1985: BMX, Boise, The Fun Spot, and Sha Na Na

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.  

I've been doing a lot of writing lately on a platform called Substack, which was designed for writers.  Check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

The Power of Creative Scenes of people... BMX racing... Jack London... and the birth of Apple Computers

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...

Martin Aparijo: Dirt Jumper

 Blog Post: Martin Aparijo- dirt jumper

 

The first photos I ever saw of Martin Aparijo, back in 1983.

 

Martin Aparijo, who most of us Old School BMX freestylers remember as a pioneering flatlander, here as a BMX Plus test rider.  This is a Champion 24inch cruiser test, from the February 1983 issue of BMX Plus.  That was the second or third BMX magazine I ever bought, the first being the December 1982 issue of BMX Plus with Stompin' Stu Thomsen on the cover.  This issue has Bob Haro doing a wheelie on the cover, and a Bob Haro how-to inside for the Haro bar-hop, the first trick I ever learned out of a magazine. 

Somebody shared this two photo combo on Facebook a couple of days ago, and it instantly took me back to my earliest days as a BMX rider in 1982 and 1983.  I knew without reading the caption, that the rider was Martin Aparijo.  Yes, Martin is best remembered as the pioneering flatland rider, one of the two riders of the early and mid-1980's that focused on flatland, the other being Woody Itson.  Like Woody, Martin could jump well, too.  In fact, Martin was the first jumper to do a front flip off a jump, also in the early 80's.  You can ask him that story if you meet him sometime.

The trick above is called the Hannah, after motocross legend Bob Hannah.  In this case, obviously, Martin pushed it and popped his visor off with the front tire.  I knew the name Bob Hannah, because it got thrown around at the trailer park.  Motocross showed up on TV maybe a couple of times a year back then, and if people knew one rider, it was Bob "Hurricane" Hannah.

This magazine came out during the cold Idaho winter, while I was living in Blue Valley trailer park. But we didn't have snow all the time, and we rode when the dirt was frozen, we rode on the ice on the pond, and even made jumps out of snow that winter.   

There were Jeep trails heading out in several directions from Blue Valley, and often we'd just go out riding, by ourselves, or with a couple other guys, and just ride the Jeep trails for a mile or two in one direction or another, and then ride back.  It was all BMX to us, jumping, racing each other, trying to do early tricks like bunnyhops or endos, or riding the Jeep trails like a mountain biker would now.

The locals at Blue Valley were the Damon Brothers, Mike, Steve, Brian, Andy, and their step brother Greg.  Mike and Steve were the best riders, but were in high school (like me), and were more into girls and parties, than BMX.  I was more of a dork, so I hung with the younger guys and rode my bike, a Sentinal Exploder GX.  Any collector got one of those?  I doubt it, it was a "Kmart special" bike.  The Damon brothers (except Greg) had all ridden BMX while living in California years before, I think.  So they all had BMX bikes and a bit more skill than the rest of us, who had none.

Andy, the youngest, had a classic Mongoose with Motomags, a 1980 or 81 model, I think.  I jumped it once, off our "big" jump, which was about 2 1/2 feet high... to flat.  I landed back wheel first, and the next thing I knew, both of my heels hit the ground, the handlebars were still in my hands, but the bike was rolling away, 8 feet in front of me.  Like a cartoon, with a look on my face that made everyone laugh, I slid on my heels, and fell right to my butt, handlebars still in my hands.

Like all ghetto BMXers, we had a "you break, you pay" rule, when riding other kid's bikes. All I could think was that I suddenly owed Andy a bunch of money for whatever broke.  It turned out he just hadn't tightened the gooseneck, and the bars and stem slid right out of the head tube when the back wheel hit the ground.  Nothing broke, my ass hurt from the hard landing, and everybody laughed about it for a while.

