The Legend of the Jinx Bank

Here's Brian Tunney at the Jinx Bank, last year (2019), talking about the impression two photos from the Jinx Bank, 30-some years ago, left on him.  

As usual in my BMX posts, I'm going back 34 years into the foggy memory banks, but here's how I remember it happening.  If you have read very many of my BMX posts in my assorted blogs, you know my 1985-86 zine, San Jose Stylin', landed me a job at Wizard Publications in August of 1986.  Officially, I was the sole editorial assistant, so I was an assistant to Craig "Gork" Barrette, editor of BMX Action, and Andy Jenkins and Mark "Lew" Lewman, the guys writing FREESTYLIN' magazine.  Unofficially, I took over for Don Toshach, who actually had an English degree, and was the proofreader for both magazines.  I was also the official driver of photographer Windy Osborn, driving her to many of the photo shoots, and being her assistant on those,.  I went from a NorCal freesytler, making 57 pizzas in 4 hours at Pizza Hut, to working at THE MAGAZINES (!!!!) in one day.  Huge life change, and I flew to L.A. with my bike (Skyway T/A), a suitcase, and $80.  That move change the entire course of my life.

I wound up roommates with Gork and Lew, in Redondo Beach, 3-4 miles from the Wizard offices.  We worked more-or-less 9 to 5ish, and put in extra hours near the magazine deadlines.  On Saturdays and Sundays, if there wasn't a local contest somewhere, we all did our own thing, mostly.  My weekends started with waking up, making a HUGE plate of about 12-15 small pancakes, and chowing those down while watching Lew's VHS copy of Bones Brigade II: Future Primitive.  In the intro of that video is this great sentence by C.R. Stecyk:

"200 years of American technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground, and it took the minds of 12-year-olds to realize its potential."

Every Saturday and every Sunday, I'd carbo load on pancakes, watch Bones II, then grab my bike, and head out on an all day "scouting mission," as I called them.  I'd just go exploring my new world on my bike, Redondo Beach, and the South Bay area of Southern California.  Street riding was something we all did then, but it was in its infancy as a "thing" that actually had a name.  Street skating, pioneered by then Vision skater Mark Gonzales, Curb Dog/Bones Brigade skater Tommy Guerrero, and Natas Kaupas, was just a year and a half old.  Those guys were just beginning to explore the urban world as one big skatepark, waiting to be sessioned.  Us BMX freestylers, and particularly Andy J. and Lew at FREESTYLIN', were heavily influenced by those early street skaters.

My favorite part of Bones II was (and still is) Tommy Guerrero's section, right at the beginning.  I'd seen Tommy jump launch ramps in Golden Gate Park, and even shot photos of him for my zine, and he blew my mind with how high he launched off jump ramps, and his style, along with the other NorCal street skaters.   I never really got to know him, but his use of the insane San Francisco terrain for skating made me want to go find cool shit around Redondo, and then session it on my bike.  So that's what I did, weekend after weekend.  I'd head off in one direction, usually to a known street spot to start, and then I'd wander in some area I'd never been to, and ride down alleys, behind shopping centers, and into weird little nooks and crannies, looking for cool stuff to ride.

One day, driving Windy and Ron Wilkerson to a photo shoot, at a quarterpipe behind a bike shop, on PCH in Redondo, we went 2 or 3 blocks too far, and so we rolled back two or three blocks down this alley, up the hill from Pacific Coast Highway.  It was the photo shoot for some weird new Wilkerson trick, called the abubaca.  we didn't know what that was, Ron had invented it on tour.  Windy and Ron were talking as I drove the Wizard Astro van down the alley.  Off to one side, I saw this weird, but awesome, bank next to a wall, in a little parking lot.  My rider mind made a mental note, and I then drove on and found the quarterpipe we were looking for.

Two or three weeks later, as I headed out after my pancakes and Bones II, that bank popped into my head.  So I headed up to PCH, and headed south.  It wound up being a few blocks past where I thought it was.  I was kind of lost, and came from a totally different direction, when I first saw it in the van.  It took an hour or so, but I found the bank.

I'd never seen one like it, and I'd never heard Gork or Lew mention it, and they rode that area all the time.  I went up a hill from PCH, behind this building, to the back parking lot.  From that side street, the parking lot went down fairly steeply.  The asphalt bank started as flat, and gradually got taller as the parking lot dropped down.  At the high end, it was 5 to 6 feet high.  I did a couple carves and kickturns on it, and scoped out the transition.  It wasn't too kinked, and rode pretty well.  This probably happened in September 1986, somewhere around there.

