Tony Hawk wanted to track down a mysterious skateboarder from 1979. We found her.
A photographer snapped a shot of Shaunda Shane skating down her street in Fayetteville when she was 10. How did the world's most famous skateboarder see that picture 45 years later?
Here’s a really cool picture:
A former colleague from my TV days, Michelle Chernicoff, sent me this picture of a young girl skateboarding underneath an umbrella on a rainy day. She saw it after Tony Hawk posted it to his Instagram page on Saturday. According to his caption, Tony really wanted to know who it was:
New fav mystery skater unlocked: from Fayetteville Observer (NC), 1973. Style, grace, confidence, and… goofy footed, in the rain!! I hope she’s still around.
Folks, we love two things around here: Tony Hawk and decades-old mysteries.
There were two initial clues: The date and the newspaper. I plugged the picture into Google Image Search to see if I could find the original post. Back on September 21, blackarchives.co had posted a collection of images taken by Fayetteville Observer photographers between 1973 and 1987. The image of the skateboarder in the rain was the first one in the carousel. Tony Hawk himself commented the same day: “New fav skater unlocked.”
Next, I did some searches on the Observer’s website. The image showed up in a monthly roundup of old ‘70s photos that staff photographer Andrew Craft had pulled from the paper’s negative archive in 2019 (“Anytime I come across a skateboarding image I always scan it,” he said later in an Instagram comment). This photo also included a date: January 20, 1979 (not 1973, as Hawk’s post said). But that was it. No location. No name. No back story.
So I turned to the people you turn to when times get tough: Librarians.
John O’Connor is the manager of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. He’s also a Rabbit Hole reader, and he’s helped me try to find archival material in the past. I sent him a message on Sunday morning to see if his library had Fayetteville Observer on microfilm. No, he said, but he’d call the Cumberland County Public Library as soon as they opened in the afternoon. There, library associate Matt Morgan got the film out, found the January 21, 1979 edition of the Fayetteville Observer, and sent over what he found:
There, on page 1B, was the image and the caption that had the rest of the details:
Shaundra Shane didn’t want to get wet, but the idea of spending a Saturday without her skateboard was too much to handle. So she got her umbrella and wheeled down Dinsmore Drive.
From there, I tracked down the 10-year-old girl in the picture. She’s 56 now, still lives in Fayetteville, and her name is Shaunda, not Shaundra (the caption misspelled it). I reached out Sunday night, and we talked after she got off of work on Monday afternoon. She remembers the day the picture was taken. An Observer photographer, the late Steve Aldridge, lived across the street from her on Dinsmore Drive. “Mr. Steve saw me out there riding my skateboard in the rain,” she says. He asked her if she could get permission from her grandparents to take a picture. He also asked if she could come back with a prop. “He wanted me to have an umbrella, so I got an umbrella,” she says. “He took that picture and that was it.”
Shaunda lived with her grandparents in a neighborhood that she loved. Family and friends were all close by. She’d been a skater for about a year, ever since her uncle brought her a little pink board with metal wheels. Her friends were more into roller skating back then, but going to the rink was kind of boring, she thought. It was limiting. Skateboarding allowed her to explore. “I was free,” Shaunda says. “You’re outside. There’s the wind. There’s just, like, a freeness, you know?”
Shaunda was the only member of her group that skateboarded, and she kept doing it for years. She got faster. Started learning tricks. But she stopped skateboarding after she got her first boyfriend in middle school. As a teenager, she started spending more time with him and less time on the board. Plus, she didn’t need to skateboard to get around—he had a car.
After that, skateboarding and the image of her doing it faded from her life. “It was just a picture in the paper,” she says. At some point, a car backed over her little pink board.
Shaunda went on living. She moved to a new place in Fayetteville. She got married and divorced. She had three kids. She started working as a patient access specialist at Cape Fear Valley Health.
Then, back in September, she got a call from a woman who still lived in her old neighborhood. She told Shaunda that she had the old picture of her skateboarding in the rain and gave it to her. A week later, the same picture started to show up on Facebook. Shaunda called up her friend, who swore that she didn’t put the image online. “I said, well, did your mom do it? And she was like, girl, my mom don’t know how to post nothing on Facebook,” she says, laughing.
It was just a coincidence. Someone online had rediscovered the picture at the same time as Shaunda’s friend. And for a while, that was it. Shaunda made it her profile picture. A few friends tagged her when they saw the image online. They made comments. They liked her ponytails. They dropped fire emojis.
Then Tony Hawk posted the picture. And then I called.
“It's amazing,” Shaunda says. “I kind of have butterflies, you know? I definitely do know who Tony Hawk is. I have watched Tony Hawk.” The Fayetteville Observer got in touch, and they’re having her re-create the photo, 45 years later (UPDATE: Here’s the picture). A local skate shop has been in touch. Her phone is blowing up.
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.”
Shaunda said she hasn’t quite been able to re-create the freedom she felt on a board all those years ago, although riding a motorcycle comes pretty close. In any event, she doesn’t really have the time to skateboard now anyway. “I mean, literally all I do is work,” she jokes. “Trying to pay these bills.”
Her son skateboards, though. And so, months ago, she got back up on a board for the first time in years. Just for a little bit. She’s a little afraid of falling, but the picture really brings back memories of a free-ranging childhood in a nice little neighborhood. “I probably would be skateboarding now,” she says, “if I really thought I could.”
MANY UPDATES (11/5/24, 9:06 a.m.): First up, Tony Hawk has seen this article and name-dropped Shaunda in an Instagram story, and Shaunda is aware that Tony Hawk has name-dropped her, but she hasn’t read this story yet because she was on her way to work. We’re all leading busy lives, people!
Also, the Fayetteville Observer posted its version of this story last night, which included the new picture of Shaunda riding a skateboard with an umbrella (you can go to their website to see it). The phenomenally talented Andrew Craft took that photo. He’s also the one who scanned the original picture of Shaunda from 1979 and posted it online, and really, there’s no story here without him. He also posted even more historical photos of skateboarders around Fayetteville, including another archival shot of Shaunda skateboarding with two friends. Check it out.
Lastly, a correction: I originally said that riding goofy foot meant riding with your left foot forward. It’s actually the opposite, which I would have known had I been paying attention TO THE PICTURE THAT I BASED THIS ENTIRE STORY ON. Anyhow, I regret the error. My penance shall be listening to the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 soundtrack for the rest of the day (which I was gonna do anyway).
As a skateboard historian, I cannot express how grateful I am to librarians, journalists, and others that unearth these unknown stories. Fantastic way to help balance my Election Day anxieties.
Great story
No politics