This post is about the section of The Ultimate Weekend from 10:41 to 12:17, the beginning of "Saturday Morning" in the video, me riding to the H.B. Pier, to me flipping off the walk your bike lights. I self-produced this video in 1990.
I spent my first six months in Southern California, in 1986, in the Redondo and Hermosa Beach area, known as the South Bay, in two apartments I shared with my magazine co-workers Gork and Lew. After five months working at Wizard Publications, and a month riding with Craig Grasso everyday after I got laid off, I got a job at the American Freestyle Association working for Bob Morales. Bob picked me up in the AFA van one day, and I moved south, past the "Orange Curtain," (from Democrat L.A. region into Republican stronghold (until two weeks ago) Orange County). My new home city, which I'd only been to 3 or 4 times, was the surfer filled city of Huntington Beach.
Huntington Beach began it's official life as Pacific City, in the early 1900's. Some developers with big ideas imagined the empty stretch of beach as the "Atlantic City of the West Coast." That idea fizzled out quick, and it was largely a little village of lima bean farmers. The original pier was built around 1902, around the time of the Pacific City idea. The name was later changed to Huntington Beach, to suck up to railroad magnate Henry Huntington, to bribe him into building a railroad extension from Long Beach, about ten miles north, to H.B., so more people could get to the rural beach town. It worked, and Huntington Beach was incorporated in 1909. Finally there was a way to get people easily from distant Los Angeles and Long Beach to H.B. But still, hardly anyone wanted to move to H.B.
In 1914, the 4th of July celebration at the pier included a "surf riding" demonstration by a Hawaiian, an Olympic swimming champion, a diver, and surfer named Duke Kahanamoku. When his slightly older surf buddy and leader of the Wakiki surf posse, George Freeth died in 1918, Duke went on to promote surfing around the world, bringing back the ancient sport of the Hawaiian kings. He became known as "The Father of Modern Surfing," But still, not too many people wanted to actually live in the little town by the sea. At one point, if you bought a set of encyclopedias, you got a free lot in downtown Huntington Beach.
Then, in 1920, wildcatters struck oil in H.B., and suddenly A LOT of people wanted to live there. And a few encyclopedia buyers became millionaires, as the legend goes. H.B. became something like an old west town, with hard working oil men, rowdy bars, ladies of the evening (the former Youth Hostel was then known as Hotel Evangeline), and a lot of money changing hands. If you walk out behind the Longboard bar on Main Street, across the alley is a little tiny brick structure, and there was a slightly larger one with three doors nearby. Those are the old "drunk tank" jail cells from the 1920's. The cops would just drag the drunks from the bars and lock them in for the night to sleep it off.
The oil boom in Huntington Beach had several long term effects on the city. First, it attracted a lot of people, and a lot of riff raff. Second, for decades, the north part of town was filled with oil wells and pumps, many right along the beach. You can see them in this 1949 home movie clip at 2:56. So, while people flocked to Southern California in the 1940's through the 1980's, many people avoided H.B. and built beachfront homes on nearly every other stretch of beach, from Malibu to Newport. But Huntington, the "dirty oil town beach" didn't get nearly as developed, except for one condo complex just north of the pier. Because the wealthy people favored Newport Beach, Sunset Beach, Long Beach and on up to Malibu, H.B. was a lot less expensive to live in. Even when I moved there in 1987, there were still a bunch of oil pumps downtown, and right along Pacific Coast Highway.
Because Huntington Beach was cheaper to live in, it became the working class beach city, and a home to lots of surfers. There's no great point break in H.B. to surf, but there's 8 miles of southwest facing beach breaks. The waves aren't great, but they're consistently pretty good, and it was the cheapest beach city from the late 1950's to the mid 1990's. So it became known as Surf City, the city Jan and Dean wrote their song "Surf City" about.
In typical small city fashion, the city leaders of the late 1950's and early 1960's wanted to get the "lazy surfers" out of their town. It didn't work. As the surf culture grew and expanded, H.B. went on to become a hot spot for skateboarding, BMX and freestyle, snowboarding (there's snow 1 1/2 hours away), motocross (Seth Eslow lived there) and the early UFC fighting and MMA. It's still a major action sports hub area. Surfer and BMX freestyle pioneer, Bob Morales, who grew up a bit inland, chose H.B. to set up the AFA, and that's how I landed there. My job, officially, was to be the editor of the AFA newsletter. I wound up doing everything, from putting AFA logos on T-shirts to driving the 30 foot trailer to contests. It was actually pretty cool, though I struggled on my $5 an hour pay rate.
