Stanton Otero and his 4-year-old daughter Oona are regular readers of the “Show Us Your Quiver” column, and Oona once asked her dad, “Daddy, where are their skateboards? Don’t surfers ride skateboards? You do, and you have a lot of boards.”
Stanton does, in fact, have a lot of skateboards. Dozens of them, and from across all eras of the sport’s history, especially from the 1960s and ’70s. He has found his boards at garage sales and movie sets, and even assembles them himself after patiently gathering the original parts online. He decorates the decks with skate stickers that he’s kept from when he was a kid. While he acknowledges that some of is boards are so rare that they belong in a museum, he doesn’t relate to the mentality in skating. “When you turn skateboarding into a collectors-only club, it ruins the inclusivity of it. Skateboarding is so great because anyone can do it — girls, boys, kids, adults, anyone.”
