Frank Fritz, long time co-star of American Pickers, just passed away yesterday, September 30th, 2024. I've been a fan of the show since I first saw it, shortly after it hit the air in 2010. Frank had a stroke in 2022, leaving him in a wheelchair, and just passed away at age 60. He's best known for about a decade of driving around the U.S. with Mike Wolfe, looking to pick antiques and collectibles, to resell. They picked "rusty gold" treasures from garages, barns, long fading outbuildings, and anywhere else cool stuff has been stored for years.
Since I live in the San Fernando Valley now, I picked the segment where Mike and Frank visited custom car legend the late George Barris, in his shop in North Hollywood, California. They got to sit in the original Batmobile, from the 1960's TV show. That's a big thing for young Boomers and old Gen Xers. In that episode, Frank and Mike got a tour of the shop that put out decades of customized cars for TV, movies, and private clients. They did pick up some collectibles, photos and similar things, from Barris, but this clip is just the first part of that show.
My dad was a guy who was always "wheelin' and dealin'" all kinds of things as I grew up, items bought from gun shows, garage sales, and flea markets. He taught me how to make a few bucks on the side when I was a kid. Many years later, I got into buying and flipping stuff from storage unit auctions, and tried to turn that into a business at one point. That never really got going full time, but I still enjoy looking for odd treasures in old junk, and may get back to it some day. So American Pickers was right up my alley, and I really enjoyed Mike and Frank's adventures, and learned a lot from the show. So it's sad to see "the bearded charmer," as Mike often called him, pass on from this life. RIP Frank.
The Canadian Beast, Jay Miron, just got inducted into the USA BMX Hall of Fame this past weekend. He ripped on flatland, he ripped on ramps, he ripped on street, and he did the first double backflip on a BMX bike in 1997 for Canadian TV. Congratulations Jay on induction into to the USA BMX Hall of Fame. I'd never seen this segment above before, and it would be amazing if it came out today, and it's absolutely mind blowing for 20 years ago, in 2004. See kids, this is what's possible if you have brakes on your bike (and practice for over 20 years and have balls the size of Manitoba).
This past weekend, BMX freestylers the late Jeff Watson and Hugo Gonzales got inducted into the USA BMX Hall of Fame in the "Early Freestyle" category, and Jay Miron in the "Modern Freestyle" category. Congratulations to all of you! You can watch their acceptance speeches on the link below. Jeff Watson at 1:34:30, Hugo Gonzales at 2:04:47, and Jay Miron at 2:39:06.
Here's the crazy thing, when you look up FREESTYLIN' magazine on YouTube, almost nothing comes up. How is there no documentary about FREESTYLIN'? Mark Eaton, what are you up to these days? This video above is former EXPN website editor Brian Tunney shooting a video at 3162 Kashiwa Street in Torrance, California, in 2019, I believe. That building was the longtime home of Wizard Publications, which put out BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, as well as two or three issues of Homeboy magazine. The words, and especially the photos, that came out of this building in the 1980's, changed the lives of thousands of us BMXers and early freestylers in that era. This is the best video I could find paying homage to FREESTYLIN'.
Bob "Oz" Osborn, founder and owner of Wizard Publications, begins the introduction for the FREESTYLIN' magazine staff introduction at 30:30 in that link above.
Last weekend, September 21st, 2024, the legendary staff of FREESTYLIN' magazine was inducted into the USA BMX Hall of Fame, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the BMX freestyle "Industry" category. The staff of FREESTYLIN' inducted includes the editor Andy Jenkins, assistant editor Mark "Lew" Lewman, managing editor/proofreader Don Tosach, art director Janice Jenkins, associate editor/photographer Spike Jonze, advertising salesperson Valerie Adlam, and receptionist/mild-mannered superhuman Dian Harlan. They are all completely deserving of this honor, and it's great to see them all included in the official BMX Hall of Fame. This group of people inspired thousands of us kids doing tricks on bikes around the U.S. and around the world, including me. Wizard Publications owner Bob Osborn, and his daughter and photographer, Windy Osborn are already members of the BMX Hall of Fame.
