Being a pool skater was a completely misunderstood activity in the late '70s.
People looked down on skateboarding as just some useless kid's activity.
First of all, no one even knew that it was possible to ride a vertical surface with a skateboard.
Second, pool owners never suspected that their pools were amazing playgrounds for pool skaters.
So, when a pool owner discovered a pool skater skating their pool, they were both shocked and amazed at the same time.
This gave us some leeway in "getting a few more shots" before we bailed that scene.
Pools are amazing to skate because:
It takes skill to actually find empty pools
You're completely barging someone's home, motel, business, etc.
The pools were not made for skating, so you have to adjust and improvise
Some pools were only partly empty and you had to get in there and bucket tons of murky, stinky sludge out of the pool in order to skate it
COPS
Neighbors calling the cops
So you had to be very stealthy to skate a pool.
We often used soft wheels because these soft wheels would make very little noise - just a little whoosh here and a whoosh there, almost blending into the sound of the wind.
On top of the adrenaline of doing something that was illegal, you added the rush of being in stealth mode and also the rush of skating itself and there was just no substitute for skating a pool.
There were lots of skateparks around this time, but the skatepark environment (with it's skate "jocks", crowds, perfection and calm atmosphere) was sterile compared to the gritty, dirty reality of skating real pools.
