Keith Treanor, born and raised in New Jersey, came out to Huntington Beach and rode and rode and rode and wound up riding for S&M Bikes for years. In this podcast, #43 for The Union Tapes podcast out of the U.K., Keith goes through his life in BMX, from early days on the East Coast, the days coming up as an unknown amateur in the Huntington Beach/Orange County, California scene, and all through his years as a pro riding for S&M Bikes.
I remember meeting Keith at the Oceanview Jump, a freestyler fly out jump at Oceanview High School in Huntington Beach. That jump was an amazing set-up, a long, concrete sidewalk runway to a 6 1/2 foot high jump up to flat. Keith flat out RULED on that jump, no one even came close to getting as high out of the Oceanview Jump as Keith did. In my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend, Oceanview made for a cool jumping segment (for that time) at 23:22* in the video. In one shot, Keith is a good 10 feet out, in a full tuck, landing to flat. That was insane for that era, where you could easily snap a frame or forks coming down from that high up. I've personally seen Keith go a good 1 1/2 to 2 feet higher than that, 12 feet up to flat, but didn't get it on video.
Keith Treanor with a one handed 360 at the Oceanview fly out jump, which they mention in the interview. He's about 4 feet up, going from right to left, in this still shot.
I was already shooting video footage on the weekends, to make my own video, which became The Ultimate Weekend, when I remember meeting Keith and John Povah at Oceanview. I used to ride there, as well. When I started making that video, GT rider Jess Dyrenforth was supposed to be the star of the video. But every time I wanted to go shoot video, Jess was busy. He was riding for GT Bikes, and was deep into the inline skating world, as well. After I met Keith and John, I'd call them up, and Keith was always down to ride, and John was too, when not busy with his auto painting job. Keith was young, hungry, and would just go off anywhere we went, so he ended up being the star of the video.
Here's another still shot from The Ultimate Weekend, with Keith doing the first 360 over a spine ever to appear in a BMX video. Gary Laurent did a 360 over the spine a few minutes later. In 1990, peg grinds, mini-ramps, handrails, and a lot of things were just starting to happen at the time, so every video of that era had lots of "world firsts" or "firsts on video" in it.
This mini-ramp set up above was amazing for its day, this was the backyard of freestyle skaters Primo and Diane Desiderio, who were working in the City Streets show at Sea World at the time. Gary Laurent also rode in the show, I believe, and he got the OK to take us to this ramp, even though Primo and Diane weren't home. Gary had those ramps wired, but he had never tried a 360 over the spine. Keith, still really new to mini-ramps, because only a couple of them existed then, stepped it up to 3 over the spine. Then Gary had to do it. Because riding was evolving so fast then, every video that came out in that era had a bunch of world firsts, or firsts on video. So this was only the second or third mini-ramp ever in a BMX video, and Keith did the first 360 over a spine on video. These are just a few of my memories of those early days (1990-1994ish) hanging out and riding with Keith and John Povah.
There's a whole lot more in the podcast above, Keith talks us through his whole BMX career. If you're a rider from the 1990's era, check it out.
The Ultimate Weekend- 1990 - Beginning with 7 shots in the intro, Keith Treanor appears throughout the video.
* Right before the Oceanview segment, there's a shot of me doing a double peg grind on a little ledge in Huntington Beach in early August of 1990. That year, 1990, the year I was working on shooting and producing the video, The Ultimate Weekend, was the year that BMX freestylers took double peg grinds, the BMX version of a 50/50 grind on a skateboard, onto the streets. In this ridiculously self-serving Substack post, I dug into the various people who did the first double peg street grinds on video, and approximately when they did them. If you are interested in the very beginning of the double peg grinds that led to all of handrail, hubba, and ledge grinds in the last 35 years, check this post out.
Op cord short shorts for guys. Izod ankle socks, yeah, they actually had the little fucking alligators on them. Nike Pegasus running shoes because I sucked at running cross country before I sucked at BMX. The Vuarnets are cool, I found them in a field. This is me as manager of the tiny Boise Fun Spot amusement park, balancing on my Skyway T/A, in the summer of 1985. Yep, a lame freestyler (one of three in Boise then), running racing frame pads while doing balance tricks. Let's face it, it was all downhill after this photo was taken. Photo by Vaughn K., my co-worker at the Fun Spot.
Top Ten Reasons The White Bear Sucks
(One) He looks gay as fuck in that photo from Boise in 1985 (above), he must be a fag. (Actually I'm just a lame straight guy who's been fat, ugly, broke, and had bad teeth for the last 20-25 years, so it's not like women have been beating down my door or anything).
(Two) He had terrible, shaky camera work in this video, although the ending is cool. "Somebody fire that cameraman right now." Heh, heh, heh...
(Three) He spent way too much time writing about trying to do bunnyhop tailwhips in his blog, and never, EVER, pulled one. Bill Nitschke invented that trick, let him enjoy the props for being the first guy to land it.
(Four) He's a loser... anybody who can manage to be homeless for 17 or 18 years must be smoking crack or meth or something. How could anyone not get a job for 17 years? (Actually no alcohol, no drugs, I even kicked my Diet Coke habit a couple of years ago. I do have a serious 7-11 pepperoni pizza habit though, after my years driving a taxi, and then being unable to find any job in NC for ten years, I actually have no work history to even put on a resume' at this point). Either I manage to get a little, one man publishing/content creating business going, or I'll do the work for free. Time will tell which way it ultimately works out.
(Five) He hasn't been able to jump anything at Sheep Hills since about 1992, when The Bowl was still a thing. And he had the audacity to write a "History of Sheep Hills" post on his Substack. What the fuck is a Substack, anyhow?
(Six) He writes like he's still a BMX guy, but he hasn't ridden a bike since like 1995 or something. (Actually I rode nearly every day from June of 1982 until August of 2003. The last trick I learned was nollie 180's on a speed bump, in a parking lot in Garden Grove, across the freeway from the Van's Skatepark and The Block of Orange. I started gaining weight working as a taxi driver in late 2003, got really fat, and haven't ridden hardly at all since, that's true).
(Seven) He's fat, ugly, and he smells bad. I know you're homeless, but damn dude, jump in the ocean once in a while or something.
(Eight) He wroteFREESTYLIN' Mag Tales blog and totally pissed off everyone at Wizard Publications. (Yep, I wrote that blog in 2008-2009 (over 100 posts). Then I wrote the original Freestyle BMX Tales blog from 2009-2012 (over 500 posts). I deleted both of those blogs completely from the internet in the fall of 2012).
(Nine) He actually admits that he used to work in a porn store. He must be a perv. I bet he has sex with goats, aardvarks, and transgender pygmies or something. (Sorry to disappoint everyone, but a little free lesbian porn when I get a motel room keeps me away from the goats, pygmies, and such. I do find aardvarks cute, though, but in a purely platonic way).
(Ten) The guy made like three low-budget BMX videos, waaaaay back when, and they all sucked. And he acts like he's some big Hollywood producer or something. What an arrogant prick! Here's the Steve Emig: The White Bear's Film Festival. You can decide how much they all suck. Feel free to go off on Facebook to make it official.
