The Ultimate Weekend video story 3: The H Ramp

The part of the video I'm talking about today is the H-Ramp, the mini ramp segment from 2:06 to 4:28.  The main rider is Keith Treanor, in the white T-shirt, and also Alan Valek in the black shorts.   Local Huntington Beach flatlanders Sean Johnson (the black dude) and Andy Mucahy are in there, and I can't remember the name of the guy with the long hair.

Sit down my little childrens, it's time for a lesson in bikin' from way back in the dark ages.  If you just watched the clip of the H-Ramp at the times above, you're probably thinkin,' "That's some really boring mini-ramp riding set to some guitar guy playing elevator music."  OK, fair assessment by today's standards.  But this was waaaaaay back in 1990.  Money was tight, sponsors were largely gone, we burned all our uniforms in a huge bonfire at the last AFA flatland contest.  OK, that last part didn't happen, but it should have.

In 1990, the widepread popularity of flatland was fading, street riding was still growing in leaps and bounds, there were no skateparks in Southern Caliornia (really... NONE), and halfpipes had taken over in place of the quarterpipes of the years before.  Two and a half years earlier, on a back street in in Costa Mesa, CA, a legal battle took place that ultimately changed both skateboarding and BMX forever.  But almost no BMXer knew about it.  But me.

Led by skateboarder Paul Schmitt, a handful of skateboarders rented a house on Towne Street, lodged between Placentia and Monrovia, and 18th and 19th, in the Costa Mesa industrial area.  Schmitt's skate company, Schmitt Stix, was part of the Vision world, and Vision's main building was a couple blocks one way, and the wood shop that built the boards was a couple blocks the other way.  And Unreel Productions, the Vision video company where I worked, was housed in a new, upscale office complex a block from Vision.  The skaters, Paul, John Lucero, and a few others, were close to work, close to their sponsor, and on a chill little street hoping they'd have fairly tolerant neighbors.  So, being skaters, they built a 9 foot tall backyard halfpipe.  Some of the neighbors complained, since there's always some douchebag who hates any noise in every neighborhood.  The city was called, and code enforcement came to check out the ramp.

Now at the time, backyard skateboard ramps were completely unknown to normal people.  Most people had never seen one, and didn't know they existed.  But Paul Schmitt and crew, being smart and pretty industrious, had built a halfpipe that was solid, not dangerous by construction standards, and didn't even qualify as a fire hazard.  Being the only halfpipe anywhere around, attracted skaters from quite a ways for evening sessions.  But, code enforcement, being the nebulous world of obscure city ordinances that it is, found a law that the ramp broke.  You couldn't build anything over six feet high in a Costa Mesa backyard without getting the plans approved by the city.  Paul and the skaters argued their case, and all of us at Vision heard about legal fight day to day.  The Man was keeping good skaters down.

After a lot of back and forth, the skaters simply chopped the top three feet off of their nine foot tall vert ramp.  The six foot ramp was no longer an issue, and the guy who complained the about the noise was told he just had to deal with it.  The skaters began stopping sessions at dusk, and a relative peaceful state was achieved on Towne Street.

But something else happened by accident.  The ramp was suddenly quite a bit under vert, since it was chopped off, which made airs pretty much impossible, but it made a lot of lip and coping tricks more possible.  Paul Schmitt and the skaters of the house, in their battle with the city of Costa Mesa, created the world's first skateboard mini ramp, as seen at 1:12 in this 1987 Schmitt Stix video.  At the time, skaters like Schmitt, Lucero, Mark Gonzales, Gator, John Grigley, and a whole bunch more started skating the Towne Street ramp.  They realized that there was quite a bit to be tried on an undervert ramp, and word got around the skate world.  I heard about this, and saw some video from time to time, because I was the guy who made copies of any video that anyone in the Vision Skateboards world needed.  Mostly a boring job, but I heard about the Towne Street ramp, new pools, new ditches, and other spots sessioned by Vision skaters.  As a hardcore BMX guy, that was a great perk of my job.

But the rest of the BMX world heard none of this.  BMXers built launch ramps, and the early 2-Hip Meet the Street contests, starting in 1988, had small ramps, often like bits of a cut up mini ramp.  But the 4 to 6 foot tall, under vert halfpipe, was a skate only thing for a couple of years.

A few other people started building mini ramps, since they could fly under the radar of local authorities, and since they opened up transition riding to a lot of street skaters.  One of these early mini ramps was the H-Ramp, several miles inland, in Santa Ana.  A dad who was good at building things had a big backyard and a son who liked to skate.  He built two mini ramp halfpipes, 4 or 5 feet tall, side by side.  Then he added a middle section that connected them, with a 3 or 4 foot spine, an idea born in the Powell-Peralta, Bones #3, Animal Chin video.  When asked later about the secret Animal Chin ramp, the Powell skaters said the back to back vert ramps with a spine was actually too gnarly to try most of the ideas they had.  So when Unreel Productions got the job of putting on the biggest skate vert contest ever in 1989, we melded the two ideas, and made a ramp with a vert spine to a mini ramp at the Vision Skate Escape.  It was the first time a lot of skaters ever rode a spine ramp, and set the stage (literally) for some new tricks that weekend.  The Vert/mini spine combo was way more shredable than the huge spine of the Chin ramp, and got the idea of both mini ramps and spine ramps into the skate world.