FREESTYLIN' magazine was the bible of 1980's BMX freestyle. It was, by far, the hippest, coolest, most stylish BMX magazine ever. I was a dorky BMX freestyler in Boise Idaho, way up at 43 degrees of latitude, when the first issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine came out in the summer of 1984. I didn't even see the first two issues of it until long after they came out. The first issue of the mag that I got my hands on was issue #3. It had SE Racing freestyler Todd Anderson one the cover, blasting a one footed tabletop over a convertible Volkswagen bug full of SE's BMX racing legends, including Scot Breithaupt, Perry Kramer, Toby Henderson, and several others. From that issue on, I spent hours reading every single issue of FREESTYLIN' for the next several years.
Like so many other riders out there at the time, when it was definitely not cool to do tricks on a "little kid's bike," FREESTYLIN' was the main thread showing us kids around the world what was happening in Southern California in BMX freestyle, and later all over the U.S. and the world. In 1984-1985-1986 and beyond, we didn't have the internet, YouTube, or even very many BMX freestyle videos in those early years. FREESTYLIN' was where we got the news, new tricks, style, attitude, and DIY ethic that was the rapidly changing and progressing sport of BMX freestyle. As my blog readers know, BMX freestyle changed the entire course of my life, and FREESTYLIN' magazine was a huge inspiration in those years. I had a complete collection of FREESTYLIN' issues, until I lost them in a move back east in 2008.
Here are a few clips of some of the FREESTYLIN' magazine staff members since the 1980's.
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.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, "Jungleland," live in Tempe, Arizona in 1980. This is my personal favorite of Bruce Springsteen's several epic, long songs. This song contains one of my all time favorite lines anywhere, "...and then the poets down here don't write anything at all, they just stand back and let it all be."
I've written somewhere over 2,800 blog posts in the last 16 years, and have told hundreds of little stories about my days in BMX freestyle in the 1980's and 1990's. I've written about many other things as well. These days, I'm doing most of my writing on my Substack site. Since this blog hit 1,000 posts, I've throttled back on the new posts. It still gets a bunch of views from various links. But I just do posts here that seem really interesting to me at the time. This is an idea that popped into my head a couple days ago, while listening to some classic rock songs.
My first car was a 1971 Pontiac Bonneville. It was a gigantic four door sedan powered by an Oldsmobile 455 V-8, and it was about 18 1/2 feet long. A land yacht. That car was big, powerful, horrible on gas, and a blast to get loose in, on snowy roads in the winter. It could hold 10 or 12 drunk high school kids, and my taxi driving career really began in Boise, Idaho, in 1983, when I would be the designated driver, and drive a bunch of teens home from parties. These, big, long, hard rock songs remind me of my land yacht Pontiac. Big and comfortable and a memorable part of a certain era.
There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of great Rock n' Roll songs that have been sung, recorded, and often covered by others later on. But there's this subset of Rock songs that are really long, let's say, over 5 minutes, and epic rock as well. Here are a bunch of my favorite long, epic rock songs.
Just for the record, I listened to every song in its entirety while working on this blog post, except for "In A Godda Da Vida." I had limited online time at the library, so I skipped over that 20 minute epic. When I started out on this idea, I thought there were about 10 or 15 classic, long songs from the 1970's and early 1980's. Then I got into this blog post, and just kept finding more epic, long songs. I didn't link every song, there are quite a few more, but I got most of the classic rock bands known for long songs, and then brought it right up to the present day. 91 epic songs and performances over 5 minutes each. Enjoy.
I do most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform designed specifically for writers. Check it out:
I've been living homeless in the San Fernando Valley. Yes, this is the place Moon Unit Zappa made fun of way back in 1982. They don't talk like that anymore, by the way. Fer shur. The Valley is just north of the Los Angeles basin, on the other side of those little mountains where the Hollywood sign is. The SoCal weather, overall, is way better than any place else I've lived. But it's pretty damn hot this week. The interwebs said it was 112 degrees (F) here yesterday. We've got a few more days of this.