(Bonus) The guy is 58-years-old, and he still calls himself "The White Bear," a nickname from 1992. Who the fuck does that? He writes blog posts making fun of himself, in the third person. Who does that? Besides, the guy is so damn sarcastic that I can never tell if he's kidding or he's serious. What a fucking kook! He's a fucking NEVER WAS sell out. And he draws pictures of other people's photos and calls it "art." What a loser.
Blogger's note- June 9- 2025- Everything on the list above is a reference to things that have been said to my face, said about me in social media comments, or said behind my back that I heard about later. My life has been really weird for about 25 years now, and I've been plugging through a whole lot of bullshit, sometimes my own, but also a lot that came at me from outside sources. It's a crazy world, shit happens. I'm still plugging away at trying to create pretty cool stuff, to the extent I'm able, every single day. I will continue to do that, as long as I can. In this post, I just decided to address a bit of the mud that's been slung at me, in my usual, sarcastic way.
When not writing self-deprecating posts while Old School BMX events are happening elsewhere, I do most of my writing on Substack these days. It's an online platform designed specifically for writers. To find more reasons to hate me, click the link below:
Here is Andy Ruffel, doing a 360 off a jump, on a BMX bike in 1981, for a British TV show. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first BMX 360 jump caught on video or film, and it happened 43 Years ago.
In late 2021, I had a crazy idea for a blog post. "What if I search YouTube for all the earliest, 'first on video' clips of BMX 360's and variations of 360's?" I wondered just how far back the basic 360 jump on a bike went. When I was first reading the BMX magazines every month, in 1983, I remembered a story saying that Eddie Fiola did a 360 over doubles in a race, at the Orange YMCA BMX track, I believe. That was where I started my search, looking for the first 360 on video. At the time, Mike Varga had just landed the first 1260 air, a few months earlier, at the X-Games in Riverside, California. It seemed a good time to dig into the video archives of BMX spinning tricks.
This basic search for the first BMX 360 on video opened a huge can of worms, and I wound up spending something like three weeks watching dozens and dozens of BMX videos, looking for 360's, 540's, 720's, 900's, and other variations. The blog post was epic, with links to dozens of "first on video" clips of BMX spinning tricks. Here's that post from November 2021:
In my research, this clip of Andy Ruffel had the earliest BMX 360's I could find, both 360 bunnyhops (also called a "360 whip floater" then), and a 360 over a small jump. At about 25:20 in that clip, you see Andy Ruffel, in front of a moving airplane, do some 360 bunnyhops, among other tricks. He also does a 360 off a mellow jump at 26:04. Three years ago, that was the earliest 360 jump I could find, Andy Ruffel, in the U.K., in 1983. Today, when I looked it up, the short video clip embedded above came up, again with Andy Ruffell, predating this clip by two years. So now, it looks like the clip above, Andy Ruffell in 1981, is the very first 360 jump on a BMX bike that's out there. That means we've now had 43 years of BMX 360 jumps on video, and that called for a blog post. You can check that Spinaroonie blog post for dozens more "first on video" BMX spinning variations. But here's a few more of the early ones.
BMX lost one of the all time top riders last week, Harry Leary. One of the early legends of BMX racing, Harry Leary, passed away last Saturday, September 7, 2024. It was announced on an Instagram post, and the only details I've seen are that he was 65 years old, and died of heat exhaustion in the Arizona desert.
Although he raced for 50 years, part of his iconic status comes from inventing the Leary, one of the classic BMX jumping tricks of all time. The Leary goes back to about 1975 or 1976, I believe, and got dubbed the lookback by freestylers, early on. The still shot on the video above is Harry Leary, doing a Leary, on the July 1984 cover of BMX Action. Easily, this is one of the greatest magazine covers ever. This video above is a review of that magazine, and there is another great shot of Harry in the magazine, a full speed bonzai jump photo. Both the cover shot and the inside two page spread are shots by Jim Cassimus.
Months after I got into BMX in 1982, a couple of my friends got their bikes stolen at a local arcade. Luckily they just figured out a week earlier that their bikes were covered on their parents' renter's insurance policy. With a little bit of creative writing on the insurance claim, they both got big checks for the stolen bikes. One of them bought a 1983 Diamondback Harry Leary Turbo. That was the first top-of-the-line BMX bike I ever got to ride. In a straight line, on the street. He didn't let any of us jump it. That bike felt so good to pedal, compared to the rat bike clunkers we all had at the time. It gave us something to aim for. Like thousands of other kids around the U.S. and the world, Harry Leary helped inspire our little crew in the trailer park outside of Boise to keep riding and progress as BMXers.
Here are some of the highlights I found online for all of you out there who were also inspired by Harry Leary at some point in your riding life.
The Diamondback Harry Leary Turbo- When it comes to the iconic signature BMX bikes of the late 1970's and early 1980's, there are four that really stand out. The Diamondback Harry Leary Turbo, the PK Ripper (Perry Kramer), and for freestyle, the Haro Master (Bob Haro), and the Redline RL-20 (R.L.Osborn). There were others, but those four were above the others in popularity and becoming the great bikes in the many years since.
Here's the Dig BMX intro video to Swampfest 2024 above, the build. Pirate ship halfpipe and a full concrete bowl? No problem. And a whole bunch of other stuff. It's flat out amazing how much stuff they build for this event. It looks amazing. Then comes a weekend of fire, bikes, and mayhem, to quote one of the former FBM slogans. As an Old School Has Been BMX industry geezer and blogger, far outside the loop these days, I'm just going to compile links to most of the best videos here. Watch one, watch 'em all, do what you want. Looks like another crazy fun time at Swampfest 2024.
Video editor tip (from a guy who made BMX videos back in the Dark Ages of S-VHS/Hi8)- If you put people's names in yellow, it shows up better on almost any background. Just sayin'.
Our BMX Day Zero- Swampfest 2024 (practice day- Cameo by Old Schooler John Paul Rogers who has an actual alligator to cook. How'd the gator bar-B-Q turn out?)
Bloom BMX- Swampfest- Waldo, Florida- 2024- 17:32- I think this is my favorite video yet. While the guys were shooting Roman candles, lighting shit on fire, and shooting phone video, the Bloom crew women were actually riding the trails. Little interviews with Robbie Morales and Chris Moeller, and different angle of the mayhem with really funny commentary throughout. All that's missing from this edit is L7's "Everglade" playing in the background. Oh, and don't grab a woman's ass at Swampfest.