To put things in perspective, wall rides on bikes didn't exist yet... officially.  On a photo shoot with Windy in Huntington Beach, I saw English bloke Dave Curry do a tiny wall ride.  More of a wall bounce/slide.  It blew my mind.  But he was popping off a tiny, one foot high bank, and slapping both tires against the wall about a foot up.  At the time it was amazing, but Windy didn't think it was worth a photo that day, and it was getting late, anyway.  So Dave Curry didn't get the first wall ride photo in a magazine, which ultimately, is probably a good thing.  Nothing against Dave, but I'll get to that in a bit.

At that time, in 1986, I was big on doing footplants when street riding.  I would bunnyhop and footplant on ledges, benches, and wherever.  I got that idea from both Dave Vanderspek and the Curb Dogs, and from Eddie Roman, another Skyway rider.  So I started doing footplants, riding up the big end of this new bank, bunnyhopping, and planting my right foot on the wall.  There was a business in that building, like paint store, or electric supply store, something like that.  But they never came out and yelled at me as I bounced on their wall.  So I kept riding.

Within half an hour, I was hitting the tallest part of the bank, around fivefeet high, and doing a footplant on the wall two or three feet above that.  That bank was made for those.  I was having a blast.  That is, until I landed hard, and snapped my cheap ass, one piece cranks.  I think that was the only time I ever snapped a pair of cranks.

So that ended my session, and I had to "scooter" my bike back to the apartment, more than a mile, dropcrank, pushing with the other foot.  When I got back to the pad, Lew asked what happened.  I told him I found this amazing bank to ride, was doing huge wall footplants, and snapped my crank.  Lew went through all the banks he knew in the area, but this new bank was one he had never seen.  So I told him I'd have to take him there sometime.

The next Monday, I found a pair of used cranks in a box in the rafters at Wizard, and I was back in action.  The next weekend, I was back at the new bank, doing big footplants, kickturns, little bunnyhop bank "airs," and having more fun, another solo session.  I came down hard from a footplant, and I cracked my fork dropout.  It started to clink and wobble, and I didn't want my front wheel to fall off.  I had that happen once, and it's not a good thing.  So I headed back to the homestead.  The next Monday, I found an old pair of Randy Tischman's forks up in the rafters, purple Kuwahara ones, I think, with weird little stands on the top of the curves.  I put them on, and was ready to ride again.

It took a couple of weeks, but I finally got Lew to follow me to this new bank one Saturday.  He did a few kickturns or something, to get the feel of the bank.  I started doing my footplants, and Lew said they looked way gnarlier than what he had imagined when I described them.  Lew started trying footplants, or something, and got sketchy on one landing, crashed, and rolled his ankle.  It was a mild, but painful, sprain.  That ended our session.  As we started heading slowly home, Lew was pedaling gingerly on his sore ankle.  He said something like, "First you snapped your cranks, then your forks, now I sprained my ankle, this bank is jinxed."  And that's how the Jinx Bank got its name.

The next Monday at work, Lew actually told everyone how gnarly my footplants were, and said Windy should shoot photos of me there.  I was stoked, because I was absolutely desperate to get a photo of me riding in the FREESTYLIN'.  But Lew was known for exaggeration, which  Andy called "The Lew Factor."  Andy J. said, "Lew says these footplants are really gnarly, but when we add in The Lew Factor, that makes them kind of gnarly."  One of these days we'll get Windy to check them out, but no photo shoot right now.  We never made it back out there for Windy to see them.  And Lew never went back to ride the Jinx Bank, it did its number on his psyche.  Myself, I went back every couple of weeks, and took Craig Grasso there often.  Grasso and I had many more great sessions at the Jinx Bank, and neither of us broke bike parts or body parts.  No more Jinxes from the Jinx Bank, after it had been named.  We told R.L. Osborn about it once, and he had actually been there years earlier, after hearing about it from some skaters.  But he never went back.

I got laid off from Wizard at the end of December 1986, and never got a photo of me riding the Jinx Bank.  I did make it back up there for 3 or 4 more sessions, over the next few years.  The last time I went, the building owners had made the small asphalt curb at the bottom, making it hard to ride and skate, without some plywood to lay over the curb.  You can see that in Brian's video above.