On one of my first photo shoots at FREESTYLIN' magazine, I drove photographer Windy Osborn to, shortly after starting at Wizard Publications, I met English freestyle skater Don Brown, and I knew that he and a few skaters, as well as a few BMX freestylers, hung out and rode beneath the H.B. Pier every weekend. So after I rented a room and got settled in H.B., (after a couple week's crashing on Bob's couch), my weekend ritual was to get up, make a huge plate of pancakes, pig out, and ride down to the Huntington Beach pier and freestyle all day. Unless there was an AFA contest somewhere, I was at the pier. In those days, the fancy restaurant on the pier, looking out over the beach, was Maxwell's, and the area below it, by the video arcade, looked like this. The walk and bike path widened, and us BMXers took turns with the freestyle skaters, getting crowds and riding for them. Every 20 to 30 minutes, the beach police on their ATV's would roll up, tell us to stop riding or skating, and that the crowd was blocking the bike path. This, supposedly, caused a danger because all the Fred and Frita poser cyclists, in their brand new spandex and over-priced/under ridden road bikes, would ride down the crowded bike path at speed and run into people. Somehow that was our fault.
There were literally thousands of beach goers every weekend, and we continually drew crowds of 100 to 150 people, and sometimes up to 500. Then the police would stop us, the crowd would wander off, then the skaters would come out, draw another crowd, and do their thing, until they got shut down. This happened every Saturday and Sunday from early 1987 to about 1991 for me. Being the geek that I am, I once figured out that I did flatland in front of over 140,000 people, 100 or so at a time, during those H.B. Pier weekends. While I didn't do near as many shows as some freestylers, I performed before far more people, as a street performer, than most. As a skating and riding spot, the H.B. Pier goes back to the mid 1970's, when skaters came down to session the bank that used to be there.
So when I got around to shooting the Huntington Beach Pier/Saturday morning section for this video, I just shot my normal life. I wake up in my room on Sims street, near Warner and Bolsa Chica, on the north end of town. I can't remember what the huge scab on my knee was from, but it was a bail of some sort. My room is a mess, and I head down, and make breakfast. The furry bowling ball of a cat, Silus, was my roommates cat, and the most unfriendly feline I ever met. The fucker bit my palm once when I was trying to get it away from the sliding glass door as it hissed at another Tom cat outside. It wasn't unusual to see Silus on the counter eating out of a pot of something after my roommate Kevin cooked.
Making Oreo Double Stuff pancakes was not my normal weekend breakfast, although the slice of cold pepperoni and pineapple pizza with the pancakes was pretty normal. When I made this video, I wanted to show "the real BMX freestyle lifestyle I knew," and not the hoopty shit that you saw in a BMX Plus or Vision Street Wear video. No uniforms, no flatland on miniature golf courses, or that kind of stuff. But in addition to showing some new and progressive riding, I also wanted to show off some video making skills I learned working at Unreel. I'm actually pretty proud of this little montage. I chopped a bunch of my weekend life into short bits, it moves pretty well, and it gives a really good glimpse of my life as a freestyler for those early H.B. years. I did actually ride about 5 miles to the Huntington Beach Pier every weekend when there wasn't a contest. I skipped the ride down Warner to Bolsa Chica Beach, and the 3 miles of pedaling the bike path down Bolsa Chica beach and along the cliffs.
The part you see in this video is when I get to Goldenwest and the bike path, the north end of the downtown area. That quick shot with tons of people on the beach is pretty funny, it's a compression shot from Goldenwest and PCH. I was shooting far up the beach, and making it look way more crowded than it ever really was in 1990. That was a super crowded day, and I made it look even more crowded. Now, 30 years later, that's pretty much what it does look like on the weekends. But back then, it was usually fairly empty until up near the pier.
The bike path continues next to Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), but the part I show in this video, with the sandy dirt path, and the big, 11 foot high, mural covered, retaining walls, that's the old railroad bed that Henry Huntington built 100 years ago. The murals were old ones in 1990, and many later got covered with new, officially sanctioned murals in the 1990's, and later officially sanctioned graffiti art. Then they all got painted over again with beige paint, because the graffiti art attracted unofficial graffiti writers from all over. Typical. So while it wasn't my plan, I ended up documenting several of the old murals, which were probably done in the 1970's.
Our favorite wall, The Blues Brothers Wall, is just south of the 14th street steps. It was pretty flat, and usually had less sand in front of it than most other walls, and had a big lip to wall ride on the left end, and a small lip farther to the right. So my typical weekend ride turns into a quick wall session with Keith Treanor, then unknown and super hungry ripper from New Jersey, and Randy Lawrence, a kid form the desert who moved to the beach and worked as a bike shop mechanic at the time. I met both at the H.B pier on the weekends. Keith, of course, went on to be a pro mini ramp and street rider for S&M Bikes for many years after this video gave him a chance to show his stuff. They'll be a lot more about him as these blog posts go on.