This song features Johnny Contardo of the 50's retro group Sha Na Na. Believe it or not, Johnny is a part of the story today. There was a huge 1950's revival movement in the 1970's. The 50's were the post World War II boom years of easy living, all American values of guys with crew cuts, girls in poodle skirts, the rise of rock n' roll music, and where the bad boys were the 50's greasers. The classic greaser had his hair slicked back, usually black hair, he wore Levi's jeans, and a white T-shirt with a pack of Marlboro cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve. The musical play Grease debuted in Chicago in 1971, and made it to Broadway in 1972. Grease echoed back to the movie West Side Story from 1962. In 1973 the movie American Graffiti came out, directed by the then unknown director George Lucas. The success of American Graffiti quickly spawned the long running TV show Happy Days, also about 1950's teens, hot rods, drive-in restaurants, and Fonzie the cool greaser on his motorcycle. In 1978, the movie Grease was a huge hit. The 1950's revival continued into the early 1980's, with the movie The Outsiders in 1983. Even as punk rock and New Wave were rising in popularity, the 50's revival kept going in the mainstream. After the crazy hippies of the 1960's, the older generations of mainstream American culture were starved for the "good ol' days" of the 1950's. The 1950's was seen as as a simpler time, before things got crazy with sex, drugs, and the hippies' acid rock. So for us Gen X kids of the 70's growing up, 1950's culture was everywhere in the little bit of media that existed back then. Out of that love for all things 1950's came Sha Na Na, a 1950's revival and doo wop musical group, who got their own prime time TV show in the late 1970's, and into the early 1980's. Sha Na Na was the band playing at the high school dance in the 1981 movie Grease.
Here I am, the complete opposite of 50's greaser cool, with a casual balance trick on my Skyway T/A. This was my first real BMX bike, which I bought with my high school graduation money. I'm rockin' the 1985 Boise Fun Spot polo shirt, Vaurnets I found in a field, ridiculously short Op cord shorts, and Nike Pegasus running shoes, because I had run cross country the year before, and just liked the Nike's. The Fun Spot was this tiny amusement park in Julia Davis Park, in downtown Boise, right across the river from Boise State University. The Fun Spot was located between the Boise Zoo and the duck pond with the pedal boats. There's a playground in that spot now. I spent the winter of 1984-85 doing Robert Peterson-style balance tricks in our garage, or my bedroom. Photo by Vaughn K.
Before 1985, obviously, came 1984. That year started off kind of crazy, with me being grounded for months, as a high school senior, for throwing a part at my dad's boss' house, while I was house sitting for him. The first night I went out after that, I got a drinking ticket at a party where we all got busted before anyone even got a beer out of the keg. I wasn't as serious of a partier as that makes me sound, and often wound up designated driver for my friends. I graduated high school in 1984, and didn't have any money for college, so I decided to "take a year off."
I was still racing BMX when I graduated from Boise High, I even won a BMX track designing contest, using my drafting skills, and helped re-design and rebuild the Fort Boise BMX track, and designed and helped the track operators build a second track between Boise, and Meridian. Over the winter of 1983-83, I went to indoor races in Caldwell, outside of Boise. We raced over some wooden jumps at first, and then a guy would literally build a track in a livestock arena on the fairgrounds there, two hours before each race. That was pretty amazing. The jumps were small, but the racing was good. I never made it out of the 17 novice class, because I raced intermediates most of the time, and even experts sometimes, depending who showed up. In those days, when I was getting ready to race, guys like Darwin Hansen was a fast 13X I think, and did really well at a lot of nationals later on. Shannon Gillette was two or three gates ahead of me, and he now works for USA BMX. Right behind my gate was Clint Davies, the guy to try and catch in 17 Expert. He was the fastest guy in Boise, and I raced him once in a while in 17 Open class. He's still racing hard these days.
While racing was fun, and there was a really solid regional BMX racing scene in the Boise area, the brand new sport of BMX freestyle, trick riding, was much more interesting to me. I never used up all the free races I got from winning the track designing contest. I met, and soon joined, the only trick team in Idaho, made up of Justin Bickel and Wayne Moore. Wayne, at the ripe old age of 17, soon retired, and Justin (Jay) and I renamed it the Critical Condition Stunt Team. Jay's mom was our promoter, and we did a handful of shows, rode in every local parade, and had the first two BMX freestyle contests in Idaho that summer. My first BMX freestyle trophy was an old, hand me down BMX racing trophy, with a mono-shock bike on it, and brown vinyl on the sides. Seriously. It was so ugly it was great. Wish I still had it.
That was in 1984, the year that BMX freestyle blew up beginning its first big wave of popularity. FREESTYLIN' magazine debuted in 1984, and the AFA held the first flatland and quarterpipe contests in Southern California. In addition, this Mountain Dew commercial featuring Eddie Fiola, R.L. Osborn, Ron Wilkerson, and stuntman Pat Romano, aired on TV all summer long. I'd never seen freestyle on TV before, and most people in Idaho had no idea it even existed as a sport.
That summer I was a ride operator at this tiny amusement park, called The Fun Spot. Even in Boise, The Fun Spot was a joke. My friends made fun of me for working there. But it was a job, and it paid me $2.10 an hour all through the summer of 1984. I got the job because of a guy named Doug in high school, who I met after we all got tickets at that party earlier in the year. I worked 5 or 6 days a week, practiced freestyle tricks for a couple hours every night, and then hung out with my high school friends, none of which were into BMX. I put $1,000 in the bank that summer, with a general plan of going off to college in 1985. My family moved to Virginia, and left me with the three bedroom house and my mom's Ford Pinto that summer. How big of a dork was I? I literally had my own house, for all practical purposes, for about three months, at age 18, and the police never had a reason to show up. I had maybe 8 friends over at a time, but no real parties. I didn't even manage to get laid with my own house. That's how big of a dork, and how shy I was at 18. My dad got a high paying two year job back east, after getting laid off in Boise. But the job ended suddenly in the fall of 1984, and my mom had to borrow my $1,000 to help them move back, and catch up the mortgage payment in Boise. My big lesson that summer was to not save money that my mom knew existed. Somehow a crisis would always happen that needed that money, if she knew anyone around her had money. That was always an issue in my family. Instead of paying me back, my mom decided I had to start paying them $100 a month in rent, but the first ten months would be free. That's kind of how things worked in our house.
After The Fun Spot closed in August, I wound up working nights as a line cook at a Mexican restaurant called Chi-Chi's, kind of like an El Torito type place, a mainstream chain with Mexican food. My family moved back to Boise, and life continued. I rode my bike as much as possible when the weather was good, and partied with my high school, non-BMX friends, on the weekends. But freestyle had become my main focus in life by late 1984.
That's me on the right, running the Ferris wheel, at The Fun Spot, in the summer of 1985. On the ride are co-workers Kim, Michelle, and Pam. On really busy days, like holiday weekends, I'd run into the food stand, call a local pizza place, and have them deliver me a pizza, right to the Ferris wheel. I'm not kidding. When the pizza arrived, people on the Ferris wheel got an extra long ride, while I wolfed down the first slice or two. Photo by co-worker Vaughn K.
I ended 1984 by joining the Marine Reserves, because they had a program to earn money for college. One of my friends had gone into the Marines right after graduation. He came back for Christmas break, and talked all of us into talking to the local recruiters. I was the only one who signed up, partly because my family was out of town for a few days after Christmas.
I stopped smoking weed, which I did maybe every week or two, and spent a couple of months in the delayed entry program. Right before shipping out to boot camp, they told me they might have to talk to my friends, since I might need a security clearance in the Corps. So I told them I had sold "speed," in high school for a couple of months. It was crosstops and black beauties that I sold, actually ephedrine you could buy from an ad in Hustler magazine, but not in Idaho. I didn't know that's where the pills came from at the time. I did it when I lived out in the trailer park, and couldn't make any money. A bottle of 5 Hour Energy is probably 20 times more powerful than what I sold.