Later they added the weird wood thing on the wall, which you can also see in Brian's video above.  That made it largely session proof, for either bikes or skates.  But the coolest thing about the Jinx Bank for me was that when I left, Gork and Lew knew it was there.   Because of that, about nine months later, this photo of Eddie Roman, doing the first wall ride ever in a magazine(since Dave Curry missed his shot) was taken, by Windy, at the Jinx Bank.  It's one of those epic Windy Osborn photos.  This photo changed bike riding instantly, and forever.  With that one photo, suddenly wall rides were possible, and walls, especially banks to walls, were in play.

 Eddie Roman, first BMX wall ride photo, at the Jinx Bank, 1987, I believe.

 While I never got a photo there, and was never a great rider, my Tommy Guerrero and pancake fueled solo scouting missions found the Jinx Bank, a spot that later changed BMX freestyle history.  Not much, but I was stoked the first wall ride photo happened there.   A while after that, Craig Campbell also got an epic wall ride photo there, as Brian shows in the video above.

Street riding progressed rapidly over the next several years, and turned into its own genre eventually, as we all know.  Craig Grasso added his flavor to street, many times over the years.  Here he is on another local bank, a favorite photo of mine.

 Craig Grasso, bank backside boneless.

I may not have had a riding photo in FREESTYLIN',  but in BMX DIY fashion, I gave myself a quick, but decent, wall ride clip in my 1990 self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend.  And a stylized version of this sketchy video still below is on the T-shirt I'm wearing right now, 34 years after rediscovering the Jinx Bank.  Wall ride over my sister Cheri's head, Blues Brothers Wall, Huntington Beach, 1990.  May the "minds of 12-year-olds" in all of us never stop discovering cool shit to ride in our urban environment.

I've started a new blog, as of May 2022, Check it out:

Steve Emig's Street Life- Dealing with change and building a new life in the 2020's.

 

The Story of my Keychain- part 1: The Zine

It started with the idea to make a zine.  At some point, in 1985, in Idaho, I read an article in FREESTYLIN' magazine about zines.  It was written by BMXer/art student turned FREESTYLIN' magazine editor, and zine lover, Andy Jenkins.  For some reason, the idea of making a zine appealed to me.

I'd always been a daydreamer as a kid, I'd get these really cool creative ideas, often I'd draw and plan them out, and then never follow through. Great ideas that never happened was a big theme of my childhood.  I guess, in a sense, I thought that was sort of the point of ideas.  I watched my parents think of big ideas, like the time my mom wanted to start a home cooking restaurant, called Kathy's Kountry Kitchen, in the farmhouse we lived in, or the time my dad and a friend, both engineers, spent a whole night planning ways to get revenge on the guy's crazy next door neighbor.  But they never took action on these ideas.  Where I grew up in the Midwest, coming up with big ideas, crazy brainstorming, often by adults after a few beers, followed by never taking action, was a normal thing.

So as a new BMX freestyler in Boise, Idaho, with a year and a half of BMX racing and freestyle under my belt, I read Andy's article about these little self-published booklets called zines, and I dreamed about making one called Idaho Stylin'.  But I never actually made it.  I sketched out the logo, designed layout ideas, and thought it out.  Then dropped the idea, and dreamed up something else.

As 1985 came in, my dad got a new job in San Jose, California, and my family moved there in the Spring.  I worked my summer job in Boise, then packed up my 1971 Pontiac Bonneville with the Oldsmobile 455 engine, and drove to San Jose to join them.  I sold my car shortly after getting to San Jose.  At that time, the most cohesive scene in BMX freestyle centered around Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.  Dave Vanderspek, of the Curb Dogs bike and skate team, was kind of the visionary leader of the group.  They'd get together on the weekends in a certain area of the park and have a big jam circle for the crowd all day.  The pros usually there, or at the Beach Park Ramp Jams, included Vander, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson, Rick Allison, Oleg Konings, and ramp crazy man Hugo Gonzales.  There was a whole second layer of great riders, amateurs as well.

When I moved to San Jose, I wanted to find those guys, and become part of that scene.  I remembered the zine idea from Boise, and decided that if I started a zine, then I'd have an excuse to meet and hang out with those guys.  While I knew they rode at Golden Gate Park sometimes, I didn't know exactly when or where, and I didn't have a car to get from San Jose up to The City (as locals called San Francisco).  The thought of driving into a big city and trying to park, and maybe getting mugged or something, scared the crap out of me.

