While it got overshadowed by the news of the former president today, this is huge in the action sports world. 14-year-old Arisa Trew became the first female ever to land a 900 air on a skateboard, on a halfpipe.
To put this in context, Tony Hawk, one of the best vert skaters of all time, and definitely the best known, spent over ten years trying it, before he landed the first skateboard 900 in the X-Games Best Trick contest in 1999.
By some crazy bit of fate, I was standing on the deck shooting video, when Mat Hoffman landed the first BMX 900 on vert, in Canada in 1989. Then, a decade later, I was standing about 20 feet from the ramp, when Tony Hawk landed his first 900 in 1999, in San Francisco. My video camera had a dead battery that time, but I didn't care, I knew I was witnessing a moment, with about 5,000 other spectators. A few years later, I did get video of Sandro Diaz landing a 900 on a skateboard, on vert, in Huntington Beach, California.
Now, twenty-five years after Tony's first 900, Australian Arisa, not even legal driving age by U.S. standards yet, stuck one for the women in skateboarding. Hell yeah! Way to go Arisa!
Blogger's note- 7/25/2024- Only days after Arisa's first female skateboard 900 hit the interwebs, 9-year-old Ema Kawakami (a boy, I believe), landed three back to back 900's, with Tony Hawk watching live. Who's genetically engineering these kids? Holy crap! Here's the link:
MSNBC reporting this afternoon as the verdict came out on the 34 felony counts against former President, Donald Trump, in the hush money case against him. Donald Trump is the first president to be charged on felony counts, and to stand trial, after his presidency. This was an unknown for the U.S., could a former president be indicted, and stand trial? In this time of incredible political polarization, Democracy itself has been under attack, and many wondered if the rule of law could stand up to this test. This afternoon we found that it could, and that no one is above the law in the united States.
This is not a political blog, by any means, but this is a major point in U.S. history, and I just wanted to document it here in my blog. Donald J. Trump lost the popular vote by over 2.7 million votes in 2016, to Hillary Clinton. But he won the Electoral College, and became president of the United States in 2016.. Trump became the first U.S. president to be impeached twice while in office, but remained in office for his full term.
In 2020, Donald Trump lost the popular election by more than 7 million votes to Joe Biden, and also lost the electoral college, and Joe Biden took office.
Now, May 30th, 2024, Donald Trump has been found guilty on 34 felony counts related to hush money payments to keep his affair with porn star Stormy Daniels quiet, heading into the 2016 election.
I've been doing most of my writing lately on a platform called Substack, designed specifically for writers. Check it out:
Here we have bluegrass legend Grandpa Jones, on the 1960's-1970's hit TV show called Hee Haw, singing "Mountain Dew." To most people out there today, Mountain Dew is a lemon lime soda in a plastic bottle. But the soft drink company stole the name from a nickname for moonshine, good ol' backcountry, homemade corn liquor. Yep, mountain dew originally was the stuff the hillbillies and the mountain folk used to drink back in the day, to get drunk, particularly during the prohibition era of the 1920's.
Vices. Those bad habits that all of us are so good at seeing in other people, and so bad at seeing in ourselves. Life is tough. We get stressed out, pissed off, frustrated, depressed, and we need something to help us get through the day. We all have our go-to's in these situations. Sex. Alcohol. Food. Cigarettes. Weed. Prescription drugs. Other street drugs. Even video games. Everyone uses some crutch to get through the tough days, or maybe every day. Many of these things are somewhat toxic, but take a whole lifetime to actually kill us. Unless we lose control and let them get completely out of hand.
The other day something on Facebook reminded me of Grandpa Jones on Hee Haw singing "Mountain Dew." I looked it up and watched the video. That got me watching other old bluegrass songs. Then I watched several old school country songs. I noticed how many songs there were back in the 1960's and 1970's about cigarettes and moonshine. That got me thinking about the vices we all have. That turned into a blog post idea this morning. That's kind of how I work, one thing reminds me of another, a theme emerges, and a blog post is born. So here ya go, a bunch of songs about the things that help us get through the day, but can kill us, or seriously screw up our lives if they get out of hand.
I don't know what's up with the links, Blogger won't let me link actual words or phrases today, for some reason. But hit the "null" link after each one to find the song. Somebody's jacking up the interwebs again, so I need to look that up in a bit.
Guns n" Roses- "Night Train"- This song is about the cheap wine that the original guys in G n' R used to drink, when they were a young band coming up, and couldn't afford better alcohol.
No Doubt- "A Little Something Refreshing"- In my case, these days, I don't drink, I don't do drugs. I even kicked my Diet Coke habit. My vices these days are mostly 7-11 pepperoni pizza and sarcasm. Yep, for some of us, food is the main vice.
Steve Earle- "Copperhead Road"- This is one of the best country songs ever, in my opinion. A country boy from the hills, in the late 1970's, coming out of the horrific Vietnam War era, gets a new idea. Why not grow weed illegally up Copperhead Road, where grandad used to make his moonshine?
Grandpa Jones- "Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette"- This actually a song about Grandpa saying why he didn't smoke. That was an era when most people wondered why some people didn't smoke. This song is for all of you Gen X kids, who had to drive around in the back seat of your parents' or grandparents' car while they smoked like a chimney in the front seat, with the windows up.
Grandmaster Melle Mel- "White Lines"- Coke.Not the kind that you buy in a bottle at the local 7-11. The glam drug of the 1970's and 1980's. The 1970's were the golden era of cocaine, but it didn't stop there. I'm going back to 1983, EARLY rap music, for this classic one about the dangers of the white dust.
Kontrol Freak- "The Tweaker Song"- I knew there had to be a song about meth, it's the main drug in much of America these days, and definitely on the streets of L.A., where I live. The tweaking zombies wander past me all night, every night while I'm trying to sleep.