The Marines deliberated for a week, and dropped me from the delayed entry program. So with that episode behind me, I kept working as a line cook and riding my bike when I could. Life went back to work, BMX freestyle, hanging with my high school friends, and trying to get laid. In May of 1985, I got tapped to be the manager of The Fun Spot for the summer. Still 18-years-old, I was running the day to day operations of a little amusement park, with 12-13 employees under me.
A photo of two girls riding the Tilt-a-Whirl at The Fun Spot in 1965. Photo nabbed from 107.9 Lite FM website.
The Fun Spot was housed in two or three acres of Julia Davis Park. We had six rides, kiddie cars, kiddie airplanes, a merry-go-round, a kiddie roller coaster, a Tilt-a-Whirl, and a Ferris wheel. There was a little ticket booth in the middle of the park. Behind the ticket booth, there was an 18 hole miniature golf course. Across the gravel covered midway area from the ticket booth was a food stand with popcorn, sodas, cotton candy, and soft serve Italian ice. Near that was a little garage-type building with about six second tier video games. That was in the height of the quarter arcade video game days, but we didn't have Pac-Man, Asteroids, Centipede, Galaga, Joust, or any of the best games. We had games like Red Baron aerial dual, and Food Fight.
The owner of The Fun Spot was owned by a guy named Tim, who was in his mid 30's then. His main business was a construction company, and he was the first real entrepreneurial guy I spent any time working around, a couple of years before stumbling into the BMX and then skateboard industries. Back then, especially in a place like Boise, people all worked jobs. Hardly anyone started their own business. Tim started working at The Fun Spot at age 16 or 17, and bought the amusement park at age 20, with $100 loaned to him by the previous owner's wife. The previous owner was 75 years old or so, and his wife wanted him to actually retire. In the 15 or so year since, Tim had put young guys, from 17 to 21-years-old, in charge, as managers, every summer. He took pride in giving us all some real world experience, actually managing a small business and several employees, when most businesses would debate hiring us in the first place.
He believed in learning by experience, and he gave all of us managers basic instructions, but let us try things when it came to managing 10-13 employees, who we were only a year or two older than usually. Once the park was set-up for the season, Tim would show up in the morning with the cash register drawer with money for the day, and he'd take off. From then until 8 pm or so in the evening, I was in charge. It was an incredible trial by fire in managing a business and employees. If you can get 16-year-old high school kids to pull weeds and mow the "back 40" section of the lawn in 85 to 92 degree weather, and keep the place operating, and deal with mad parents and issues, you could probably manage most other businesses later in life. Tim had a pager, so I could call him in emergencies. But The Fun Spot, the goofy little amusement park my friends made fun of, was my kingdom to run every summer day in 1985. It was a really challenging and great experience for me as an 18-19 year old, that summer. I once had to fire a girl I wanted to go out with. Man that's a great way to kill a relationship before it starts.
One day I got a call in the food stand, a guy said the National Governor's Convention was coming to Boise, and he was looking for places to take the kids of all of the governors during those days. The Fun Spot became one of their activities. Although I was still incredibly shy in general, I saw an opportunity. "Have you every heard of BMX freestyle?" I asked the guy. He hadn't. I told him about our trick team, and wound up doing a freestyle demo for all the governors' kids, in the parking lot in front of The Fun Spot. As expected, all the kids over about ten were not impressed with the tiny amusement park. Most came from cities much bigger than Boise, cities that had real amusement parks. But the kids were really stoked to see a BMX freestyle show, something none of them had seen before. The main thing I remember is that we set up Jay's wedge ramp about two feet beside the quarterpipe, instead of at the other end of the riding area. We were doing alley-oops and bunnyhops to fakie across the little gap, onto the wedge ramp, something we'd been doing for fun at Jay's house. So the kids from all 50 states left pretty stoked. That was really cool.
At one point in mid-summer, Tim came by one evening to do some repairs. He and I headed out to a section of fence behind the Ferris wheel. I think someone had damaged it during the night. As we were making repairs, he asked me what my plans were, for life in general. At that point, I'd been into BMX for three years, which was really uncool for a 19-year-old kid anywhere, but particularly in a pretty conservative city like Boise. Every adult made fun of me, and my love for doing tricks on "a little kid's bike." So I was reluctant to answer.
But Tim was pretty cool, so I told him I really wanted to pursue BMX freestyle, and try to become a pro rider some day. I got that statement out, and held my breath, waiting for the inevitable response "You need to grow up, go to college, and get a real job." Instead, Tim kept working on the fence, turned his head, and said, "Hey, you never know, you wouldn't be the first guy from The Fun Spot to get famous." I was blown away. Tim was the first adult, other than Jay's mom and dad, to take the idea of me making something out of freestyle seriously. I didn't know what to say. He continued, "You know that 50's band, Sha Na Na?" "Yeah," I said. Well Johnny from Sha Na Na used to work here years ago. He went off to college. He came back during the summer, and told me he met some musicians at school, and they were starting a new band, a 50's revival band. That band was Sha Na Na. So you never know, maybe you will go out there and make it big." That fucking blew my mind. We kept talking as we worked, and he told me Johnny even wore his old Fun Spot T-shirt when the band played in Boise.
The kiddie cars ride at The Fun Spot. Photo nabbed from 107.9 Lite FM's website.
We all have some kind of dreams when we're young kids, and then as teenagers and young adults. But there's also a lot of pressure to do the "responsible thing" and "grow up," to become the kind of person that family, friends, and those around us want us to become. Most people don't feel a strong enough drive to follow their dreams, and wind up working reasonably normal jobs, and take a fairly traditional path through life. It's "the sensible thing to do."
The world needs all kinds of people, and it needs lots of people to work traditional jobs. But the world also needs the the rebels who buck the trend, follow their dreams, and do the various types of creative work, where a steady paycheck is often not a sure thing. These people create the art, the music, the movies, the video games, the new technology, and the new businesses and industries. I wasn't particularly creative in school, even in high school. But I was drawn to something, doing tricks on BMX bikes, that was new, and really stupid, in most people's eyes. But I knew it was the right path for me, it was a gut feeling. That day at The Fun Spot, in Boise, where Tim agreed I should go ahead and give it a shot, really meant a lot to me.
I did give it a shot. About 15 months later, after living most of a year in San Jose, California, and publishing a zine, I wound up working for BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines in Southern California. I never became a pro rider. But I did get sponsored for a bit, and I wrote magazine and newsletter articles, shot some photos, and made videos of BMX freestyle. I became one of a relatively small number of BMX industry guys in the 1980's. I saw a lot of really cool moments in BMX and skateboarding happen over the next several years. I didn't wind up performing in a hit TV show like Johnny from Sha Na Na, but I did get to wrestle the American Gladiators as a crew guy for four seasons later on, which was pretty cool. I never met Johnny, but I did see Sha Na Na live at the Orange County Fair a few years after Tim told me Johnny had worked at The Fun Spot.