Brian and Andy were the main Damons riding every day.  The there were Scott and Rocky, from the other side of the pond (in the trailer park, not England), and Buzzard, Me, and occasionally Shane from our side.  Yes, we had a friend named Buzzard.  He had a real name, but I have no idea what it was.  He got made fun of for a buzz haircut a couple of years before, and got nicknamed "Buzz."  then someone mentioned that, with his hair short, he looked a lot like a buzzard (turkey vulture), and he did.  From then on, he was Buzzard.

Our trails were about 40 yards long, a dirt area with one foot high berms on each end.  A motorcycle rider, a couple of years earlier, had roosted the berms, and rode them for a while, and we kept them shaped.  On one side there was an 18 inch high jump to flat, which I jumped 18' 2" off of once, when it had just rained and the dirt was hard and fast.  A little past that were our doubles, six inches high and three feet apart.  When we all improved a bit, we added a third jump, making them a six foot long set of triples.  Then we'd hit the left hand berm at the bottom (it sloped a tiny bit), and head back up to a one foot high jump to flat.  That was our "style" jump.  It was over that little jump that I spent a couple of days learning to pull the bike vertical and do a Hannah, inspired by that photos of Martin Aparijo above.  The was the first jump variation I ever learned, and it's all thanks to Martin on that Champion 24" cruiser bike test, in the photos above. 

In the middle of our jumping area was our "big jump."  It ranged from 2 feet to 3 feet high, depending on how thrashed it was.  We rebuilt it time after time.  Like the others, it was a jump to flat.  that's the jump I hit on Andy's bike, where the bars came out.

So thanks whoever shared those pics of Martin on Facebook, those took me back to the time I was just getting really stoked on BMX.  There wasn't much else to do in the trailer park.  There were three cute girls and one ugly one.  One cute girl was 16, my age, and had an older boyfriend.  No play there.  Of the other two cute ones, one had the same boyfriend the whole time, and one was prude/shy, and didn't make out with anybody.  So all of us horny, frustrated, young guys rode our BMX bikes all the time, and took turns making out with the ugly girl.  Hey, it was a trailer park.

When I started getting more into freestyle in 1983, and into 1984, most freestylers rode coaster brakes.  I always hated coaster brakes, since my first crappy BMX bike had one that never worked right.  So I decided to freestyle on a freewheel, which was unusual at the time.  Martin Aparijo rode a freewheel, and so I figured I could learn tricks on a freewheel bike, too.  If other riders asked why I didn't ride a coaster brake, I's say, "Martin rides a freewheel, and look at all the tricks he's invented." 

When I originally wrote this blog post, in the fall of 2019, I was working on one of my drawings of Martin Aparijo to sell.  Homeless and struggling to get my act back together at the time, Martin helped me out by letting my draw a picture of him, and sell them.  I first met Martin on a FREESTYLIN' magazine photo shoot in 1986.  He's a first class guy, and helps a lot of people out behind the scenes, but he'd never tell you that.  We've talked a lot over the years, and he's given me advice many times. 

  Here's the 11" X 14" drawing I did of Martin, my take on a classic photo from his GT days in the 1980's, done in my Sharpie Scribble Style. 

To insure the drawings actually sold, Martin offered to sign each one, and it this was the best selling drawing of the six Old School BMX Freestyle drawings I've done.  This is Martin with one of the drawings, right after he signed it.  Most of them went to diehard fans of Martin, around the world, including Europe, Australia, South America, and even one to Taiwan.  Martin Aparijo is global, these days.  Thanks again Martin, that was a huge help, at the time. 

How I became interested in Creative Scenes

Courtesy of Shannon Gillette, a Boise BMX local who now works for USABMX (BMX sanctioning body), this video is racing at the Fort Boise BMX track, in 1983, I think.  I know it says 1984, but I won a contest to help redesign the track in late 1983, and we rebuilt it for 1984.  This is the old jump set-up, before the re-build.  In any case, this is the spot where the idea of a "scene" that catapults one group ahead of another, first hit me.