The Salton Sea (movie)- "Pooh Bear"- "Pooh Bear did so much gack they had to cut his nose off." Want 1,000 reasons NOT to do meth? Watch this movie.
Afroman- "Because I Got High"- (Video featuring Jay and Silent Bob- aka Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith) A pot smoking classic. It's 4:20 somehwere.
Blink-182- "Waggy"- Stressed out and horny? Can't find a woman? Time to rub one off.
Lana Del Rey- "Video Game"- Sex, drugs, alcohol, and... video games. Playing video games is fine. But it can also become a vice, and get out of control, like all the other vices.
"Death that lasts a lifetime is what gets us through the day." That's a line from one of the poems I wrote in the 1990's, but have lost since. I made a few memes of that line last year. The things we consume to help us deal with life can consume us if they get out of control. That's one struggle we all deal with in life.
I've been doing a whole bunch of writing on a new platform called Substack, check it out:
Jeff Snider, of Eurodollar University, with a solid, 20 minute video, showing the trendlines of why our standard of living has dropped so much since the Great Recession (aka the GFC or Global Financial Crisis), of 2077-2009.
I've been following Jeff's YouTube channel for around a year now, and it's really hard to get your head around most of the time. He's spent decades working to understand the Eurodollar system, which is how banks buy, sell, trade, and borrow billions of dollars daily, to keep the worldwide monetary system functioning. His depth of knowledge on this subject is mind-blowing, and hard to understand until you've followed him for quite a while.
But this video is pretty straightforward, and shows the actual data and trendlines of all the economic growth that DIDN'T happen after 2008. This is the best explanation of why so many people are struggling financially that I've seen in a 20 minute video.
I've been doing most of my writing lately on a platform called Substack, designed specifically for writers. Check it out :
Author of several books, including the novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, and the non-fiction book on creativity, The War of Art, Steven Pressfield tells people what it takes to "turn pro" and get serious about creative work. This interview, a little over an hour and a half long, is mind blowing if you're someone who delves into artistry of any kind. If you do any kind of creative work seriously, read The War of Art.
Here's what many of you longtime readers are likely to know about me. I got into BMX freestyle in a trailer park outside of Boise, Idaho in 1982. Riding bikes led me down a weird path in life, and I wound up working at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines in 1986, for the AFA in 1987, and worked as a video guy for Vision for a while after that. I was one of the guys who lived in the P.O.W. House in the early 1990's, the first famous BMX rider house. I was also a longtime roommate of Chris Moeller, owner of S&M Bikes, during that time, and I edited the first two S&M videos, Feel My Leg Muscles and 44 Something. I also made a self-produced video around 1990 called The Ultimate Weekend, that I just won't shut up about.
Then I disappeared for a couple of decades, wound up back east, and started blogging about my early BMX freestyle days, in 2008. Before the Old School BMX Reunion, before the Old School BMX podcasts, and before Greystoke, I was blogging, writing about my adventures as a BMX freestyler and industry guy in the 1980's and 1990's. Then, in 2015, I started selling my Sharpie Scribble Style drawings, doing my versions of classic photos, with Sharpie markers. And I'm homeless, and can't seem to get my act together financially. I keep blogging, drawing, and scraping by as a homeless dude. Something like that.
Life after suicide...
Then there's the part you don't know. In the spring of 2015, shortly before Easter, I woke up on Sunday morning, in a small apartment in North Carolina, and just couldn't take it any more. While my mom was alseep in her room, I swallowed a whole bottle of Lithium and a whole bottle of Abilify, the two drugs I had been prescribed for many months. The medication turned me into a zombie, I could barely function, and had no energy. I was absolutely miserable on the meds, and pretty miserable off of them. Being on medication was so bad, that I had stopped taking my meds a month earlier. On that Sunday morning I swallowed both entire bottles of pills, and sat on the couch in the living room, waiting to die. A weird calm came over me, and I sat there for about 45 minutes, "knowing" I was dead. I had no great insights, I didn't really have any regrets. I just wanted the pain of living to be over... finally. I just sat there thinking, 'OK, that's it, I'm dead."
Then I started to throw up. A lot of the medicine was in my system, but I threw up some of the pills. At that point I realized I might actually live, and that I needed to get to the hospital. I woke my mom up and told her what I had done, and that I needed her to drive me to the nearby hospital, 3 or 4 miles away. She was pissed. My mom did not like getting up in the mornings, she usually slept until at least noon. It took over half an hour to get her up, wait for her to get dressed, and get to the hospital. I puked some more then, and then some more at the hospital.
After not initially believing that I had really swallowed all those pills, the doctors and nurses believed me once they got the results of my blood test. I had a ton of lithium in my system. The next day I got transferred to a larger hospital, where I'd already made two trips to the psych ward in the previous couple of years. I wound up spending about 9 days in regular hospital rooms, and then 7 or 8 more days in the psych ward. The doctors gave me dialysis into my neck, through my jugular vein, to strain as much of the lithium as possible out of my system, twice, in the next two days. I had to lay there for five or six hours, motionless, while they did that. For nearly three days, I had three times the "fatal" level of lithium (a heavy metal) in my system. I should not have lived. I should have wound up a vegetable, practically brain dead, just from the lithium poisoning. There is some higher force at play in this world, whatever you call it. That higher decided to keep me around a while longer.