You can call me a failure at my current point in life. As a long term homeless guy who draws pictures with Sharpies and scrapes by for food money, that's how most people see me. But following my heart to ride BMX bikes, when it seemed like there was no future in it, and almost everyone told me I was screwing up my life, it was definitely the right path for me. BMX led to a whole bunch of other things I never would have done otherwise. Who knows, maybe all the years of writing, blogging, and Sharpie art will make more sense somewhere down the line as well. Time will tell. I'm a BMXer at heart, until I die, even when I'm out of shape and don't have a bike. I still see banks and ledges and curb jumps everywhere I go. I'm also one of those few guys who got to manage a weird little amusement park in Boise in the 1960's, 1970's, 1980's, and into the 1990's. I learned a lot at The Fun Spot, hidden away in a big park in Boise, at $2.10 to $3.15 an hour, over two summers. I'm really glad I had that experience as well.
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In this video, Chad Powers, owner of Powers BMX bike shop and museum, gives a tour of his amazing collection of BMX bikes, components, clothing, magazines and videos. The Powers shop and museum is located in Richmond, Virginia. If you're into BMX, and get near Richmond, go check this place out. You can buy from the Powers BMX website here.*
All of us who got seriously into BMX at some point, remember the bikes, media, and unique frames, forks and components of that era. It's like the cartoons you watched as a little kid, that first period of being into BMX gets imprinted on you. Years later, when you see a bike from that era, or an old set of cranks or handlebars at a garage sale, or find an old video or magazine from that time, it takes you right back to your early days of BMX stoke.
In the weird journey of my life, I landed in Richmond, Virginia, more down and out then usual, in August of 2018. I had never been to Richmond, I didn't know anyone there, as far as I knew, and I had $3.50 in my pocket when I got off the Greyhound bus. About three weeks later, much to my surprise, Former FBM owner Steve Crandall called me up, and said, "Hey, meet me at Powers Bikes this afternoon, I'll help you out." I figured out where the shop was, which at the time was on the side of this big, old industrial building, where several companies manufactured different products. When I got there, Steve wasn't there yet, but I met Chad Powers, who is one of the coolest guys in BMX.
I wound up staying in Richmond for about eight months, and made several trips to Powers during that time. Both Steve and Chad helped me out a lot personally while I was in Richmond, and I really thank them for all their help. But that first day, the shop looked like this high roofed place, more a small warehouse than a bike shop, with dozens and dozens of bikes hanging high up on the walls.
When Chad found out I was a former BMX industry guy who had worked at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines for a short period of time, he led me into a back room with dozens of binders of magazines. Much to my surprise, he asked me to sign my first published article, which I wrote as a freelance guy, for FREESTYLIN'. The article covered the AFA Masters freestyle contest in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the spring of 1986. It appeared in the August '86 issue of FREESTYLIN', with the iconic cover featuring a tiny photo of a new ramp rider, Josh White.
My article wasn't great, by any means. But it just happened to be the article that Mat Hoffman's first editorial photo was in. The industry didn't know who Mat was then, and I had to call around to find out his name, after editor Andy Jenkins said they had a great photo of some young kid doing a no footed can-can, which only two people could do then. They didn't even know Mat's name for the photo caption, but I mentioned him in the article, and he was in the results, winning 14-15 expert. That contest was amazing for me, and seeing the magazine took me back to the weekend that launched me into the BMX industry, and changed my whole life. So that's my personal story of Chad's collection taking me back to my own beginnings in BMX. It's done the same for many other riders before and since. It will be a trip down memory lane if you visit Powers BMX.
Back out in the main part of the shop, which was more of a small warehouse packed with stuff, I saw a bike way up high that looked almost identical to my first bike. I told Chad about it. It happens to be the bike Chad points out in this video, a 1984 or so Skyway T/A, with red Z-Rims and a red pad set. I didn't realize, until watching this video, that finding that bike cheap started Chad's collection. Yep, I had a pad set on my "freestyle" bike, because I was still racing when I got that bike. Chad pulled it down that day, and I got a photo with the bike. Here's me in 1985, on my second BMX bike, and the first frameset I bought new.
Yes, it's a really dorky photo, shot by my co-worker, Vaughn Kidwell, at the Boise Fun Spot, the summer of 1985. I learned a bunch of Robert Peterson style balance tricks over that previous Idaho winter, since I couldn't ride outside much.
While I was in Richmond, Chad told me of his dream to get a bigger shop, and actually be able to have a BMX museum, with his huge collection of bikes, components, jerseys, clothes, magazines, and other things BMX. When I was about to leave the area, he told me he was looking at a new building. So it's great to see this video of Chad taking the time to give a tour of the huge collection displayed in the new building.
For all of you old schoolers and mid schoolers out there, if you have some BMX stuff that's cool and vintage, and you'd like to put it somewhere that lots of other BMXers and see it and appreciate it, think about donating to the Powers BMX museum. Again, if you're into BMX, and wind up near Richmond, Virginia at some point, go see Chad and the BMX museum, you'll be glad you did.
Here are a couple of photos I shot at the BMX DIY World Championships jam in 2018, put on by Steve Crandall and Chad Powers, at Powers BMX's old location.
I had been away from the sport for so long that I don't know who either of these riders are. If you do know, hit me up on Facebook or email, and let me know.
* Not a paid link.
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Lifers... A short documentary on the Old School BMXers from Belfast that are still riding
today.
I first saw Will Smyth at the very first King of Dirt Jam, in Palmdale, California, in 1987. I can't remember if I actually talked to him that day or not. A few years later, in the early 1990's, after BMX "died," he stayed at our apartment while on holiday, on trips to the States. I got to know him then. When he started Dig BMX magazine, I was one of many who wrote some articles for those early issues. Design-wise, Dig was the coolest BMX magazine since FREESTYLIN'. Content wise, those early issues had the feel of a zine, but in a really cool, full color magazine, with killer layout and design.
I got contacted a couple months ago to contribute a little bit to one of the articles in a new magazine, aimed at the Old School BMX crowd... the lifers. I was told the name, Greystoke. It sounded like a cool idea. I was more than happy to send in a bit of text on the subject. Later on, I found it was Will Smyth, the crew from Dig BMX, along with lifelong rider and industry guy, Scott Towne, doing this project. I knew this was going to be something special, and have been waiting for it to come out.
Dennis McCoy, blowing minds at age 20 (he should have beat Woody), and more than three decades later at age 52, and at age 56. He's got to be part alien, or part Yoda, or something. Legend. Lifer.
When I sat down to write this blog post, I looked for some old video of Will, or some of the other U.K. riders, from the early 90's. Much to my surprise, I found the short documentary above. Even better. Far from sunny Southern California, across a continent and an ocean, in Belfast, lived a crew of BMX riders as hardcore as any guys, anywhere. From the crew that brought us Dig BMX in the 1990's, now comes Greystoke, as the original Generation X BMXers ride through middle age, now in their 40's 50's, and even early 60's. Once BMX gets ahold of you, it doesn't let go. As we all learned decades ago, action sports are lifestyle sports. Into today's 21st century world comes Greystoke BMX magazine. Check it out, and pre-order here: Greystoke BMX.* They have some merch, too.