Randy Lawrence is the most natural BMX rider I've ever seen IN MY LIFE. He would just naturally learn stuff in minutes. Back when we first met, '88 or so, he could learn ANY flatland trick we could think of in ten minutes with Mike Sarrail and I coaching him. Seriously. He made me sick, in a good way. When I say the most natural rider, I mean that he just learned anything like he was born to do it. No one, not Eddie Fiola, Mat Hoffman, Mike Dominguez, Dennis McCoy, ANYONE, seemed so born to ride a BMX bike as Randy. Randy's brother was pro motocrosser Phil Lawrence, who along with Jeff Emig (a second cousin to me, I think) was one of the pioneering motocross freeriders in the early 90's, who set the stage for the early Crusty Demons of Dirt videos, and the sport of Freestyle Motocross. Much to my surprise back then, Randy became a motorcycle mechanic, tuning bikes for Doug Dubach, and later Jeremy McGrath through most of Jeremy's championships. Now Randy trains young motocross riders, he's legendary in the motocross world, and his son Ryder Lawrence is one of the best up-and coming kids in the BMX world. When you do this at age seven, there are some big things in store in coming years. The way Ryder flows through that hilatious nose bonk, and rides it out, that's the same natural riding flow I saw in Randy back in the late 80's and 90's. If it ever gets to the point of trying to genetically engineer the perfect BMX or FSMX rider, start with the Lawrence family. There's just something in their blood that's perfect for two wheels. Unless you tell Randy to do a simple X-up, that is.
In this section of The Ultimate Weekend, Alan Valek (who uploaded my video to YouTube, thanks again for that Alan!) watches from the top of the wall as we do wall rides and fakies. This was the only place I could do fakie wall rides, because of the smooth lip. Keith and Randy step things up with no handers. If you pause the quick flash edit, it looks like this:
The next highest I ever saw anyone get on that wall, after Randy and Clymer, is Keith's wall ride in this section, going his natural direction. That one scared the crap out of me, Keith's back tire broke loose, and it slid across the whole wall, but he rode it out. A hair under Keith's front wheel was how high Josh White went. Josh told me about the wall at the pier, and we found it together one Saturday. For over a year, I rode on the bike path up top to the pier, never going down the other path to find these walls. Josh, one of the more amazing vert riders ever, got about 8 feet up the wall, 2 feet lower than Randy Lawrence going opposite. Josh was also doing fakie wall rides to turndowns out that first day we rode it.
Years later, I lived about three blocks from this wall, and I sessioned it all the time, and went rock climbing on the wall down to the beach right there. I got into bouldering as something to do away from the BMX world, and I had a 300+ foot traverse on the lower wall just down from here. This is one of my favorite places to ride ever. I tried to learn framestand wall rides there, I could stand up in a low, long wall ride, but never get my hands off the grips. Too chicken.
We actually didn't ride this wall as a group really, but would hit it individually when in the area. Keith stepped it up that day, getting stretched no handed fakie wall rides. Then he decided to go for the rail grind into the sand on the spur of the moment. At the time, no one had done a handrail slide down steps, but people were talking about them. Skaters had been doing board slides on rails for 3 or 4 years, and I think 50/50's were starting to happen. Meanwhile, BMXers were trying to figure out a way to slide handrails on bikes. We talked about sprocket slides, like today's crank arm slides, but it just seemed too dangerous, with little chance of ever riding it out. As double peg grinds started becoming standard on vert ramps, and a few riders toyed with feeble grinds on street ledges, the idea of a double peg grind on a handrail down stairs was forming. But it hadn't been done yet. So Keith decided to try this rail into the sand with no notice, and luckily I had the camera rolling when he headed that way. I'm not sure what any of us expected, but Keith's front wheel washed out on the sand in front of the rail, and it turned into a funny bail.
Then Randy held Keith on the rail, trying to get the mechanics of sliding and pulling up and off it at the bottom. The sand made for a crash pad to soften the landing. Remember kids, there were no skatepark rails then. This was 1990. Hell, there were no skateparks in Southern California then. The whole technical problem of how to bunnyhop, angle the bike, and land on both pegs hadn't been figured out yet. So putting his bike on the rail to slide and land in the sand was a way to get part of the idea worked out.
Randy's 360 off the wall and into the sand, next to the woman laying out, was another spur of the moment decision. She was laying there when we shot Keith on the rail. As we were walking back up towards the wall, Randy said, "I could 360 over the wall and land by her." I didn't think he was serious at first, because there was a 2 or 3 inch lip on top of that wall, and doing a bunnyhop over it into doing a 360 drop five feet, seemed pretty crazy then. But it was Randy, so I walked a ways away, so the woman wouldn't wonder what I was doing, and Randy did a great 360 drop first try, and the poor, unsuspecting woman was totally startled. We, of course, thought that was hilarious back then.