So I'm doing my best to stay out of the heat and stay hydrated this week. Doing a little blogging and a bunch of writing and reading, mostly.
I just finished reading the book, When McKinsey Comes to Town, by journalists Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe. The book was straight out mind blowing. McKinsey & Co. is a management consultant company that's nearly 100 years old, and has advised many of the best known, major corporations, and many government agencies in the U.S., and around the world. After reading this book, I'd like to try and explain who McKinsey is, but John Oliver and the LastWeek Tonight crew does it so fucking well in this video above. Just watch the video.
"To those convinced that a secretive cabal controls the world, the usual suspects are the Illuminati, Lizard People, or 'globalists.' They are wrong, naturally. There is no secret society shaping every major decision and determining the direction of human history. There is, however, McKinsey & Company."
- a former McKinsey consultant, quoted in the book, When McKinsey Comes to Town. (p.278).
For me, learning about McKinsey & Co., in the last several weeks, started with wondering why McDonald's corporate officers seem to be making so many odd decisions in recent years. As someone who eats at McDonald's a lot, I began to wonder why McDonald's seems to have forgotten that they actually run restaurants.
I started checking out some of the YouTube videos about the fast food industry and McDonald's, like this one, and this one. With the pandemic and high inflation afterwards, the last few years have been incredibly tough for fast food restaurants in general. McDonald's issues though, go back a decade or more. The McDonald's corporate officers, according to multiple reports, have been increasingly squeezing more money out of the local franchisees for several years now. This became such an issue, that McDonald's franchisees actually started a union, to collectively voice their issues to the corporate officers. As time passed in recent years, the local owners, the franchisees, have seen decreasing profits in many places, due to corporate decisions in many cases. And then, the pandemic hit, with the business shutdowns, followed by high inflation and rising prices for food items. As a business owner, that's a lot to deal with.
After a while, I came across this article, with McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski, from 2021. In it, and the embedded video, he talks about McDonald's focusing more attention on their rewards program, and delivery orders using Postmates, Uber Eats, and similar delivery platforms. He also talks about McDonald's testing out restaurants that had no inside seating at all, just drive-thru, phone order takeouts, and delivery orders.
It looks like that for three years or more, McDonald's has been looking into the cost savings of having fast food restaurants, with no actual "restaurant." I have a hunch, that if you polled 1,000 Americans, and asked them, "What is McDonald's?" their answers would say that it's a fast food restaurant where families go to eat for a reasonable price, or something similar to that. Tens of millions of current American adults played, as little kids, in the Play Places that no longer exist at McDonald's.
Somehow I don't think the idea of McDonald's being just a drive-thru/delivery business would fly with most current customers. Not for the long term, anyhow. Maybe that's just me. It also seems like it would be difficult to get the owners of the 12,775 McDonald's franchisees in the U.S. to shut down the indoor part of the restaurant, when it usually costs $1 million to $2 million to buy a McDonald's franchise. In any case, it appears there's a lot more drama ahead for most, if not all, fast food companies, for the corporate staff and franchisees alike.
In any case, that article with the McDonald's CEO is on the McKinsey & Co. website. So I asked myself, "Who's McKinsey?" That's when I found the LastWeek Tonight video above, and a bunch of other interesting posts about this consulting firm. Last week, looking for an interesting book in the local library, I stumbled upon When McKinsey Comes to Town. Since that three year old article is on the McKinsey website, it's obvious that McKinsey was consulting Mickey D's in 2021, and likely still is. After reading that book, I now understand how McDonald corporate could have forgotten that they actually run restaurants, not just phone app delivery sites.
Several weeks ago, I was wondering why my local McDonald's no longer have dedicated clerks manning the register and taking orders full time. That led to this crazy trip through learning about the current the tribulations of the fast food industry, and then to this secretive management consulting firm that literally seems like a parody of the terms "management consulting." Man, it's a weird world we live in, and McKinsey has had consulting gigs with a lot of it in 100 years.