On a sunny, brisk, October day in 1982, all the BMX riders from Blue Valley, the unofficial name of our trailer park outside of Boise, packed into my dad's silver Ford van.  With about 8-10 kids and bikes packed in, I drove us all to the Fort Boise BMX track, on the north end of downtown Boise, nestled into the edge of the foothills.  It was the very first BMX bike race, ever, for most of us.  The weekend before, after someone discovered there was a BMX track in Boise, four of us guys and three BMX bikes packed into Scott's mom's Ford Pinto, which was not a hatchback, and went to the race.  Scott, James, and Rocky (I think) raced, while I coached and checked out the scene.  They all came home with trophies, and we told the rest of our trailer park posse about the BMX scene at a real track.  Sure, the track was built inside of an abandoned sewage pond, but we didn't know or care then.  It was REAL BMX. 

Here's the thing, most of our bikes were pieces of crap.  I had a "Kmart special" bike frame, a Sentinal Exploder GX, with some decent parts on it.  James, the fastest among us, had a Huffy frame, the "official" cheap, piece of crap bike of the 1980''s.  But over the summer of 1982, BMX had become our thing in our isolated trailer park, in the desert (technically sagebrush steppe) a few miles outside of town.  Every evening after dinner, as the blazing hot summer temperatures cooled, all of us high school and junior high kids came out and some kind of sport took place.  When I moved there in early June, 1982, it was usually a football, basketball, or whiffle ball game.  Sometimes we just argued and threw rocks at each other (it was a trailer park.)  But often we wound up at these little jumps on the edge of the park, that some motorcycle rider had built a couple of years earlier.

We were White Trash kids, so we were from somewhat dysfunctional families, some more than others, and we joked, argued, talked smack, and continually tried to be better at something than the other guys.  As June turned into July, we began to spend less time playing football, basketball or whiffle ball, and more time out at the BMX jumps.  One kid bought a BMX magazine at the grocery store with hard-earned lawn mowing baby sitting money ($1 an hour and all the government cheese you could eat), and we all read it and got motivated.  We pushed each other, we built our jumps bigger and better, though they were tiny by today's standards, and BMX became our thing. When we broke a stem, or our fork dropout, or our cranks, we bought higher quality ones at Bob's Bikes (and lawn mower repair).  We all ended up with several gold anodized parts on our bikes, because other BMXers didn't like the gold color, and Bob would sell them to us a little cheaper.  We all had stolen bike parts on our bikes as well, some of the time.  We did what we could to keep riding, so we could jump higher than Scott, or do a cross-up better than Brian, or whatever.

By the time we made it to that first race, we were pretty good riders.  We were poor kids, by and large.  OK, my dad was an engineer, we were solid middle class, but my mom habitually over spent, and my parents moved to the trailer park to save money for a year or two so they could buy a house in town.  That plan actually did work.  But day to day, we were broke ass teenagers with no place close to get an after school job.  So we scraped by and built up our bikes... and our riding skills, by riding every day, and continually pushing each other to improve.

A funny thing happened on that race day.  Our Blue Valley trailer park posse, in jeans and T-shirts, with paper plates for number plates, kicked some racing ass.  Sure we were all novices.  But with the small number of riders, we all raced some intermediate racers, most of whom had $400 to $600, dialed in, name brand bikes, fancy leathers (uniforms), and lots of racing experience.  Every one of us, in our first or second races, got first, second, or third.  There were seven official local teams racing that day, and I figured out that, had we been an official BMX team, we would have placed second out of eight.

The Fort Boise locals were no slouches.  Sure, we were in Idaho, but there was a solid BMX racing scene there, and some riders (with well off parents) raced four to six races a week in the area.  They were serious.  They were chasing points standings we knew nothing about.  Yet our trailer park posse smoked many of them on the track... in our first race.