But I really wanted to meet those riders, so I actually followed through and published my first zine. Actually following through on ideas was something I'd been starting to do since I got into freestyle.  My self-esteem was low enough, that I thought I needed a reason to approach the guys, and to ride with them.  After, they were "famous guys from the magazines," and I was a goofball from Idaho.

So I bought a manual Royal typewriter (about 1940's era) from the San Jose Swap Meet, bought some Scotch tape from my Pizza Hut paychecks to tape the photos and copy to a sheet of paper, and dug out the photos I had from riding in Boise.  I changed the name of the zine to San Jose Stylin', and typed up three pages, both sides, of text and photos.  I didn't even know a zine was supposed to be 8 1/2" X 11" sheets folded in half, like a little book.  I figured that out on issue 3 or 4, I think.  My first two or three issues were two or three sheets, with black & white words and photos on both sides, with the pages just stapled in the top left hand corner, like a test at school.

I borrowed my mom's car, drove around to several bike shops, and dropped off copies for bike shop workers, and any freestylers who came by the shops.  Within a week, a San Jose local rider and underground legend, John Vaquez, called me up, and asked me to come ride with his friends, Vince Torres, and a couple others.  They told me about the Beach Park Ramp Jams (held by Robert Peterson at the shop he worked at), and that Sundays were the big day to session Golden Gate Park.  I made it up to a Beach Park Jam two or three weeks later, and handed out some zines there.  I met John Ficarra, who decided to be my assistant editor of the zine, and started riding up to Golden Gate Park with him and the Ground Control guys, which included Chris and Karl Rothe, Mike Perkins, Marc McKee, Tim Treacy, Darcy Langlois, and Mike Golden. I soon became the "zine guy" of the Bay Area BMX freestyle scene.


Here's a local TV segment from the summer of 1986, with a Golden Gate Park Jam circle, featuring Maurice Meyer.  Also in the segment are Mike Perkins at 3:48, Karl Rothe at 4:05, Darcy Langlois with the gut lever at 4:06, Tim Treacy's legs doing the backyard (which he invented, nearly a year before that trick went viral in the freestyle world), Chris Rothe at 4:34, Marc McKee in the yellow shirt at 4:43, and me, chasing my bike (an Idaho parade trick) at 5:07.

One of the better ideas, which to me just seemed like just the smart thing to do, was that I sent copies of San Jose Stylin' to each of the editors at FREESTYLIN' magazine, BMX Action, and BMX Plus!  Instead of sending one for the whole staff to share, I sent them each one, so they could check it out individually, and hopefully talk about it.  That turned out to be a smart move.

In the Spring of 1986, after about 5 monthly (almost) issues of my zine, a bunch of us NorCal guys piled into a van, and headed down to the AFA Masters contest, at the Velodrome, near L.A..  While I was down there, I saw Andy Jenkins, editor of FREESTYLIN'.  I went over and introduced myself, thinking he'd just shake my hand and say "Hi."  When I told him I'd been sending zines to him, Lew, and Gork, he said something like, "Oh man, we love your zines."  That blew my mind.  And that's how I first met Andy Jenkins, which is the start of the story of my keychain.

I've got a new blog going, it's about building a creative business, and building small businesses in general.  You can check it out here:
WPOS Kreative Ideas 
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Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now

3162 Kashiwa Street in Torrance, California

Sometimes a location becomes famous itself, as a focal point of human activity that affects a large number of people.  Over the last couple of days, an old school BMX freestyle rider made a Facebook post about a non-descript industrial building at 3162 Kashiwa Street in Torrance, California.  A whole bunch of us added comments.  Why?  Because that building was the longtime home Wizard Publications, which published BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  That address became legendary to us BMX freestylers of the 1980's.

After reading the comments on the FB post, I knew it was time to write a post about that place, because I worked there for a short time, from August 1st to December 31st, 1986, and it changed the entire course of my life.  Since the photos shared were on FB were of the outside of the building, I've decided to write this post about a few things I saw happen in that parking lot.  Yeah, just the parking lot, the one you see R.L. Osborn and Ron Wilton sessioning in the the early part of the video above.

