longboard ended up getting run over by a mail truck when we lived in Florida. The post office gave us some money for it so I was able to upgrade. This new skateboard has amazing trucks. Its sort of the Maserati of longboards as far as I can tell - turns on a dime.

My first year college I didn't have a car or bike, only a skateboard. Unfortunately, this wasn't a reflection of skateboarding prowess or an assertion of coolness, but rather relative poverty -- I didn't have enough money for a car or a mountain bike. This was the mid-80s when skateboarding was in a lull between the 1970s Logan Earth Ski era and the 90s rise of Tony Hawk etc. so skateboarding hadn't been banned on campus yet. It seemed that there were only about 10 or 15 people that rode skateboards on campus at the time and when we passed each other on campus we’d give each other that slight male nod that represents acknowledgement without necessarily denoting approval or disapproval. The board I had was actually an old one that my friend Scott Oaks had given in lieu of some money he owed me. I remember it was a Dogtown deck with Gullwing trucks and red Kryptonics wheels. Life was good.

We're not actually moving so don't panic. Ethan just likes feeling like he's in on the action.

That's probably more than anyone would want to know about our skateboarding history.