After the post-race jumping session, the best part of racing then, I drove our elated crew back out into the desert, my brainiac side wondering why we managed to place so well.  That was my first inkling in the power of a "scene" of people could have.  As I got into the emerging, brand new offshoot of BMX racing, BMX freestyle, or trick riding, I saw that it was small groups of kids, 3-4-5 or so, in random parts of the U.S., that started and promoted our sport, in different areas.  Scenes.  A couple kids would see a trick show, or buy a magazine, and go out and start learning tricks on their bikes.  As years turned into decades, I realized that these small "creative scenes" were how art scenes, music scenes, high tech scenes, and other creative environments, started.

When I heard about the "Creative Class" concept in a local entertainment weekly in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 2009, the concept of scenes was well known to me.  Richard Florida's research into high tech scenes, and why they clustered in certain regions, put a larger framework around what I'd seen happen over 20-some years in BMX freestyle, skateboarding, snowboarding, art, and music.  I learned in his work how these small groups of people, sometimes, turn into major economic engines for their regions.  While they don't have the absurd money making potential of high tech, the action sports I was involved in not only became obscure sports that have gone global, they became worldwide industries.

This morning, I read this article about "Brain Drain," put out by City Lab, who build on Rich Florida's ideas and research.   I know some regions are going to extreme measures to get highly intelligent people into their areas.  I found that out the hard way.  But on my three day bus ride from Virginia to California this week, I saw signs of creative scenes springing up all over.  I came to a city outside L.A. to join a BMX/bike business, but I saw signs of several really cool art scenes in several cities along the way.  I wandered into El Paso's arts district while on a layover, looking for a mini mart to escape the ridiculous bus station food prices.  Charlottesville, Virginia had signs of a cool art scene.  So did a few other cities, which are kind of lost in the haze of the crazy, 72 hour bus experience.

I've come to believe these small "creative scenes,"  not just art and music, but action sports, gaming, crafts, street art/graffiti, food trucks/restaurants, custom cars and motorcycles, and, of course, high tech, are key to our economic future as a nation.  So while I help my old BMX friend, Rich Bartlett, get his online BMX shop off ground and jamming, I'll be writing more on this idea of creative scenes, and how they are important in our weird, chaotic, rapidly changing world.  Much, much more on this area of thinking to come...  Now go create something cool, then make your own scene better. 

Times have changed in Boise

Several times I've written about how I got into BMX in Blue Valley trailer park, outside Boise, Idaho, in 1982.  We all know that the data mining programs are paying attention to what we look up and search online, and the algorithms put ads and other stuff in front of us using that info.  Today, on the new Mozilla front page, this came up, "The King of Boise."  I started to click past it, then decided to take a look.  The article is about some dumbass kid who rode BMX and was the biggest Oxycodone dealer in Boise, apparently.

I stopped reading.  It's lame that they had to add BMX riding to a drug dealer article.  I wondered how the hell this popped up #1 on my feed, then remembered writing about BMX riding and Boise. 
Unlike the skate artist Pushead, who lived in Boise when I did, I actually really liked Boise.  There was actually a good BMX racing scene in the 80's, and I was one of the first few freestylers to help promote that in the area.  I haven't been there since 1987, but you can see from the clip above they have a great skatepark there now.  It'd be cool if someone would write a big article about that, and not about some stupid drug dealer.

Who the heck is Steve Emig?

This was my favorite place that we lived in Ohio.  It's called Holiday Lakes, outside Willard.  We lived there for about 2 1/2 years, 6th through 8th grades for me.  I think this video was uploaded by one of my sister's friends from back then.

I was born in 1966 outside Akron, Ohio, and my family moved around small towns and rural areas of Ohio as I grew up.  My dad was a band geek as a kid, playing clarinet and saxophone.  He became an avid car guy and target shooter in his younger years.  Among his cars, he owned three of these babies. My dad was a draftsman, so he actually drew pictures for a living.  He taught me how to draw Army Jeeps when I was 8, and later how to draw isometric and oblique pictures.

My mom listened to country music all day long and liked to do crafts.  Ceramics was the one she was best at.  I have a sister, Cheri, five years younger than me.  My family was more dysfunctional than most, and less dysfunctional than some.  We moved to a new house or apartment nearly every year.