Blogger's note- 8/2/2023: I live a weirder life than most these days. I had a few rough days before when I first sat down and wrote this blog post. I wrote this post while in a really frustrated mood. Last night, I kept thinking about it. What I wrote just didn't sit well with me. So I re-wrote the post this morning. I wasn't trying to piss anyone off yesterday, I just wrote when I was in a bad place, when I was far more sarcastic than normal. I haven't checked any comments yet, I just rewrote the post for my own reasons.
* Not a paid link.
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Yeah, I was being a bit sarcastic in the title. Chase Hawk got some property, moved himself, the wife, and the kid out to it, and then built his dream ramp. Way to go. No matter how far our lives may have diverged from the BMX world, if you spent some serious time riding back in the day, something like this was the dream. Props to Chase for pulling it off.
After the intro part about the dream, and building this crazy bikepark in his yard, Chase proceeds to completely tear the place up. Transfers and variations every which way possible, and then some. Just watch the video. then watch it again.
What this really reminds me of was a time when I worked at Unreel Productions (Vision). As cameraman in either 1988 or 1989, I got the great job of driving a van load of skaters out to the Blockhead Ramp, somewhere out in the SoCal boonies, south of Orange County. That was the first really cool, privately owned ramp set up I ever saw, with bowl corners and all. I think every one of us there was thinking, "I want this in my backyard some day." That day sticks out in my mind, and this video of Chase really reminds me of that. I didn't have a bike to ride, mostly because it was a skaters only spot. But I got to hang out and shoot video, and get paid for it, which was a great day in my book, back then.
The other thing that stands out in my mind about that day is that this guy. He was 14 or 15 then, I think, and he was one of the skaters I drove out there. That's the first time I met him. You never know who those young BMXer and skater kids will turn out to be. when you first meet them. To bring this post full circle, I only met Chase once, when I gave him a ride in my taxi one night, with a couple of the Sheep Hills locals.
Another BMXer built his dream ramp. Who's next?
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A backwards bunnyhop won real street at Rincon, over the rail, down the big drop. Fucking wow.
I learned backwards bunnyhops in 1988, because I was a dork, and knew I couldn't hang in flatland anymore, once the locomotive and whiplash were invented. And by "hang" I mean place in the middle of the pack, in a class of fifty 17& over intermediates, in flatland at an AFA Masters comp.
So I started trying a bunch of weird bunnyhop tricks, just seeing what was possible. Since I rode with skateboarders every weekend at the Huntington Beach Pier, I learned a few skate tricks on my bike, like half-Cabs (roolback to 180 bunnyhop) and no complys (footplant to 180 on flat), backside bonelesses (can-can footplant on a bank), and nollies (nosewheelie into a speed bump to hop).
In the freestyle world at the time, those weren't even tricks. Pretty much no one else did them. Eddie Roman did footplants to 360's, along with dozens of other weird, hard, and innovative tricks. So goofing around on my own, I got to where I could do 6-7 foot backwards bunnyhops on flat, 6-7 foot half-Cabs (on a freewheel, not freecoaster, so I could launch farther) and full Cabs (rollback to 360 bunnyhop, only landed a few). I tried a bunch of other bunnyhop tricks, and famously spent years trying to pull a bunnyhop tailwhop, but never landed a single one. None of those things were even considered tricks at the time.
Then, 15-20 years later, with stronger bikes, and when street riding had progressed a lot, riders discovered those old skate-inspired tricks, and took them to gaps, drops, ledges, and banks. They kept pushing them to new levels. So as a complete dork of a rider from the 80's and 90's, I'm stoked to see an completely fucking insane, HUGE backwards bunnyhop win Real Street at the X-Games. I never even dreamed something like that would be possible. Mad props to Colin Varanyak, and all these riders.
My favorite part of all the X-Games footage I've seen was the cutaway shot during the dirt jumping comp. The camera panned over to Cory Nastazio, standing near a pole, watching the action, and just goes, "Wow." Yeah... Wow.
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I've tried a whole bunch of blog ideas in the last 15 years. Starting with a terrible taxi driver blog in 2007, I found my voice in 2008-2010 with FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales, and then FREESTYLE BMX Tales (original version), both of which I deleted because I was a depressed idiot in 2012. Even when I had one popular blog, sometimes I'd take time off and try other ideas for a while. Altogether, I've tried at least 50 blog ideas, and half of those, or more, are still on the web somewhere.
Crazy California 43 was an idea that I thought had a chance of being a money earning blog. I wrote a bunch of posts, it looked pretty cool, but it wasn't getting near enough views from tourists to make my idea work. Because of my financial situation, I couldn't get out and travel, and shoot photos or videos of the spots I wanted to cover. So I just stopped working on it. Another idea tried.
It's also one of the blogs I lost control of, when three of my Google accounts got mysteriously shutdown one night, for no apparent reason. If I could get into the account, I could cut and paste the whole post to this blog. But I can't. I've been wanting to link it here for a while, so here it is. My best take at the history of Sheep Hills in Costa Mesa.
As of the late summer of 2023, I'm doing a lot of my writing on Substack, a platform designed specifically for writers. Check it out!
Tony Hawk, during the best trick jam at the 1999 X-Games in San Francisco. I think it was on the 11th attempt he landed the first 900 on a skateboard ever. He'd been trying the trick for nearly ten years.
Ride a bike, it will take you places. SE Bikes brand manager Todd Lyons says that a lot these days, and he's right. There were about 5,000 stories of Tony Hawk landing this 900, the first ever on a skateboard, that night on a pier in San Francisco, a different story for each person in that crowd. This is my version. I was standing behind the pro skaters, less than 20 feet from the side of the ramp, talking to San Francisco BMX freestyle legend Maurice Meyer. My Sony Digital8 video camera was in my hand... with a dead battery. I'm glad actually, that was a moment I was happy to just stand there and witness, without trying to capture it on video, and keep him well framed during each try. More than a decade later, in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Sean Penn's character sums up that feeling better than I've ever heard it described.
I had finagled a press pass to the X-Games that year, planning to write an article or two for Dig Magazine in the U.K. about the contest. Maurice had nabbed a VIP pass, too. I rode with him and the other Golden Gate Park locals, most weekends, during the one year I lived there, in 1985-86. We ran into each other near the end of the BMX vert practice, and started talking about "the old days" and how much BMX and action sports had changed over 12 or 13 years' time.
While we were talking at the bike halfpipe, a red helicopter with a World Industries logo on the side of it, hovered near the ramps, and started dropping stickers. The handful of kids around the area ran around picking them up. Then we realized that something else was getting thrown out of the chopper, little wadded up pieces of paper. Because of the breeze, most were falling on the empty BMX ramp area, where we were, not on the skateboard crowd. Someone grabbed one of the pieces of paper, and unraveled it. "It's money" they said. Suddenly all of us jaded Old School guys were picking them up, too. Mike Dominguez Jr., amped up after an afternoon of free Mountain Dew, sprinted around and grabbed 30 or 40 of the wadded up dollar bills, I think. I wound up with four of them, each with a World Industries skateboard character, like Flame Boy or Wet Willie, rubber stamped on them. We laughed at yet another example of Steve Rocco's crazy promotion methods. When in doubt, just throw money on the crowd. I literally had real helicopter money in my pocket when Maurice and I decided to walk over and watch the skate best trick jam, which had just started.