This BMX Action Trick Team video was written (they did that back then) and produced by a professional video production company.  This video cost about $40,000 to produce, and lost a ton of money.  No disrespect to R.L., Ron, Windy, Dian Harlan (the world's greatest receptionist at the time) or anyone else in this video, but, let's face it, it sucked.  The reason it sucked is because nobody knew how to make a really exciting BMX freestyle video at the time, and only professionals could afford high quality equipment.  So those people were hired to make a standard, documentary-type, video about the BMXA Trick Team, and the new and emerging little sport of BMX freestyle.

In that parking lot, on my first full day working for Wizard, I helped set up for a party commemorating the 10 year anniversary of BMX Action magazine.  Gork, the editor of BMXA at the time, spent Saturday, the next day, at the party.  Andy Jenkins, Lew, and myself, made a short appearance, but then went off to other plans for the day.  But during that short appearance, I saw Bob Haro, the guy who invented BMX freestyle, for the first time.  Fan boy moment on my second day living in Southern California.

In that parking lot, I had some after work freestyle sessions on the T.O.L. (Tower Of Love) halfpipe, with R.L. Osborn, Eddie Fiola, Gork, Lew, and a few other riders. I never got up to coping, but it was fun anyway.

In that parking lot, I rode a mono-shock bike for the first time.  Some old schoolers brought a few really old BMX bikes to the warehouse for a photo shoot, so we had a couple of impromptu freestyle sessions on them, and even rode them all to lunch one day.

In that parking lot, I first rode on Gork's BMX sidehack.  We tried a few freestyle tricks on it.  We actually managed to do a few backwards wheelies on it, Gork on the bike and me on the hack.  They weren't easy, I'm pretty proud of that trick.  But no one thought to snap photos back in those days.  Bummer.

In that parking lot, I saw an unknown rider named Mitch Collins, wearing one of Woody Itson's old uniforms, blasting higher airs on the T.O.L. than anyone I had seen ride it.  He didn't air quite as high as Josh White did, but I started working there a few months too late for Josh's epic photo shoot there.

In that parking lot, I saw Eddie Fiola session the T.O.L. halfpipe many times.  He ruled that ramp in 1986.  A couple of guys got a bit higher, but Eddie had the lines and the flow since he was a skatepark rider, and rode the ramp more than anyone during my stint working there.

In that parking lot I had flatland sessions with R.L. Osborn, Gork, Lew, Craig Grasso, Chris Day, Zack, Melody, and the local kids, Dizz Hicks, Ceppie Maes, McGoo, Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, and the entire NorCal/Golden Gate park posse, along with other random freestyle travelers.

In that parking lot, one pro rider showed us the nude photos his girlfriend had professionally taken so he could check them out while on tour.

In that parking lot, I first tried a trick Gork dubbed the Spud Stall.  He named it that since I was form Idaho.  I pulled up my front wheel while rolling straight at the warehouse wall, then I tried to touch both tires to the wall with the bike straight up.  Fakie wall rides hadn't been invented yet, but that's what I was trying.  I'd get my front wheel on the wall, and my back wheel within six inches of it or so, hit the brakes, then hop back and ride out.  Craig Grasso, who saw me try these for months, and get really close on a skater launch ramp in Hermosa, ended up being the guy to actually make fakie wall rides happen and get the first photo.  I'm stoked on that.  I had to clean the white Wizard wall because my tires left black marks on it.

Just outside that parking lot, in the street, I was sent out one day to help some ramp rider kid set up Brian Scura's ramp to do a photo shoot with Windy.  It turned out, Brian had engineered the ramp to be set up by a single person, so this kid with the stringy blond hair didn't need help.  I hung out and watched him warm-up anyhow.  At one point it looked like he was bailing, but he ended up doing this insane, upside down footplant.  I'd never seen anything like it.  That was the day I met Dave Voelker.

One day, Andy led us out into the parking lot for a "meeting."  Gork, Lew, Andy, and I sat on the curb of the little island, and he brought up our topic.  He was thinking about hitting up Oz to make another video, and he wanted our ideas.  Since Oz spent $40K on the BMX Action video (above), there was a "don't ever mention making another video," unwritten rule in place at Wizard then.  Andy thought that if we could come up with a really, REALLY good idea, we might be able to talk into making another video, using the new, amazing (and cheap) Video 8 camcorders.  We all threw out ideas.  My idea was to show us getting off work on a Friday afternoon, and then going riding with all the best riders in SoCal all weekend.  Nobody liked that idea.  So I self-produced the concept as The Ultimate Weekend in 1990, 3 1/2 years later.