I was pudgy, smart, bad at sports, I had buck teeth as a kid, couldn't say my "R's" or "S's" well.  Yeah, I was a dork who got picked on a lot.  When things got bad, I'd usually run off to the woods and wander around on my own for hours.  John Denver's "Country Boy" was my theme song as a kid.

At age 10 in Willard, Ohio, a kid showed me a skateboard for the first time.  It was handmade by his dad out of pressed aluminum with steel roller skate wheels.  He showed me how to ride it.  I rolled about a foot on his rock sidewalk, hit a pebble, fell down, scraped my knee, and said, "Skateboards are dumb."  I changed my mind a few months later, and saved my allowance money for nine months to buy a green, plastic Scamp skateboard at Western Auto.  It cost me $11.92.  A couple years later, I bought a homemade board for $2 at a flea market.  It was surfboard shaped, made out of a 3/4" piece of oak, and had 2 1/2" wide GT wheels.  I rockwalked that board until about 1988.

When I was in 8th grade, in the late 70's, my dad's company was having troubles, and he found a new job... in Carlsbad, New Mexico.  That was a huge culture shock for a small town kid from the Midwest.  I went from this to this overnight.  It was a rough year.  But then that company had problems, and we moved to Boise, Idaho.  Though we moved to a new house every year, I did manage to go to Boise High School for the full three years and graduate. My plan was to go to college and become a wildlife biologist.  But I didn't have money to start college, so I "took a year off" and ended up never going at all.

At the end of my sophomore year of high school, in June of 1982, we moved to a trailer park in the "desert" outside of Boise.  The plan was for my parents to save money for a year and then buy a house.  Officially, the park didn't have a name, but all the street names started with the word "blue."  So everyone called it Blue Valley.  There was nothing but miles of sagebrush in three directions.  The other direction was bounded by I-84.  It was really hot in the summer, so the dozen of so junior high and high school kids in the park would watch TV all afternoon, and then we'd come out in the early evening after supper.  Like kids everywhere, we'd play basketball, whiffle ball, football, or just talk smack to each other.  But all us guys had cheap BMX bikes, and we'd also go out to this little area of jumps and berms some motocross rider had built a couple of years before.  As the summer progressed, we spent more time riding our bikes and less time playing other games.  BMX became our thing. In October of that year, someone heard that there was a BMX track near downtown Boise.  We found it, and raced the last race of the year.  The track was at the edge of the foothills, in a drained sewer pond.  It didn't look like much to most people, but it was amazing to us.  Despite our cheap bikes and lack of actual racing experience, we all won trophies.  Our daily competition with each other paid off, and we surprised and pissed off the local racers by doing so well.  "Where'd all these fast kids on lame bikes come from?" they asked all day.  BMX became our thing.

I raced BMX for all of 1983, and helped re-design the Boise track, and then designed a new track.  But the emerging sport of BMX freestyle, doing tricks on BMX bikes, was way more interesting to me.  I joined the only BMX trick team around, and did shows with Justin Bickel and Wayne Moore.  For once, I was actually good at a sport.  OK, hardly anybody else actually did that sport, but I didn't care.  Much to my parents' dismay, I spent hours a day learning tricks on my little BMX bike.  Without realizing it, my life turned in a totally different direction.  The idea to be a wildlife biologist faded, and I worked at restaurants and rode my bike, and not much else.

The year after I graduated high school, 1985, my dad got a job in San Jose, California.  I finished my summer job in Boise, managing a small amusement park called the Boise Fun Spot.  In August, I packed up my ugly, brown 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo to San Jose to live with my family. 

While my year in Carlsbad, New Mexico was a tough one, I came to love the desert and the wide open spaces of the West.  I also made several trips to Carlsbad Caverns, a truly amazing and beautiful cave system.  When I lived there ('80-81), another cave, called The New Cave then, was just beginning to be explored.  Now it's called Lechuguilla Cave, and is one of the largest cave systems in the world now, bigger than the original caverns that made the area famous.