At the beginning of this clip you see a skinny big-nosed fellow attempting to skateboard. It’s like he’s pretending to be the great alpine skier Stein Eriksen: parallel stance, knees together, shoulders forward and hips moving side to side.

Except he loses control and nearly goes face-first into a parking meter.

That’s my dad, Winfried Breuer, owner and operator of Sundown Ski and Surf Shop in Levittown, New York—the second-oldest surf shop in New York, after Bunger Surf Shop.

This footage is from my dad's collection of 8mm and Super 8 home movies that I've been sitting on for 15 or so years. The intention was always to get the reels digitized. Over time, though, the old projector, the Super 8 camera, and the boxes of film just became decor on my shelves. A conversation piece for guests and a way to put out a vibe that I’m artsy and creative. I’m neither.

Call me lazy. Call me cheap. But the idea of finding a reputable company to whom I could hand over this family treasure for digital conversion felt daunting and expensive. So the project sat on the shelf, literally, for years.

My wife and I recently relocated to Rockaway Beach. As we were unpacking and settling in, she commented that I should probably just get rid of the rolls of film if I wasn’t going to do anything with them. I think this was meant more as a subtle dig at my interior design aesthetic than anything else. But the idea of converting the film came back into my focus and, amazingly enough—although maybe not, Jeff Bezos knows and sees all—the Amazon algorithm presented me with a Magnasonic Super 8 Film Scanner for the very reasonable price of $299. I clicked away, the hardware arrived two days later, and the transfer project began.

It worked like a charm. The first person I showed the results too, of course, was my dad.

The best information I could get from him was that the footage was shot in either '66 or '67. The break is probably a place they called Azores, located between Long Beach and Lido Beach. It was kind of a no-man’s land where neither municipality claimed authority, meaning it was one of the only beaches in the area where you could surf all day. The pilings sticking out of the water are from an old boardwalk. The only surfer in the film my father remembers is a local hot kid named Kevin Reynolds. Not surprisingly, Kevin is also the best skateboarder in the film—the guy with the surf trunks hanging out of his back pocket, signifying to the world (or this paved-over New York neighborhood, anyway) that he'd rather be in the water but in the meantime why not surf the concrete.

The shop you see is Emilio’s Ski Shop, in Forest Hills, Queens. Emilio De Turris hired my father when my dad was just off the boat from Germany. He was the Atlantic distributor for Hobie Surfboards and deserves a lot more credit in East Coast Surf history. He helped Hobie grow his business up and down the entire coast and was thus instrumental in helping grow the scene over here.

What I love most about this footage, apart from seeing my dad as a stoked young man, is that it looks old and new at the same time. Sure, the boards and clothes are different. But not much has changed, really. I still see kids skating like the guys in the footage. We still pose for the camera. And riding waves is still incredibly fun.

"KINGS OF QUEENS: NEW YORK 1966," BY TYLER BREUER

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