When I finally got out of the hospital, I got a new psychiatrist, a good one, for once. I already had a cool therapist. The psychiatrist put me on much better meds, so my symptoms died down, but I could still function. I had been severely depressed because I was 50 years old, living in North Carolina (which I hated), I was unable to find any job, or earn any money, and I living with my mom, who had her own serious mental health issues that she refused to ever get help for. She was a very toxic and abusive person who drove everyone around her crazy. At the time there was no one in my life that I really found interesting. For over 20 years, I had been around weird, crazy, creative, action sports people, and a lot of really entrepreneurial people. There was non of those people in North Carolina. I literally didn't have an intelligent conversation for about 7 years at that point. I just wanted to earn $300 and get on a bus back to California, where there were people I could actually relate to.
Once out of the hospital, and on decent meds for that period of time, I started diving more and more into my creativity, blogging online and doing my Sharpie drawings. Still unable to find any job, I decided to try and sell my Sharpie drawings online in November of 2015, about seven months after the overdose. I stepped up my game, and started drawing pictures of people. I put a couple on Facebook, and I sold a drawing for $20. Then another one.
By the late spring of 2016, a year after my suicide attempt, I was a "working artist," drawing every day, and making a small amount of money. I lived free with my mom, her Social Security was enough to pay the bills. I did the "guy things" around the house, and drove her to all of her appointments, and to go shopping, since her eyes were really bad. But the continual drama kept eating at me. And every time I made a little bit of money, she created some kind of "emergency," which required every dime of my small amount of money. That was one of the manifestations of her issues. While my depression has lessened a lot, I couldn't make any progress towards making a living again, and getting my own place.
In late may of 2017, my mom and I had a big argument, and I called a friend, to get me out of the house. I grabbed some of my stuff, and my friend gave me a ride to a patch of woods in a larger city nearby. I built a lean-to, out of branches and leaves, and slept in it for three nights. Then some guy in the nearby park gave me an old, six-man tent. I began living in the tent in the patch of woods. Later that year, with that friend from group therapy keeping tabs on me, I weaned myself off of my meds. My depression was largely gone. I've been getting by, selling Sharpie drawings, though living homeless, almost the whole time since. My psychiatrist said I was one of his best success stories. Then he took another job, and moved.
It was after three weeks living in the woods, a friend gave me some money to get a motel room for a night. I woke up the next morning, in late June of 2017, and I started this blog, Steve Emig: The White Bear. I didn't know if anyone would read it. I didn't know if I'd survive the winter in the tent in that city. I didn't know if I could ever make an actual living from my Sharpie art. But going back wasn't an option. So I kept blogging, drawing, and surviving as a homeless guy, day after day. I've been doing that for the 8 1/2 years since my suicide attempt. My depression faded away. I'm really frustrated a lot, from not being able to make a living and rent a room or and apartment. But focusing on creative work keeps me in pretty good spirits.
It's now about 6 years and 11 months since I started this blog. I've lived 8 1/2 years, sold over 100 drawings, and now written and published a blog with 1,000 posts, since I "committed" suicide. It's also 40 years since I graduated from Boise High School this month. This is not the life I imagined, by any means, when I was in high school. But it has been one hell of an adventure. I've come to grips with my creative drive. I don't question and over analyze every creative idea, like I did for much of my life. Day after day, I sit down and do the work of writing or drawing, and promoting my work.
This is my first blog to make it to 1,000 blog posts, and it also has well over 300,000 page views. My original Freestyle BMX Tales blog ended at about 510 blog posts. I deleted that blog from the internet in 2012, which I immediately regretted. It was a couple of months after my dad's death, and when I was beginning to get severely depressed.
It's been a long, crazy few years while I've doing this blog, including the pandemic years. But I'm still alive. I'm still writing my blog, and drawing regularly, though still homeless. I'm back in Southern California, the only place, out of the six states I've lived in, that ever seemed like home to me. I'm still here, still alive, and I've become ridiculously prolific as a creative guy, after my suicide attempt. I wanted to write some mind blowing blog post for post #1,000. But I decided to finally tell you guys why I began to focus so heavily on being creative, several years ago, instead. Now you know.
A huge Thank You to everyone who has read a post, or many posts. A huge Thank You to everyone who has bought one or more drawings, or has helped me keep going, in one way or another. I'm going to keep at it until this is how I make my living. I just keep plugging away at the creative work. This is who I am. This is what I do. There's a lot more to come. Thanks for taking this journey with me.
I've been doing a lot of writing on a platform called Substack lately, which is designed specifically for writers. On my Substack I go deeper into big ideas. I've also just begun writing the stories of some places, locations I find interesting (like Sheep Hills trails). If you like anything in this blog, check out my Substack:
Thanks again everyone! Post #1,000 is on the blog. There's a lot more to come.
Riding my Schwinn Cruiser backwards in 2009 while back East. Just for the record, I was under pressure to sell this bike from my family, shortly after the time it was given to me. This bike was a gift from a group of my blog readers from the Midwest. I put it in a pawn shop, and would go pay the interest on it every month, so it was out of sight, and safe, hoping for a better situation in the future. During one of my stays in the hospital I missed the interest payment, and I lost the bike. So I apologize to the guys who hooked me up with this bike, it was just a really weird situation while in NC. I was hoping to start making a living again, and then be able to start riding regularly again.
I've been doing most of my writing lately on a platform called Substack, which is designed specifically for writers. Check it out:
Here's a little known clip of Craig Grasso and Pete Augustin, dueling it out on a big wall ride at the Huntington Beach Street Scene in 1988. My blog post, "Schralpin' with Grasso" came in a lucky #7 on this list, with 1,331 total page views. That post is about the month after I got laid off from FREESTYLIN' magazine, when I spent my mornings calling around the BMX world, looking for a new job, and then spent the rest of each day riding streets, local ramps, and flatland with Redondo Beach local Craig Grasso, back in early 1987. The Huntington Beach Street Scene post itself had around 600 views, putting it in the top 25 posts by views.