Dusk was descending on the huge pier that housed the 1999 X-Games, next to San Francisco Bay. With our passes, we just walked over and stood behind the rows of chairs there for pro skaters and their girlfriends, wives, and a few kids. In some of the wide shots in the clip above, you can see two really bright lights, that look lke stars on the video. We were right below, and maybe 20 feet in front of those lights, they were shining over our heads, lighting up the skate halfpipe for the TV cameras.
Maurice and I kept talking, as the world's best skaters tried their newest and best tricks. As I recall, Pierre Luc Gagnon was trying to land a heeflip Caballerial, as Steve Caballero himself sat 10 feet in front of me. Bob Burnquist was trying a one footed Smith Grind to revert, I believe. Other skaters were trying their "Merry Christmas" tricks, the things they could land once in a while. For Tony Hawk, that was the varial 720. About 12 or 15 minutes into the half hour jam, he landed one. Then he went back up, and just stood on deck a few minutes.
Skaters dropped in, sometimes snaking each other, to try to pull that one big trick. It was the closest thing I'd seen to "real," everyday skateboarding in a contest environment. The best trick jam was a concession to the vert skaters, who still weren't really happy with ESPN's take on skateboarding, in their 4th year of the putting on the X-Games. The big TV contest idea for action sports was evolving, as skaters got more involved and vocal about how they were portrayed to millions of viewers.
It was obvious the bigwigs at ESPN didn't give a shit about the best trick jam, but they had a big crowd, around 5,000 people in the stands on the other side of the ramp, so they kept the cameras rolling. It would make for soem good highlight clips, I think that's how they saw it. Old School skater and announcer, Dave Duncan, called the action out live from the deck. Maurice and I watched and talked.
Then Tony Hawk dropped in again, and no one paid that much attention. Until he opened up out of what looked like a over-rotated 540. We stopped talking, "Did he just try a 900?" one of us asked the other. I can't remember who said it. Tony walked back up to the top of the ramp, and did the same thing a couple of more times. The second rotation got tighter and tighter. After the 3rd or 4th try, he walked off the side of the ramp, facing us, He was 15 or 20 feet away, and we could totally see his eyes, he had the stare, the "thousand yard stare," as I've heard some call it. He was looking right towards us, but saw nothing. Pure focus. I asked Maurice, "Did you see his eyes? He's serious. He's either going to land it or go to the hospital trying." Maurice agreed.
The whole aura of the place shifted. Other skaters stopped dropping in. The skaters on the deck knew Tony really wanted the 900, and stepped back in respect. It wasn't planned. No color commentary guy had to spew stats and percentages to hype people up. The energy in the whole area changed. This was real skateboarding at it's best.
A top skater just got a taste that tonight was the night to land the unlandable trick, and Tony just laser focused on it. Everyone stopped skating after a couple more attempts. It wasn't about trophies or prize money anymore. We all wanted to see Tony Hawk progress vert skating to the next level. Tony kept trying, getting more and more determined, and closer to landing it. Dave Duncan kept talking into the mike like only a hardcore skateboarder could. This was a moment, one way or the other.
I think it was on the 7th attempt that Tony landed on the board, made it a few feet, then washed out on the flatbottom. I jumped up in the air screaming, I gave that one to him. But he didn't ride away, it wasn't clean, he wanted it 100%. He kept trying. On the 11th attempt, I believe, is when Tony Hawk landed the first skateboard 900 air, totally solid. Everyone went nuts.
If you freeze that video above at about 6;03, you'll see Maurice right behind Tony, in a white hoodie, with sunglasses. He ran up there with all the skaters to congratulate Tony. I, for some reason, stayed right where I was, 30 feet away, watching the pandemonium. The place went nuts. But I had seen that happen before, 10 years earlier, up in Canada.
Mat Hoffman's first 900, at 14:43 in this clip, in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, in the spring of 1989. After the intro with Eddie Roman's girlfriend, this is the footage that I shot from that contest, with Eddie and friends doing their funny color commentary over it. This is from the 1990-2-Hip video, Ride Like a Man, edited by Eddie Roman.
Riding a bike did take me places. I was a dorky, unathletic kid who grew up in Ohio, spent 9th grade living in New Mexico, and then lived in Boise, Idaho through high school. The summer after my sophomore year, I got into BMX riding, then BMX racing, and then new sport of BMX freestyle, in 1983. A year after I graduated high school, my family moved to San Jose, California. I worked at Pizza Hut, started publishing a freestyle zine, and met the Bay areas freestylers, like Maurice, Dave Vanderspek, Robert Peterson, Hugo Gonzalez, and a couple dozen more. My zine led me to a magazine job in Southern California. I wasn't punk rock enough for that place, and I got laid off. I got a job editing a newsletter, which led to working at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company, in late 1987. I was out riding three hours a night like everyone else, but didn't have the balls to make it to pro caliber as a BMX freestyler. By 1989, I was Unreel's camerman, traveling to all the 2-Hip vert and street contests to shoot video, because Vision Street Wear sponsored the contests.
While I was bouncing around the BMX and industries, the early skatepark riders inspired a bunch of great quarterpipe riders around the U.S. and Europe. In 1987, Haro pro Ron Wilkerson started putting on halfpipe contests. Riders like Todd Anderson, Josh White, Joe Johnson, and this kid from Oklahoma, named Mat Hoffman, moved up the amateur ranks and into pro. They pushed the older guys like Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez, as vert riding progressed.
The first 2-Hip King of Vert of 1989 was in Kitchener, Ontario Canada. The less than epic 2-Hip halfpipe was set up in a college gymnasium for the weekend, and the riders, amateur and pro, gave it their best. The talk of the weekend was that this crazy, unknown guy from Canada, called The Terminator, was going to do a backflip abubaca or fakie or something. No one except lake jumper Jose Yanez had done flips on a BMX bike then. No one had even tried them on vert. The Terminator was an amateur, and when his final run came up, he did a high fakie, leaned back a little, and crashed hard. The weekend up hype fizzled.
The rest of the amateurs rode their runs, blasting high and pulling their best tricks. Joe Johnson landed the first double tailwhip air, which was amazing. I was on the deck, with a $50,000, 35 pound, rented Ikegami Betacam, shoulder checking photographer John Ker for a good angle to shoot from. I was doing my best to get good footage of the days events.
Then came Mat Hoffman, in what I believe was his second pro contest. He won his first pro contest. At the end of his final run, with about 300 people watching, mostly Canadians, he nearly landed a 900. Mat got up, and went for it again, landing the first BMX 900 in a contest, and the first recorded 900 in any action sport. Even snowboarders hadn't pulled a 900 air at that point. I caught it on video from the deck, and Eddie Roman and another guy caught it from two angles below. Mat Hoffman, new pro vert rider and wonderkid, broke the 900 barrier in action sports, with video and photos to prove it. Word was the Mike Dominguez had landed a 900 or two on his own ramp. But there were no photos or video. Mat made it official, the 900 was possible.
