Dogtown always felt like it carried some of the original core of skateboarding with it — rough, imperfect and close to the source.

My first real introduction to the company came through friends. Greg, one of two brothers I skated and built ramps with, had a Dogtown Street deck after his Town & Country board. I remember that broad, blunt nose almost as much as the graphic. A lot of Dogtown boards seemed to have something unusual going on with the shape — blunt noses, hips, scalloped sides or other details that made them feel almost sculptural.

The graphics were just as memorable. The Street model had that long, empty road disappearing into the desert. Other 1987 Dogtown graphics, like the Micke Alba boards, pushed further into monsters, ruined cities, strange temples and almost apocalyptic scenes. There was something eerie about them, but also fantastical.

That fantasy element probably mattered more to me than I understood at the time. I had grown up liking early horror movies and spending time outside imagining swords, monsters and whole invented worlds. Some Powell Peralta graphics connected with that part of me too, but Dogtown had its own version of it — darker, dustier and more desolate.

I also identified with the idea of the edge. I grew up where paved roads started giving way to dirt roads and developed neighborhoods thinned out into fields and country. Dogtown’s world of rough concrete, empty streets, dust and strange landscapes was very different from Michigan, but the feeling of being out on the edge was familiar.

That is still what Dogtown means to me. It feels like something rising out of the dusty margins where the ocean meets the desert — rough, imperfect and somehow close to the origins of skateboarding itself.

Years later, when I started collecting more seriously, Dogtown became important for another reason. Before I was thinking strategically about representing specific riders, I was thinking about shapes. I wanted the collection to show what skateboard decks had actually looked like in the 1980s, and certain silhouettes seemed essential. A Zorlac Metallica, a Hosoi Hammerhead and an Aaron Murray Dogtown were the kinds of boards I felt I needed.

I never ended up with the exact first Aaron Murray model I originally wanted, but I eventually bought the later 1988 version from the California tattoo artist and skateboard collector Grime. It still had the distinctive scalloped sides that had made the Murray shape so memorable to me.

By then I understood that Dogtown had given me two things I wanted the collection to preserve: a visual world I had connected with when I was young, and some of the most distinctive shapes of the era.