My story post 8

The back yard of the house my family lived in when I was making and repairing surfboards had a big cement slab that was pretty good for skateboarding. There were some mean cracks in it, but possible to navigate.

The house we lived in before that had a killer circular drive way. The house set below the street maybe about 8 feet. So the circular drive way ramped up to street level on both ends, made for great skateboarding. I would walk to the top on one side, jump on my skateboard and ride down the drive way and up the other side, turn and ride down then up the other side again, back and forth for hours practicing and developing my skills. No doubt all that skateboarding helped my surfing. I didn’t get to the beach but once or twice a month back then but I did the skateboard thing constantly.

But how’s this for a near miss? In 1964-’65 my dad worked for a company in Newbury Park, which was about an hour drive from where we lived. Wanting to live closer to where my dad worked my parents found a lot in Oxnard Shores… a beach community that was maybe 25 minuets form where my dad worked.

The property was bought and an architect hired to design the house for the lot. The lot BTW was about 6 lots up from the beach. Well, right when my parents were shopping for a construction loan to build the house on that Oxnard Shores lot, my dad was laid off his Newbury Park job. They had actually already sold the house we lived at the time so we had to move… all be it not to Oxnard Shores.

My parents rented the house with the circular driveway that I loved to skateboard on in the interim while they found a house for the family to settle into in the same area we had been. All was not lost I guess, because the house we moved into was the house I was able to put my little surfboard shack up at.

Though sometimes I wonder what life events would have developed had we moved to Oxnard Shores. The The Campbell brothers are from Oxnard Shores… we would have most likely hooked up and surfed together… probably would have gone to school together. Duncan I can’t remember ever meeting. Malcolm and I have been acquainted for a long time. Some 6 or 8 years after the would be family move, in the early seventies, Malcolm and I were in the same geology class at Ventura College. We sat next to each other the whole semester. I never new he made surfboards until one day on a class field trip we started talking about surfing and boards. So, it seems we went to school together after all, a curious circumstance.

D.R.

Surveying Oxnard Shores property circa 1964