By some weird quirk of fate, me, the goofy kid from Ohio and Idaho, was there to get video. And by an even crazier quirk of fate, I was in San Francisco a decade later to watch Tony Hawk do it, live, on a skateboard. The only other two people that I know were in both places were Mat and his buddy Steve Swope. But they were running the bike contest in 1999, and I don't think they were watching the skate best trick jam. I'm not sure. There may have been a couple of people who saw both happen live.
We live in a weird Universe, and really crazy coincidences happen now and then. It still trips me out that I somehow saw both of these happen live, right in front of me. Riding a bike did take me places, for the first 20 years of my adult life. I met alot of cool people, traveled around the U.S., and into Canada a couple of times.
Then I got injured, became a taxi driver, and things went into a downhill spiral. I think life wanted to kick my ass for a couple of decades to teach me some other lessons. One of the things I've learned is that there are a lot of ways to spend your time in life, and goofing around on bikes is one of the best ways. You never know where it will lead you. Ride on!
A couple of guys goofing around in a garage led to a revolution in consumer technology that changed the course of human history. That is not an understatement. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were fascinated by the emerging technology of computers in the early 1970's. Woz built the Apple 1, and Steve decided they needed to sell them to other hobbyists. Apple Computers, now Apple, was born in 1975. What kind of phone do you have? These two guys were ,arguably, the most influential Creative Scene in history.
"Buck lived at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara valley... There were great stables... rows of vine-clad servants' cottages, an endless and orderly array of outhouses, long grape arbors, green pastures, orchards, and berry patches."
-Jack London
From the second paragraph of The Call of the Wild, 1903, describing the Santa Clara valley, the San Jose area of California, in the 1890's, when the Klondike gold rush began
My interest in what I now call Creative Scenes began with my first BMX race, October of 1982, in Boise, Idaho. About ten of us from the Blue Valley mobile home park piled into my dad's big, silver, Ford van, to go race the last BMX race of the season. Three guys raced the week before, after we heard a track actually existed in Boise, and I tagged along to watch and coach. They all got first or second place in their novice class. We went back to the trailer park, and got everyone else stoked on the idea. So I talked my dad into borrowing the van the next week. We got there way too early, and rode around a very rudimentary BMX track, which seemed like the coolest thing ever to us.
We wore faded Levi's and T-shirts, and rode bargain store BMX frames, cobbled together with mismatched, halfway decent components, some stolen. We got pie plates with a number in marker on it, taped to our handlebars, for numberplates. The Boise BMX scene was already solid, but not fast growing. So even in our first or second races, in the novice class, we all raced some intermediates, and novices who had raced for months. The track gave trophies for 1st through 3rd place. We all went home with trophies, mostly 1sts and 2nds. Most of the kids we raced against were on $400 to $600, top-of-the-line BMX bikes, many had full racing leathers and fancy helmets. We shared a few old, heavy, motorcycle helmets we borrowed from dads in the trailer park.
All day long we kept hearing kids and parents asking the same question, "Who are all these kids on crappy bikes, and why are they all fast?" That whole summer, we had been coming out as it cooled down each evening, and riding our BMX bikes, pushing each other to get better. I later realized we had formed a little BMX scene, completely by accident. Isolated in the trailer park outside of town, from most of the people we went to school with, and the whole city of Boise, BMX became our thing. We were high school and junior high kids, and we just kept trying to outdo each other, to race faster, jump higher or farther, and learn new tricks the other guys couldn't do. By forming a little scene where BMX became our life, we improved faster than many other guys in town, who liked BMX, but also did a bunch of other activities. We were fairly focused, day after day, and hungry to be good at something. There's not a whole lot of positive reiforcment for kids in most trailer parks. So we showed up at the last race, and beat a bunch of much more experienced racers.
At first I wondered how that happened. In time, I figured out we had created a hardcore little BMX scene. I became fascinated with the scenes in BMX freestyle, and later was a part of several different scenes as I moved around over the years. In time I realized these scenes existed in skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, and other action sports. I also realized they were similar to the art and music scenes that we've all heard of. Later still, I was a part of a few art scenes, and learned that high tech start-ups, and entrepreneurial scenes also exist. These are all different forms of Creative Scenes.
So what's a Creative Scene? My working definition is that it's a group of two or more people who get together on a regular basis, to pursue some creative endeavor.
The video above, which appears to be a segment of a larger program, starts with Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004. He leaves the Boston area, home to Harvard, where he went to school, and to MIT. He moved his fledgling social media busniess to Palo Alto, part of "Silicon Valley," officially the Santa Clara Valley on the south end of the San Francisco Bay. The area is anchored by San Jose, and a bunch of suburb cities on the west side, heading up into the peninsula leading to San Francisco.
From the birth of Hewlett-Packard decades before, the area had grown into THE place for cutting edge computer technology work, by 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg took his social media platform there. From the grape arbors and fruit orchards that Jack London wrote of more than 100 years earlier, the San Jose/Santa Clara Valley area had become a massive scene of many interwoven tech scenes, some influenced by the strong counter culture wirters, hippies, and music scenes, just to the north in San Francisco. London himself, in his day, was a part of the Carmel writing scene in the early 20th century, not far to the southwest.
It was in this large, originally defense-oriented, high technology region, an area with thousands of engineers and computer scientists, that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were raised. They grew up in a huge a scene of interwoven high tech, and other Creative Scenes, including the R&D departments of major corporations, computer hobbyists, along with the counter culture, music, and other scenes in nearby San Francisco.
They not only had an interest in computers and new technology as young kids, but they were surrounded by a culture of many different Creative Scenes, and a big part of the high tech industry. As Steve Wozniak says, if he hadn't been surrounded by both the engineers and tech people, and his dad's other connections in the industry, his first score of 400 transitiors, and his first homemade computer, would never have happened. He would have still had the interest in computers, but lacked many of the other factors that led to his and Jobs' success later on. His story would have been much different. Being in that area was a big part of what made the Homebrew Club, one of the most legendary high tech Creative Scenes ever, to form. That was a key part of the story of Apple Computers, and many other early innovators in tech.
Creative Scenes can be as simple and small as two 5-year-olds drawing "cool cars" in the back of a kindergarten class, or two tween girls learning dance moves in the living room off of TikTok or YouTube. Or Creative Scenes can be as massive as Apple, now a $2.6 trillion company, which is a scene of probably hundreds of smaller Creative Scenes interwoven inside the business. I'm going to be writing quite a bit on the whole concept of Creative Scenes in the future, and looking at all kinds of them throughout recent history, and maybe farther back, at some point.
We are now, in late April 2023, at the edge of what I believe will be the worst recessionary period of our lifetimes. We are now in the "powers-at-be says there won't be a serious recession" part of the timeline, which happens for a few months right before every recession, then things really head down. Yes, recessions and depressions suck on many levels. But they are also times of incredible change and innovation. Recessions are a great time to try out new ideas, because a lot of old, lame ideas come crumbling down, in many parts of society. Economic down times are when lots of new ideas, movements, businesses, and industries are really needed.
This is a little look at the general idea of Creative Scenes, which most of us have some knowledge of, but I think will become much more important in the next several years. There will be much more on this concept coming in this blog, on my Patreon page, and in other my other writing. Stay tuned...