Meanwhile, in the big backyard in Santa Ana, the two mini ramps with the middle mini-spine connector section made it look like a big letter "H," and it became known as the H-Ramp.  Skaters from far and wide showed up to session there.  The "H" shape lasted for a year or so, and then the ramp got re-configured and rebuilt in a few different ways as time passed.  You can see the H-Ramp a year earlier, with skater Marty "Jinx" Jiminez sessioning it at 50:14 in Vision's Barge at Will (1989).  If you watch Barge at Will, you'll see the mini ramp idea was all over the skate world by 1989, just two years after the Towne Street Ramp, with 10 or more different mini ramps showing up in the video.

Sometime in early 1990, BMXers John Povah and Keith Treanor got wind of the H-Ramp, and got the OK, to start sessioning it on a regular basis.  So why am I going to so much detail about this mini ramp, in a video segment that's alright, but definitely doesn't blow your socks off?  Because the H-Ramp segment in The Ultimate Weekend was the very first time a mini ramp showed up in a BMX video.  Serioiusly, the first one.  Much of the footage in this section was shot on the second time Keith rode there, which is the second time he ever rode an actual mini ramp.  Keith went on to become a mini ramp ruler later on, but this is him just getting used to one.  That's why he seems ot be doing a lot of tailtaps.  This was one of the earliest segments I shot for the video, and I didn't go back to get better footage of Keith there because I knew there were a couple more mini-ramp segments later on.

Making The Ultimate Weekend, I didn't set out to have the first "this" and the first "that."  I just wanted to make a good quality, "professional" video, that showed the actual riding all of us were doing in my Huntington Beach area scene and around Southern California in 1990.  I wanted fresh riding, a lot of different riders and styles, and one rider that was going to session with all these people that the video would seem to follow around.  That rider, who I actually had agree to the idea, was former GT rider Jess Dyrenforth.  He was a good all around rider.  I knew him fairly well, we was pretty well known, and my video was going look like I followed him around to all these sessions in one amazing weekend.  But Jess was getting into Rollerblading really seriously then, and he just kept flaking out on me.  He wasn't being a dick, he was just super busy.  Then I met Keith Treanor and John Povah at the Oceanview jump, and Keith was this hot, new rider, who was hungry as hell, and always had time to ride.  So he became the main guy in the video, and John was there a lot as well.

I have a couple of more memories from the H-Ramp, besides me sucking at riding it, that is.  My boss at Unreel, Don Hoffman, went to shoot some video there for one of our Vision videos.  Don is the guy on the left in this clip, interviewing AFA head, Bob Morales.  It might be the Marty Jiminez footage I linked above when this happened, I'm not sure.  But at the time, the deck on the H-Ramp was eight feet wide on one part, and four feet wide on another.  So Don was shooting with one of Unreel's huge, $50,000, 35 pound Betacam cameras.  He stepped back, thinking the deck was 8 feet wide, but was on the narrow section, and fell off the back of the ramp, which was 5 feet high.  That sounds pretty funny, but he fell backwards, with his eye up to the viewfinder, and the massive 35 pound camera landed on his face.  He did something like $5,000 damage to the camera, and $7,000 damage to his face.  Plus he looked like the elephant man for about a week.  Poor Don.  But he eventually healed, and we all gave him shit about it for a year or so. 

My other memory is one day, probably after I made the video, I was riding the H-Ramp with Keith, John, Jess, and Jess's girlfriend, a chick named Angie Walton.  Angie was riding there on rollerblades, and was about the first woman riding ramps on blades.  Jess was switching, riding his bike a bit, and then the blades.  At one point, we were all tired, and sitting there on the parts of the ramp talking.  Angie was trying to learn some kind of handstand drop-in thing.  She needed someone to hold her legs up in the handstand, as she tried to figure out how to balance so she could actually drop-in from there. I was the closest person, so she asked me. 

So Angie is upside down, in a handstand on the coping, wearing T-shirt and pretty short shorts, I'm holding her legs as she's doing a handstand, and her boyfriend Jess is 20 feet away.  The weird part was that I could see right down her shorts, and she kept directing me to lean her legs a little one way of the other, I'd look down, and be looking down her shorts by accident.  Sure, I'm a guy, and she's was really good looking, but I really was actually trying to be a gentleman about the whole thing, and not stand there staring at her down her shorts.  And Jess was watching, trying to help her figure out these drop-in things while I'm trying to not to look down her shorts.  I'm a dork to start with, and it was just this weird situation that stuck in my mind.  Her underwear was pretty standard issue white women's panties, I couldn't avoid getting a glimpse.  I guess it never occurred to Angie, she just wanted to learn that trick, oblivious to the weird view she had on display from my angle.  So if you stumble across this post Angie, I really was trying not to be a perv that day. 

Angie, by the way, went on to start Daily Bread, the top inline magazine for years, and to start this other little idea with roadie/promoter Kevin Lyman... called the Warped Tour.  Really.  I actually called her up looking for a job on it when I first heard about it.  She didn't know who the fuck I was.  Kevin, was the guy whose crew built the stage for the Vision Skate Escape contest, linked above.  Looking for a clip of Angie skating, I found this interview, which I listened to the first 20 minutes of, it's pretty damn funny.