This is blog post #999 of Steve Emig:The White Bear blog. That's a line I never expected to write. I started this blog days after moving out of where I was living, and into the woods in North Carolina, in the summer of 2017. The living situation was just a really toxic situation, and I had to get out for a bunch of reasons. My Sharpie scribble style art was the only thing making me any money, but only $2 to $3 an hour for the time I spent drawing. I hadn't been able to get hired for any "real job" in North Carolina, for over 8 1/2 years, at that point. I started this blog partly to help promote my artwork, but mostly just for the creative outlet of blogging. I seriously didn't think very many people would check it out.
I was wrong. Most of the posts with lots of views, 300 views or more, came in late 2017 and 2018. If you follow this blog, you know that I've had more than 150,000 views in the last year or so. But I think these huge surges are coming from people using VPN's, because I don't get a breakdown of what posts they are viewing, and they come mostly from cities like Singapore or Hong Kong. These surges seemed to start as the VPN's got popular, so people could stop websites from collecting their data, using cookies to track them online, and all of that. So those views don't count in the totals below, just in the overall total you see on the view counter on the right.
In any case, for post #999, I decided to link the most popular posts, out of the 998 so far, as determined by you, the readers. These 14 posts below all got more than 1,000 page views each, and some of those that made the list surprised me. Here's the list, so you can check them out again, or see which ones you missed over the last 7 years.
As the publisher of this blog, I'd like to thank every one of you who has ever checked out a post, or a bunch of posts, on my blogs. I love to write, and always have lots of ideas, but having people out there who actually read what I write is a huge part of why I keep going. Thank you!
OK, there they are, the 14 most popular posts out of the first 998, as judged by you, the readers. This is post #999 you're reading right now. Post #1000, a new milestone for me, coming soon.
I've been doing a lot of writing on a platform designed specifically for writers, called Substack. Check it out:
Selfie in front of a cool mural, the side wall of a Mexican restaurant in Studio City. This is the closest thing I have to a decent photo of myself in recent years. 2021, I think.
I started my first BMX freestyle zine in September of 1985, as a way to meet other freestylers, when I moved from Boise, Idaho to San Jose, California. I was inspired by an article Andy Jenkins wrote about zines in FREESTYLIN'magazine. While working nights at a Pizza Hut, I published my zine, starting with a $15, manual, 1940's era Royal typewriter, and a Kodak 110 Instamatic camera. Eleven issues of that zine, San Jose Stylin', landed me a job at Wizard Publications, drawing me into the BMX industry. At 20 years old, I worked at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines for five months, and got laid off because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy. Well, that, and I was a really uptight, moody dork in those days.
I then worked as editor/photographer at the AFA newsletter for most of 1987. That led to video work, and a job at Unreel Productions, Vision Skateboards' video company, for about 2 1/2 years, into 1990. I published a few issues of a zine called Periscope, while working at Unreel. Altogether, I've published over 40 zines, several of them 40-52 pages, which is really big for a zine.
In 2007, working as a taxi driver, I got the idea to start a blog about taxi driving. It sucked. I think only my mom and the police read it, which are the people you don't want reading your blogs. I did maybe 30 posts, and got 45 views or something. Then Fate pushed me out of Southern California in late 2008, after taxi driving died, and I'd been homeless and on the streets for almost a year.
I wound up living with my parents, in a small apartment, in a tiny town in North Carolina. I was unable to find any job at all, as the country plunged into the Great Recession. I became seriously depressed almost immediately in NC. I was 42, unemployed, fat, broke, had no car, and was living with my parents. I did, for the first time in my life, have a decent computer, with internet access, in my room. I began "surfing the web" each night, just exploring the internet. Remember those days when we called it "surfing the web?"
After looking up BMX and porn for a a few hours, every night, for a couple of weeks, I got bored, and decided to publish a BMX blog. I started FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales, after finding the FREESTYLIN' book online. I decided to write a few of my stories from my short stint working there in 1986. I was completely clueless, I didn't promote my blog in any way, put tags on it, or link to it from anywhere. I wasn't on any social media, and didn't even really know what that was then. I'd been living in a taxi or homeless on the streets for the previous 6 or 7 years. The internet was basically brand new to me. I thought blog posts just went out into this big black hole of cyber space, and just sat there waiting for someone to randomly find them. I started writing little stories about my magazine days, every couple of nights.
One post in particular, found an audience, after about a month. People from BMX freestyle in the 1980's started emailing me. Some were people I knew back then, some were people I knew of, but had never really met. A few were complete strangers. They all told me to keep writing. So I did. That was before the Old School BMX Reunion began, and long before podcasts with old BMX freestylers telling their stories.
Since that first real blog, I've tried out somewhere between 50 and 100 different blog ideas. A handful of my blogs found audiences, most of them in the Old School BMX freestyle world. This is post #998 of Steve Emig: The White Bear blog, a blog I started in 2017, thinking almost no one would bother to read it. I was wrong, people started checking it out. And people kept checking it out. I figured it was time to total up my blog stats, as this blog is about to hit a brand new milestone for me, 1,000 posts in a single blog. To put that in perspective, Internet marketer Seth Godin has over 8,000 posts on his Seth blog, which he started in 2000 or so. I have been able to find who the next most prolific bloggers are. But out of an estimated 600 million blogs on the internet, I'm near the very top by sheer number of total blog posts. No one keeps stats after Seth's blog, but very few blogs get to 1,000 or more posts. I've now written and published over 2,849 posts.
So here are the stats on my various blogs, the ones with more than 1,000 page views each, anyhow.
FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales- 2008-2009: about 110 posts, over 25,000 page views. Took it down in 2012.
Freestyle BMX Tales- 2009-2012: About 510 posts, and over 125,000 page views. Took it down in 2012.
Make Money Panhandling- 2009-2011: This was a joke blog that I started just to learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques. It got serious, and I wrote over 100 posts, and got over 60,000 page views. I took it down in 2012.
Steve Emig: The White Bear- 2017-2024- 998 posts- 331,578 page views. I seriously thought almost no one would read this blog when I began it, right after I moved into a tent in the woods, while living in North Carolina, in June of 2017. It's become my longest and most read blog ever. You never know when you start a creative project where it will ultimately lead.
Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack- 55 posts- over 1,500 page views. I'm doing a lot of longer form writing on Substack lately, a platform designed specifically for writers.
Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now- Book 1- 2019-2020- This is my 20 chapter "book/blog thing," describing the economic and social chaos I saw coming in The Tumultuous 2020's. This is the most intense thing I've written, trying to explain in late 2019 and early 2020 why I thought the 2020's would turn into one of the craziest decades ever. 20 posts- 6,047 page views.
Freestyle BMX Tales (Version 2- on Wordpress, not Blogger): I wrote a couple of dozen posts, I think. I forget the stats. Went back to Blogger, which works better for me.
These are just the blog ideas that I've tried, that pulled in at least 1,000 page views per blog. There are at least 30 other blogs I started from 2009-2012, that I deleted in late 2012 (big mistake). There are at least 10 or 15 more blogs I've tried since 2012. But these are the ones that actually got some readership while sitting out there on the interwebs. I have not used A.I. to write posts, that seems stupid to me. The whole point is to get my own, personal idea out there. For good or ill, I wrote every single post myself. I don't see the point in using A.I. to write a post, because it'll just be boring garbage, and the algorithms wouldn't like it anyway.
Obviously, turning my prodigious output of writing into actual income is the issue I've struggled with. But I'll keep plugging away. I wake up in the morning, on the sidewalk as a homeless guy, and slowly get myself going. Once I'm up, I say, out loud, "Let's go create some shit!" Then I try to do some writing or drawing, every single day. You can get a lot of create work down if you can't find a "real" job for 15 years.
This blog is rolling up on the 1,000 post milestone, this is post #998
I've been doing a lot of writing on a platform called Substack lately, which is designed for writers. Check it out.
Here's a great shot of 1970's era skateboarding at the Huntington Beach Pier bank, some variation of a Bertleman or layback slide. The bank is long gone now, but this was a major session spot for skateboarders, and a few BMXers, in the 1970's, early 1980's, and for most of the summer of 1989. I pulled this photo from the web, skater and photographer unknown. It's the only good photo I could find of the bank.
Huntington Beach in 1987
Getting laid off, after only five months working at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN', is what ultimately led me to Huntington Beach. I got the magazine job thanks to my zine, San Jose Stylin', where I wrote about the San Francisco Bay area riders for a year. My last day at Wizard Publications was December 31, 1986. I was still a roommate with Gork and Lew, who had been my co-workers. I was a really uptight dork in those days, and just wasn't the right fit for that business. I had saved up some money during my short stint at Wizard, so I paid a month's rent, and spent my days in January 1987 calling around the BMX industry, looking for another job, so I could stay in Southern California. After calling around a bit each morning, I'd go riding with Craig Grasso all day, who lived nearby. Those were some epic riding days, hitting local ramps, doing some street riding, and flatland sessions at The Spot in Redondo Beach every night. After about three weeks, I heard from Bob Morales who ran the American Freestyle Association (AFA), and he hired me to be the newsletter editor and photographer for the AFA. A couple months later, Wizard hired 17-year-old BMXer/skater kid from the East coast, a kid named Spike Jonze. He worked out much better at Wizard. He moved into my old bedroom in Gork and Lew's apartment in Hermosa Beach.
Bob Morales showed up with the AFA van one day in late January, we packed up all my junk, and headed down into Orange County, to Huntington Beach. I stayed on Bob's couch for two or three weeks, and started work at the AFA, then found a room to rent. I got settled in the new apartment, near Springdale and Warner, my new roommate was an older guy who worked at a car dealership.
I soon found my way down to the Huntington Beach Pier one weekend. There was a small group of locals, who, ironically, were mostly from other places. A tall, skinny BMX freestyler, Mike Sarrail, drove down from the San Gabriel Valley every weekend to ride. Two of the world's top freestyle skateboarders, Pierre Andre', from France, and Don Brown, from England, were down there nearly every weekend, unless there was a contest or demo somewhere else. Hans Lingren, from Sweden, and H.B. local freestyle skater, Jeremy Ramey, rounded out the main pier crew in that era.
Pierre skated for Sims, and Don for Vision, both part of the Vision Skateboards empire, in nearby Costa Mesa. I had met Don on a photo shoot for FREESTYLIN' a few months before, and I reintroduced myself, and hung out and started doing some of my flatland tricks for the crowds. I soon became a local of the Huntington Beach pier, in the spring of 1987.
The north side of the Huntington Beach Pier, the amphitheater area now, in a photo I took in 2019, shot from out on the pier. On the far right, you can see steps coming down from the pier level to the beach level. The old steps were a steeper set, and hit bottom farther back. The Huntington Beach Pier bank was where the little wall is now, on the left side of the steps, at the bottom. There was a long, two level parking lot where the amphitheater and parking area are now. The pier bank rose up about 3 1/2 feet from the concrete under the pier, to the lower level of the parking lot. The bank had been sessioned by skateboarders through the 1970's and into the early 1980's. Then huge posts were put into the bank, and a gigantic chain ran through the posts near the bottom, to keep skateboarders and bike riders from riding the bank.
Downtown Huntington Beach was a much different place in 1987. Many of the buildings on Main Street are still there, from that era, the ones made of bricks. Jack's Surf Shop was on the north corner of PCH and Main, as it is today, though it was a smaller shop. Huntington Surf & Sport was also on the same side of the street, half a block inland, not on the opposite corner, as it is now. That south corner of PCH and Mani was an empty lot in the late 1980's. Jan's smoothie shop was in the back of Huntington Surf & Sport. Perq's bar was there then, and so was the Longboard, on the second block. There was a liquor store on the corner of Main and Walnut. About where the fountain is now, on the south side of the second block of Main Street, was a indie record shop called The Electric Chair. It was a small shop, with folding tables topped with milk crates full of record albums, "vinyl" as most people call them today. That whole second block of Main street, on the south side, where the fountain is, looked like the other side of the street, old, one or two story brick buildings, probably going back to the oil boom days of the 1920's.
Downtown Huntington Beach was much quieter then, none of the current hotels were in that area in the 1980's, just one small motel, south of the pier, on the inland side of PCH. There were far fewer shops, and more oil pumps, continuously rocking up and down, on lots all over downtown. Most of them have since been capped off, and covered by houses or condos. Skateboarders regularly skated the P.O. curb, a freestanding painted curb, which was where the small wall is now, behind the Post office, next to the Rockin' Fig surf shop.
There were only about 5 bars, including Perq's and the Longboard. In the 1980's, Newport Beach was the cool city then, and people would often take a taxi to the bars around the Newport Pier to go party on the weekends. Huntington Beach was a dirty little surf town with empty lots and oil pumps, running up most of Pacific Coast Highway, on lots full of condos and tall skinny houses today. One of those empty lots is now for sale for almost $4 million, I just looked it up on Zillow.
Oil was discovered in downtown Huntington Beach in 1920, near Huntington High School, and the oil wells, and oil workers in the early days, made H.B. less desirable by wealthy people looking for a beach house. So the oil wells and pumps made Huntington Beach the "dirty beach city," which kept much of it from being developed, up into the 1990's and early 2000's. Since H.B. was less popular to rich folk for several decades, because of all the oil pumps, rent was cheaper.
The Huntington Beach I moved into, in 1987, was a working class beach town, full of surfers, construction workers, bartenders, servers, and a lot of action sports people. As we moved into the 1990's, a lot of strippers and later porn stars moved to H.B.. I think we can thank Damian Sanders, Jon Huntington, and the snowboard/motocross crew that started the Pimp n' Ho Ball as a house party, for that. But that's a story for a different day.
If Newport Beach was the Beverly Hills of Orange County, Huntington Beach was where the working class people, and many of the creative and entrepreneurial people of surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX, and motocross lived. It had a completely different vibe than Newport Beach until the early 2000's, when Huntington Beach was deemed cool by hipsters, and the Yuppie hoards moved in. I was driving a taxi in Huntington Beach much of that time, and if you're reading this, I probably drove your drunk ass home from Main Street once or twice. By the turn of the millennium, Huntington Beach was the SoCal beach city with the most undeveloped land, thanks to all those oil wells from the 1920's. In the real estate boom of the late 90's and early 2000's, the H.B. oils wells got capped and McMansions and condos sprang up like mushrooms. And rent and home prices SOARED. The hotels and a lot more trendy shops soon followed. Welcome to Irvine by the Sea. A whole different group of people moved into Huntington Beach.
In addition to Pierre, Don, Hans, and Jeremy practicing at the Huntington Beach Pier, other freestyle skaters like Per Welinder and Bob Schmelzer, as well as street skaters like Mark Gonzales, Ed Templeton, and a pack of locals, came by to skate on a regular basis. Here's Bob Schmelzer on a street board in 1986, with a layback on the H.B. Pier bank, under the big chain. This is from the August 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine (page 8), a Windy Osborn photo, I believe. This is what the pier bank looked like in 1987 and 1988, in my early years riding there.
One weekend in the spring of 1989, I rolled down to the Huntington Beach Pier on a Saturday morning, and a few skaters were skating the pier bank. The huge chain blocking it off had disappeared. As a BMX freestyler who was always up for a good bank session, I joined in, probably throwing a backside boneless (can-can footplant) first. Then I started trying some kickturns and other stuff. Game on! The Huntington Beach Pier Bank, long blocked by the monster chain, was back in play.
At that time, I lived way up on the north side of Huntington Beach, near Bolsa Chica and Warner. I didn't have a car then, so I would either take buses up PCH, and into Costa Mesa, to work at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company. Or I'd make a 10 mile ride on my BMX bike, riding the entire 8.3 mile length of the H.B. bike path, with a headwind, as part of my route.
I rode right by the pier going to and from work, when I rode my bike. Once the chain was down, the nightly sessions were on, in the spring of 1989, and they were some awesome sessions. Some times I'd ride the bike path home, and other days I'd ride down the 19th street hill in Costa Mesa, through the what later became the Sheep Hills BMX jumps area, and I'd hit a bunch of little streets spots, and then the pier bank, on the way home. Those nights it was a three or four hour ride home, with a bunch of little sessions along the way.
Every single night that I rode up to the pier bank, there would usually be one or two, maybe three or four street skaters, sessioning the bank. Some of them were guys I knew from Vision, both sponsored skaters or workers that skated. Sometimes they were people I didn't know. Every once in a while, it would be just me, and I'd listen to Ramones Mania on my Walkman, which I carried in my Vision hip pack, and I'd session alone for an hour or more.
It was a really mellow bank for bike riding, but it was fun to session. As weird as it sounds today, almost no one wandered by the lower part of the pier in those days during the week. A few bike riders rode up and down the bike path, and maybe a runner or two. The H.B. police, oddly, left us alone down there. I think once or twice a motorcycle cop rolled up the bike path and checked us out. I sort of remember them asking if we knew what happened to the chain. If they told us to leave, we'd take off, and just come back the next night. We weren't really bothering anyone down on the bank, so the sessions continued. Then one night, I rolled up, ready for another session... and the chain was back up. Game off.
We were all bummed. The rumor at the time was that a couple of local skaters had cut down the 300 pound chain, and dragged it out onto the beach, 100 feet away, and buried it. But beaches attract all kinds of people, including metal detector guys, looking for coins and gold rings. Somebody found the chain, told the cops, and the session stopping monster chain was back. The Pier Bank sessions stopped.
Life went on, I still went down to ride at the pier nearly every weekend, unless there was a contest somewhere. I still went street riding on the way home from work, just hitting other spots, along the way. Then, about a month or so after the chain went up, I rolled up to the pier, and someone was skating the pier bank again, they chain had once again disappeared. The nightly and weekend sessions began again.
This is me, doing one of the tricks I learned at the H.B. Pier Bank, a 270 bunnyhop to 90 hop to rollback and 180 out. It wasn't that hard, just a fun little bank trick. This is on a bank in San Diego, while on a video shoot with Eddie Roman, for my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend (36:22). In 1986, while at a contest in Canada, I saw Eddie Fiola do a trick he called the Expo. He'd flyout on the quarterpipe, and land sideways on the deck, on both wheels. He'd hop on both wheels, once or twice, and then hop back into the ramp, turning 90 degrees, and landing fakie, going in backwards. It looked pretty gnarly, a cooltrick at that time. This trick was inspired by the Expo. Doing a 90 on a bank, then 90 back in fakie, was pretty easy. So I turned it into a 270, and it became a fun little bank trick.
None of us were sure if the chain was going to reappear, and shut down the pier bank again, so the two or three dozen skaters that sessioned the bank from time to time, made the most of it. Other BMXers showed up once in a while, but most of the time it was me and a couple of skaters, during the weeknight sessions. Sometimes on the weekends, there would be ten or more skaters hitting the bank.
In time, after a month or two, rumor got around that the city probably wouldn't find the chain again. The story was that the guys who took the chain down dragged that 300 pound beast way out under the pier, during a low tide, into about chest deep water, and then dove down and worked it into the sand, burying it under water, the best they could. To the best of my knowledge, that's where the chain has been ever since, 100 yards or more out from the bike path, 20 or 30 yards past the low tide water line, under the center of the pier. If that rumor was true, it has probably worked deep into the sand and mud, in the 35 years since. While the metal detector guys looking for money and treasure scour the whole beach area every week, they didn't go chest or neck deep into the waves looking for rings and coins. So the chain is probably slowly rusting away in the silt.
I'm sure the city thought it was B.S. when the chain disappeared again. They had no idea how determined a couple of skateboarders can be to open up a great session spot. I forget the actual dates, but from about late May or early June, the pier bank was open to ride and skate, until well into the fall. I think the city finally bought a new chain, and installed it, in late September or October. The skating and bike riding on the bank went on all summer of 1989.
That was a time when all BMX tricks were brake tricks, but I got sick of working on my bike at some point, since I've always been a lousy mechanic. So I rode brakeless for much of that spring and part of the summer. During those sessions on the H.B. Pier Bank, I learned a bunch of weird little bank variations. I learned foot jam nosepicks, tailtap 540s, and no footed bunnyhops to fakie. None of those are very hard, but they were fun tricks, and the no footed bunnyhops wrecked my shins, because I slipped my pedals a lot learning that trick. I also started jumping out of the bank, doing 180's a lot. They were tiny, only a few inches off the ground, but fun.
After a while, I started doing a little bunnyhop when I did the 180 out of the rollbacks. That turned them into BMX half Cabs, which the skaters often thought were cool. In that era, I was actually riding with skateboarders more than I was riding with BMXers, so I did some skateboard tricks on my bike. I was already doing backside bonelesses, a can-can footplant on a bank, but in a more sweeping movement than the vert version of that trick. I learned a no-comply on a bike, where a skater did a footplant to 180. So half Cabs (half a Caballerial- a fakie 360 air on vert, then later on flat ground) were another skate trick on a bike.
After a while, I tried to twist a lookback while doing the 180 jumps. They were far from fully clicked, but were partially twisted. Then I started trying lookbacks in the half Cabs. I could do really small 180 bunnyhops, hopping off of both tires, and spinning really quickly, so I could keep a lot of speed going backwards. I rode a freewheel, so I had to back pedal faster than the cranks would spin backwards on their own.
Unlike today's freecoaster riders, the natural back pedaling of the cranks gave me and edge doing half Cabs. I could catch the pedal, and really get leverage to get some pop in a half Cab. So those started on the pier bank in the summer of 1989. Eventually, I could do my tiny 180 bunnyhops at nearly a full sprint, and then land rolling backwards at real speed. Then I could hop the half Cabs farther and farther. I was doing 6 to 8 foot half Cabs by late 1989 or so, and fairly clicked lookback half Cabs. But those weren't even considered a trick then. Eddie Roman and maybe a couple of the San Diego guys did BMX half Cabs off ledges, but they were rarely seen by anyone. The real video era of street riding was just beginning. So no one else did them, and I didn't even bother to shoot video of them when I made The Ultimate Weekend video in 1990, because I didn't think they were a big deal. Lookback half Cabs were just some goofy trick I did, and nobody else. But that was the best trick of mine that was spawned from all of those sessions at the Huntington Beach Pier bank.
One more weird story from those sessions. I was riding alone at the pier bank one night, well into the summer of 1989, and it was fully dark out, so it was probably after 9 pm or so. I heard a skateboard coming up the bike path from the north. Around the bush on the corner of the bike path came this kid, knee riding on a skateboard, pushing with one leg, hands on the front of the board.
At first glance, I thought it was a little kid, and wondered who was with him. But it turned out to be a young guy of maybe 18 to 20 years old, I think. I think he asked if I minded if he skated the bank, and I said something like, "Sure go for it." And that's when I noticed. His lower legs were deformed, his feet pointed backwards, his legs were almost like a cricket, bending in a weird way. His lower body was totally built wrong, a birth defect, obviously. But he pushed up to the bank, pushing with one back leg, hands on the nose of the board. Then he put a hand down on the bank, sort of a beanplant/or boneless type thing, and picked up the board and spun it around, like a varial.
The kid had obviously been skating for quite a while, and he had a whole series of handplant and board flipping tricks, that worked for his unusual, mutated body. And the kid was good. This kid I'd never seen before, never heard of before, with a body shaped liked none I'd ever seen... he was a skater. So we sessioned together, taking turns hitting the bank, for maybe 45 minutes or so. When he did something cool, I'd say, "Yeah!," and he did the same to me. He was just another skater, who was built in a really weird way, and he had developed a whole series of tricks that worked for his body. They were all things that would be nearly impossible for a normal bodied person to pull off.
That night, at the pier bank, I learned why there are no paralympics in skateboarding (or BMX). There are only people, skaters, or even BMXers, with a different body shape, people you'd never want to play a game of SKATE or BIKE against. The kid amazed me, reminding me that we're all fucked up in one way or another, and we started skating or BMX freestyle to help deal with it. His issues seemed mostly physical, while most of us were kinda fucked up in the head from our crazy families, childhood trauma, or whatever. "Normal" people didn't skate or ride BMX back then.
After a while, he was done skating, and he just said, "Later," or something like that, and pushed back around the corner, into the darkness, heading north on the bike path. The crazy part is that the only things that way were the one condo complex by the beach, a couple hundred yards away, or the parking lot. I couldn't figure out where that kid came from, in the dark that night, or where he headed back to. He was alone, he wouldn't be able to drive a car. He just came out of nowhere, we sessioned the bank together, and then he disappeared into the darkness. I didn't get his name, and I've never heard of a skater like that from anyone else. No one else seemed to have seen or heard of the guy. That became one of my great memories of that summer, riding the Huntington Beach Pier Bank.
These are my best memories of one of my favorite eras in 20 years of BMX freestyle riding, all the cool sessions at the Huntington Beach Pier Bank in the spring and summer of 1989.
This skateboard documentary, Downhill Motion, is dated at 1975 on YouTube, and has some great mid-1970's California skateboard film in it. There's even a couple of BMX riders riding a pool with skaters, at one point. But right in the beginning, at 1:43, you can see several kids sessioning the Huntington Beach Pier bank, probably in 1974 or 1975. Jay Adams, one of the Z-Boys from Venice Beach, is in there, in his blond hair and dark blue Zephyr T-shirt, along with another Zephyr skater. There was probably a contest in H.B. that day, bringing skaters from around SoCal together. The really young kid you see skating in this film is Kele Rosecrans.
This blog is rolling up to the 1,000 blog post milestone, since I started it in 2017. This is post #997
I've been doing a lot of writing on a platform designed for writers, called Substack. Check it out:
Democracy Now (of WBAI radio NYC/Pacifica Stations), April 30, 2024 report of students at Columbia University occupying Hamilton Hall, the site of a 1968 student occupation, in protest to Columbia's ties to military research at that time. That student protest began about three weeks after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr..
This is not a political blog, this is my personal blog, and my main themes are Old School BMX freestyle, economics and our collective future, and my Sharpie art and creativity. But these student protests began to grow and spread, protests in response to Israel's current and ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip. Israel's actions are in response to a horrific attack on October 7, 2023, by Hamas. The initial attack killed 1.139 Israelis, and about 250 hostages were taken.
The response of the nation of Israel to this attack, orchestrated by Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu, has killed an estimated 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with 13,000 of those being children. The last estimate I saw was that at least a million Palestinians have been displaced, and half of the buildings in the Gaza Strip have been damaged or destroyed. Widespread famine is the current fear, since very little aid has been allowed into Gaza in the last 7 months. The nation of Israel is now committing genocide against Israel's Palestinian population, by definition. That's not in question, though many fear to acknowledge it. In the U.S. mainstream media, this is generally called the "War in Gaza." So this whole ongoing situation in Gaza, and the ties of particular colleges to Israel or Israeli business, are what American students are protesting.
I'm going to link several of the news reports about the protests at U.S. colleges here in my blog because these protests totally remind me of the Vietnam War protests I remember seeing on TV as a little kid, in the early 1970's. These protests sparked up, and then spread to so many other campuses so quickly, that I think we're seeing history playing out here, much like the years of student protests in the 1970's. Another interesting thing this time is the different responses that different schools have taken to these student protests. Some college chose a massive response by police, while others negotiated with protestors, to find common ground.
Sometimes we study history, other times, usually times of crisis, we watch it happen live. I'm posting some of these reports just as documentation of what's happening right now, early May 2024, and we'll see how all of these various issues play out as time goes on. A lot of U.S. college students have become very politicized in the last week or two.
Here is a report on the War in Gaza- the root of all the protests in the U.S.-
Blogger's Note: Here's a May 8th article from CNN about the arrests on college campuses during the Israel-Palestine war protests. There have been more than 2,400 arrests at more than 50 colleges and universities across over half of the states in the U.S..