After that, we see close-ups of another painted wall, and then the "walk your bike lights" that had recently been put up by the pier. Every bike rider hated those lights, which were on during the weekends. Those damn lights, again, were put up because of road bike posers riding fast down the bike path, on the weekends, when it was crowded, and then running into pedestrians. Those weekend riders never showed up to actually put miles in during the week, when the bike path was not crowded, and you could ride the whole eight miles of Huntington Beach's bike path at speed. They just showed up on the weekends to pose. Debbie Hendrickson, a serious cyclist and Sim snowboard team manager, told me the hardcore cyclists called the posers Fred or Frita.
So that's the story of this little section, and one of my all time favorite places to ride, The Blues Brothers Wall. There's only one thing left to do in this post, tell you how to make Oreo Double Stuff pancakes.
Oreo Double Stuff pancakes:
Ingredients:
"Just add water" pancake mix
water
Double Stuff Oreo Cookies
Take a bunch of Oreos, a couple for each big pancake you plan to make, and crumble them up into big chunks, say 1/4" to 3/8" round. It's best to leave the cookies and cream attached to each other.
Put the pancake griddle on the stove, and turn the heat to about 6 1/2 or 7, slightly above medium if it's gas, and let it warm up. The key to good pancakes is to have the griddle at the perfect temperature, and the batter at the right consistency.
Pour the dry pancake batter mix into a big measuring cup or small bowl. I don't measure the water, I make batter by feel and sight. I add a little bit of water, and stir it by hand with a fork. Then I add a bit more water, and stir it more. At first, the pancake mix turns into a dough-like consistency. Then it slowly works towards batter. I like to work to the point where the batter pours slowly, but steadily. It's a thick liquid.
Once the batter is near a good consistency, add the Oreo chunks and mix them in with a fork until they are pretty evenly spaced in the batter. I tried Oreo pancakes with regular thickness Oreos, and you couldn't really taste the Oreos at all, so go with the Double Stuffs.
By then, the griddle should be hot. In fact, it should be a bit too hot. I always pull the griddle off the stove, and wave it around to cool it a bit, then put in back on the stove, before pouring my first pancakes. If you do this, don't hit anyone. Once you start making pancakes, it stays a bit cooler from the batter. For most people, I'd advise putting a little cooking oil on the griddle, or melting some butter. Me, though, I cook my pancakes without oil on a Teflon griddle. They brown lightly on the bottom, and I wait until the batter is about ready to bubble, and I start edging the plastic spatula under them, until I can get under the whole pancake and flip it.
I normally use a square griddle, and make 4 pancakes, 4" to 5" in diameter, at once. I flip all four, and the watch them. A square griddle cooks hotter in the center, and I'll get the spatula under the flipped pancakes, and spin them so the outside edge is towards the middle of the pan, to cook them evenly, and let them finish cooking. Then I set them on a plate off to the side. I don't care if they cool off a bitas I make the rest. If you have company, put an oven safe plate in the oven, turn it up to about 225 to 250 degrees, and just set all the pancakes on it to keep them warm until you're ready to eat. Remember to use a pot holder or two to get that plate out of the oven, and set it on another pot holder on the table.
With the Oreo cookies and frosting in the pancakes, in big chunks, you don't really need maple syrup on these pancakes. But don't let that stop you, 'cause maple syrup is awesome. To really live large, make a big ol' plate of Oreo pancakes, scoop some vanilla ice cream on top, or maybe Oreo Cookies and Cream, and then hit it with some maple syrup. You can go back to the gym, or go ride, tomorrow. If you wind up trying these, show me some photos on Facebook.
For more crazy pancake ideas, check out my Pinterest Board: Cinnamon Rolls and Pancakes.
And that's it about riding to the H.B. Pier.
I'm currently writing a series of big, fat zines called, Freestyle BMX Tales, after my former blog that had over 500 posts about BMX freestyle BITD. Each zine will be at least 48 pages, full of my old school BMX stories, and written around a theme. I'll be hand making all of them, in typical zine fashion, and signing and numbering each one. Zines, by their very nature, are collector's items.
The first Zine in the series is about The Spot in Redondo Beach, the place I rode with Lew, Gork, Andy Jenkins, R.L. Osborn, Chris Day, and Craig Grasso, among others. That was when I first moved to SoCal and started working at FREESTYLIN' magazine in 1986. It will be done and ready to ship about December4th, 2018. You can pre-order the first copy by sending $6 paypal to me at: stevenemig13@gmail.com . ( steven, not steve in the email address) Mark it "The Spot zine" or something. So far, the first 5 are spoken for.
I'll be sharing most of my BMX stories on the new Block Bikes Blog from now on, check it out...
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