One morning, while standing outside the little warehouse door on our break, Haro pro Ron Wilkerson rode up on his motorcycle.  He shut it off and coasted up to us.  There was a small person, which appeared to be a blond kid, about 13-years-old, on the back of the motorcycle.  We looked at each other in confusion, wondering if Ron was going around picking up young boys or something.  They took their helmets off.  Ron said, "Hey guys, this is Spike, Spike Jonze.  He jumped in the Haro van back East and went on tour with us as our roadie."  We had no idea what that (17 -year-old) BMXer/skater kid had in store for his life.  I don't think he had any idea either at that point.  He's still surprising us all.

So those are some of my best memories from the average looking parking lot, located at 3162 Kashiwa Street, in Torrance, California.

Schralpin' with Grasso

This post was sparked by a album of photos of old school rider Craig Grasso in the Facebook group "Freestylin'.  It's a bummer, but there aren't many videos with Grasso riding on You Tube.  So I picked this one, which is my edit of the first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in Santee, California in 1988, from the 2-Hip BHIP video.  Craig Grasso is wearing the black beret and yellow and black shirt.  You can see him painting at :25, and riding at 1:54, 2:36, 4:11, 4:34, and 4:46.   Craig was known as a weird, artsy, funny guy, and not a top placing contest rider.  But he ripped it up.  If you check the results for this comp, Grasso came in 4th in the "Great" (pro) class, behind Dave Voelker, Craig Campbell, and R.L. Osborn.  That's some seriously heavy company.  Just for the record, I'm the guy who ghost rides his bike into the big wall.  I decided I'd only include myself in this clip with a goofy shot, since there were so many guys ripping it up that day, and I couldn't give everyone fair video time.

I actually met Craig Grasso on my first trip to Southern California, riding along with my Idaho trick team partner Jay Bickel.  His family took me to the AFA contest in Venice Beach in 1985.  Jay had a co-sponsorship deal with SE Racing, and they sponsored Todd Anderson and Grasso then.  So on my first trip to see the "real" BMX freestyle world, Jay and I hung out with, Todd, Craig, Steve Broderson and that crew all weekend.  It was epic for us.

My life took me to San Jose, California later that year, when my dad got a job there.  I rode with the Golden Gate Park/Curb Dogs/Ground Control riders for a year, and published a zine about that scene.  That little zine catapulted me to a job at Wizard Publications.  That job changed the course of my life in a huge way, and landed me in Redondo Beach, CA, as a roommate with my co-workers Gork and Lew.  Their local riding spot was The Spot, a brick area on the north end of the Redondo Beach Pier complex.  I followed Lew down there night after night.  Gork, although editor of racing magazine BMX Action then, came down to freestyle at least 4 nights a week.  Locals Craig Grasso, and high school kid Chris Day were down there every night as well.  R.L. Osborn came down to ride 2 or 3 times a week.  Skater Rodney Mullen also would practice on the concrete next to The Spot when staying with Steve Rocco for a few weeks at a time.  It was a great scene, but a much different vibe than the NorCal guys I'd been riding with.  Not better or worse, just different.  Industry guy and natural comedian McGoo came down regularly, often bringing Ceppie Maes and Dizz Hicks with him.  They were the CW factory team then.

We all sessioned and practiced our flatland for a 2 or 3 hours every night.  Chris didn't do anything but flatland, and he was busting his amazing "flail" boomerangs back then, swinging his legs wide like a flair in gymnastics.  He was kicking his legs higher and higher, blowing all our minds, as the weeks went by.  Grasso also had a trick he called the Flail.  But it was totally different.  Craig would start pedaling fast, heading towards a group of people either walking or riding up the bike path.  He would pretend to slip a pedal, drop down onto his top tube, and purposely get all squirrely like he was out of control and going to run into the people.  It was always hilarious as people bailed out of the way in panic.  That, and random jokes, were ways that Craig kept us all laughing night after night.

Flatland riding then was filled with single tricks, like backwards wheelies (on the back pegs), sliders, boomerangs, decades, lawnmowers, and the like.  R.L. Osborn was starting to link his tricks together, something that I, myself, had also begun doing.  He was as much, much better rider, of course, but we had the desire to link tricks in common then.  We also all played games of FREESTYLE, often, like HORSE in basketball, where one guy would do a trick, and everyone else had to pull it or get a letter.  That helped us all progress and try new stuff.

