Doug Owens

Devoted Father, School Volunteer

Excerpts from a winter 2020 interview:

I've been in the skate and surfboard industry since the mid-eighties, I was working with skateboard decks and wheels, with Gravity Skateboards. I grew their accounts. After Gravity I went to work for a company called MirrorSkate.com, which was the biggest online custom long board skateboard shop in the world. I was a buyer of all accessories and I ran the assembly crew. It was a great job. I met all kinds of people in multiple industries. Then I also started up my own company doing skateboard trucks, which is the part where the wheels are connected to the board. All the steering mechanism, I was building that.

Then my life began to collapse. Actually there was a blend of problems, because at this time skateboarding changed. Amazon tore into the skateboarding sector, especially of what we did. Bezos is a genius. I got to give him that. He would analyze what makes money in our industry and the next thing you know our boards are being copied. What we sold for $225 on Amazon was now $85, so where do you think our sales went? They were gone. All of a sudden it was all gone. Just out of the blue. And as that went on, the whole market for my skateboard truck started declining. So now I'm losing money.

“I liked being around my daughter. And, I wanted my daughter to stay in the same school, same room, same house, with the same friends, no displacement, no disruption.”

It is a very critical time for a child. I could see where our divorce could cause emotional issues in her development. So I said to her mother, “Well, here’s how I’d like to help this play out. If I let you and Keala both stay in the house, and I stay in this area and rent a room somewhere, then I can stay here in Encinitas while our daughter gets through school.” I preferred not selling the house and so not having my daughter’s life disrupted. I think it's a horrible way to treat a child. So we got a mediator instead of lawyers and worked it all out financially.

I love this school district. I always want to be sure Keala stays in school here. That’s why I volunteered in her school. I liked being there. I liked being around my daughter. I wanted my daughter to stay in the same school, the same house, with the same friends, no displacement, no disruption. So, I just got a place to rent.

Next thing you know, the place where I was staying got sold. So that was gone. Vapor. Oh my, what am I going to do? Fortunately, a good friend of mine who lives up off Crest, another entrepreneur, said, “Doug, we've got an RV on our lot and you are welcome to use it.” I said, “Oh thanks man!” He said I could stay in the RV as long as I needed. I lasted pretty close to a year there. I'm a good neighbor, but it's their place and I finally left, I just felt it was time for me to go.

I'm working full time during all this. Then, I lost my job, and I got hired at Target in the food market. The food market is backbreaking work, at a backbreaking pace. It's physically the most painful work I’ve ever done. People quit basically on a monthly basis and I did it for nine months. We were pulling pallets that are a thousand to 2000 pounds of fruit juice and frozen foods, dragging them out onto the food market floor. It was so painful. My legs and my knees were starting to go. I'm 57, 58. I couldn’t do it anymore.

So, that's when I went over to CarMax and I've been at CarMax over two years now. It's just $15 an hour. However, if you sell X amount of cars, you can make more. Sometimes you have a good month, then you can go two months where you don’t sell enough cars to bring in any extra income.

I've watched people there at CarMax, some of the young guys, say they can’t pay their rent. One guy told me, “I have to put part of my rent on my credit card.” So I see the need for affordable housing. It’s not just my concern. And, I can only work X amount of hours because I pick up my daughter every Tuesday and every Thursday morning to take her to school. I want to be sure we get that bonding. She tells me her daily stories then. And, also if I'm working till six o'clock during the week I then try to schedule to get off of work as fast as I can to do a little homework with her or watch a movie at her house, and put her to bed. Then, I hop in my van, where I now live, and I take off to find a place to park for the night. I've been a surfer my entire life. This is what we do. And, I'm impervious to cold, which helps. And, I've found ways to take showers. One thing I do in the winter is go to a local state beach, I’ve been surfing at these campgrounds since I was with my surfer friends, we were all about 15 years old. They have pay showers there. That works well for me. And, that is only about $15 a month.

Keala is awesome. She's my favorite thing in the world. I love hanging out with her. I love playing with her. I love taking her to the beach. We run on the beach. She’s taken classes at the YMCA, she’s been in swim lessons in the therapeutic pool there. I took her to ballet there. She also did Val day, and hip hop dance. I take her skateboarding because that is one of my things, right? She’s now 11, going on 12. If we're going someplace, she'll still reach out to hold my hand. How many other kids are doing that when they're that age? Not many, because that's when they are becoming little women.

“My thing is to try and stay together. You know what I mean? Stay with my daughter as much as I can to provide her with memories of she and I together as she grows up. I'm the male figure in her life. I'm contributing. I'm going to the school. I’m volunteering there and in the community with her. She's my project.”