 Lew at the time had nerves of steel.  I would get nervous riding with R.L. or other top riders that came by.  Lew would pull his tricks solid, and with tons of style, no matter who was watching. So that was the main form or riding for our group, the group that Lew dubbed, "Club Homeboy" that fall, before opening that club up to riders everywhere.

At times, for whatever reason, a couple of us would wander off and do some street riding.  At the time, street skating, led by Mark Gonzales (who came by The Spot a couple times) was just becoming a thing.  And Andy Jenkins and Lew at FREESTYLIN' were starting to cover BMX street riding in the magazine.  Those little roaming street sessions were usually Grasso, Lew, and me wandering around to hit some bank or curb jumps.  Grasso, being the weird, artsy guy, even back then, showed his latent creativity in finding weird things to try and ride.  At the time, wall rides and wall fakies hadn't been invented.  So we'd do kickturns and footplants on banks a lot.  Even then, Craig Grasso shredded the street obstacles.

On one of those street sessions, Craig and I realized we both liked to do a backside boneless on a bank.  A backside boneless is a skateboard trick, basically like a BMX can-can footplant, BUT done as one swinging, pendulum motion.  Brian Blyther had been doing can-can footplant flyouts on vert for a while.  But on those, he would flyout, land on the can-can foot, stall a few seconds, then hop back in  But Craig and I, independent of each other, had learned to do a more fluid version, more like a skater, on banks.  What was really weird, was when we tried to figure out exactly when each of us learned that trick.  We discovered we "invented" that trick, me in NorCal in him in SoCal, in the same week.  Trippy.  This is something I saw fairly often in the early days of freestyle.  I called it, "spontaneous revelation."  It's more like a form of the "100th monkey" concept.  Riders in different areas, with no contact to each other, would come up with the same trick at almost the same time.  It seems the idea was out there, and Grasso and I tapped into it simultaneously.  That happened to other riders with other tricks as well back in the 80's.

Then I got laid off at Wizard in December of 1986.  The inside joke was that I got fired because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy, a big favorite of Andy J. and Lew.  But I just didn't fit the Wizard scene, I was way to uptight and dorky.  But I had enough money saved to pay my rent for January of 1987.  So I was still roommates with Gork and Lew while searching for a new job.  So everyday that month, I'd meet up with Grasso, who lived at home then, and we'd ride around and session different places all day.  One day we'd bomb down 190th street hill and head inland to session a some skaters' ramp.  The next day we'd head up PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) and session the Jinx Bank and the Fat Burger banks.  The next day, we'd wander around an find other stuff to ride.  Many days we'd start out at the Wall Ramp in Hermosa Beach.  It was two foundations for a building that never got built.  There was a big concrete slab, a five foot high wall, and then another slab above it.

On the top slab, local skaters had built a tiny mini ramp, eight feet wide and 2 or 3 feet high.  On the bottom slab, there was a launch ramp up against the wall, with a parking block on top of it.  I started doing fakies on it.  I'd been trying to do a fakie on a wall, which wasn't invented yet, for months.  Gork had dubbed the trick the "Spud Stall" since I was from Idaho.  I could get close, but never get my back tire on the wall.  Grasso said my fakies on the launch ramp and parking block were super close to a true wall fakie, with my back tire coming within a couple inches of touching the wall.  But the wall wasn't high enough.  If I tried to go higher, my front wheel would go over the top of the upper slab, and I hang up and fall backwards.  So I never got the wall ride fakie until a couple years later on a wall in Huntington Beach.

Some of you may remember that the person who did get the first wall ride fakie photo was... you guessed it, Craig Grasso.  He did it on the Jinx Bank wall, a bank I found and showed to both Lew and Craig.  That was also the location where the first wall ride photo of Eddie Roman was shot by Windy Osborn.  It's funny how things work out.

While Craig Grasso, in those days, was known mostly as a weird, artsy rider who listened to The Cure and Gene Loves Jezebel, he was also a truly amazing rider, and just a fun guy to hang out and session with.  He could bust four foot airs and several variations, launch a curb jump, bust original tricks on a bank, and lay out serious flatland.  And he was funny as hell all the time.  Just a great person to hang out and session with. 

I know Craig has had some serious struggles since, including in recent years.  I hope things are going better Grasso, and you're out there making people laugh somewhere. 

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Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack