The Huntington Beach Pier Bank sessions of 1989

 Here's a great shot of 1970's era skateboarding at the Huntington Beach Pier bank, some variation of a Bertleman or layback slide.  The bank is long gone now, but this was a major session spot for skateboarders, and a few BMXers, in the 1970's, early 1980's, and for most of the summer of 1989.  I pulled this photo from the web, skater and photographer unknown.  It's the only good photo I could find of the bank.

Huntington Beach in 1987

Getting laid off, after only five months working at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN', is what ultimately led me to Huntington Beach.  I got the magazine job thanks to my zine, San Jose Stylin', where I wrote about the San Francisco Bay area riders for a year.  My last day at Wizard Publications was December 31, 1986.  I was still a roommate with Gork and Lew, who had been my co-workers.  I was a really uptight dork in those days, and just wasn't the right fit for that business.  I had saved up some money during my short stint at Wizard, so I paid a month's rent, and spent my days in January 1987 calling around the BMX industry, looking for another job, so I could stay in Southern California.  After calling around a bit each morning, I'd go riding with Craig Grasso all day, who lived nearby.  Those were some epic riding days, hitting local ramps, doing some street riding, and flatland sessions at The Spot in Redondo Beach every night.  After about three weeks, I heard from Bob Morales who ran the American Freestyle Association (AFA), and he hired me to be the newsletter editor and photographer for the AFA.  A couple months later, Wizard hired  17-year-old BMXer/skater kid from the East coast, a kid named Spike Jonze.  He worked out much better at Wizard.  He moved into my old bedroom in Gork and Lew's apartment in Hermosa Beach.  

Bob Morales showed up with the AFA van one day in late January, we packed up all my junk, and headed down into Orange County, to Huntington Beach.  I stayed on Bob's couch for two or three weeks, and started work at the AFA, then found a room to rent.  I got settled in the new apartment, near Springdale and Warner, my new roommate was an older guy who worked at a car dealership.  

I soon found my way down to the Huntington Beach Pier one weekend.  There was a small group of locals, who, ironically, were mostly from other places.  A tall, skinny BMX freestyler, Mike Sarrail, drove down from the San Gabriel Valley every weekend to ride.  Two of the world's top freestyle skateboarders, Pierre Andre', from France, and Don Brown, from England, were down there nearly every weekend, unless there was a contest or demo somewhere else.  Hans Lingren, from Sweden, and H.B. local freestyle skater, Jeremy Ramey, rounded out the main pier crew in that era.  

Pierre skated for Sims, and Don for Vision, both part of the Vision Skateboards empire, in nearby Costa Mesa.  I had met Don on a photo shoot for FREESTYLIN' a few months before, and I reintroduced myself, and hung out and started doing some of my flatland tricks for the crowds.  I soon became a local of the Huntington Beach pier, in the spring of 1987.  

The north side of the Huntington Beach Pier, the amphitheater area now, in a photo I took in 2019, shot from out on the pier.  On the far right, you can see steps coming down from the pier level to the beach level.  The old steps were a steeper set, and hit bottom farther back.  The Huntington Beach Pier bank was where the little wall is now, on the left side of the steps, at the bottom.  There was a long, two level parking lot where the amphitheater and parking area are now.  The pier bank rose up about 3 1/2 feet from the concrete under the pier, to the lower level of the parking lot.  The bank had been sessioned by skateboarders through the 1970's and into the early 1980's.  Then huge posts were put into the bank, and a gigantic chain ran through the posts near the bottom, to keep skateboarders and bike riders from riding the bank.

Downtown Huntington Beach was a much different place in 1987.  Many of the buildings on Main Street are still there, from that era, the ones made of bricks.  Jack's Surf Shop was on the north corner of PCH and Main, as it is today, though it was a smaller shop.  Huntington Surf & Sport was also on the same side of the street, half a block inland, not on the opposite corner, as it is now.  That south corner of PCH and Mani was an empty lot in the late 1980's.  Jan's smoothie shop was in the back of Huntington Surf & Sport.  Perq's bar was there then, and so was the Longboard, on the second block.  There was a liquor store on the corner of Main and Walnut.  About where the fountain is now, on the south side of the second block of Main Street, was a indie record shop called The Electric Chair.  It was a small shop, with folding tables topped with milk crates full of record albums, "vinyl" as most people call them today.  That whole second block of Main street, on the south side, where the fountain is, looked like the other side of the street, old, one or two story brick buildings, probably going back to the oil boom days of the 1920's.  

Downtown Huntington Beach was much quieter then, none of the current hotels were in that area in the 1980's, just one small motel, south of the pier, on the inland side of PCH.  There were far fewer shops, and more oil pumps, continuously rocking up and down, on lots all over downtown.  Most of them have since been capped off, and covered by houses or condos. Skateboarders regularly skated the P.O. curb, a freestanding painted curb, which was where the small wall is now, behind the Post office, next to the Rockin' Fig surf shop.  

There were only about 5 bars, including Perq's and the Longboard.  In the 1980's, Newport Beach was the cool city then, and people would often take a taxi to the bars around the Newport Pier to go party on the weekends.  Huntington Beach was a dirty little surf town with empty lots and oil pumps, running up most of Pacific Coast Highway, on lots full of condos and tall skinny houses today.  One of those empty lots is now for sale for almost $4 million, I just looked it up on Zillow.  

Oil was discovered in downtown Huntington Beach in 1920, near Huntington High School, and the oil wells, and oil workers in the early days, made H.B. less desirable by wealthy people looking for a beach house.  So the oil wells and pumps made Huntington Beach the "dirty beach city," which kept much of it from being developed, up into the 1990's and early 2000's.  Since H.B. was less popular to rich folk for several decades, because of all the oil pumps, rent was cheaper.  

The Huntington Beach I moved into, in 1987, was a working class beach town, full of surfers, construction workers, bartenders, servers, and a lot of action sports people.  As we moved into the 1990's, a lot of strippers and later porn stars moved to H.B..  I think we can thank Damian Sanders, Jon Huntington, and the snowboard/motocross crew that started the Pimp n' Ho Ball as a house party, for that.  But that's a story for a different day.

If Newport Beach was the Beverly Hills of Orange County, Huntington Beach was where the working class people, and many of the creative and entrepreneurial people of surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX, and motocross lived.  It had a completely different vibe than Newport Beach until the early 2000's, when Huntington Beach was deemed cool by hipsters, and the Yuppie hoards moved in.  I was driving a taxi in Huntington Beach much of that time, and if you're reading this, I probably drove your drunk ass home from Main Street once or twice.  By the turn of the millennium, Huntington Beach was the SoCal beach city with the most undeveloped land, thanks to all those oil wells from the 1920's.  In the real estate boom of the late 90's and early 2000's, the H.B. oils wells got capped and McMansions and condos sprang up like mushrooms.  And rent and home prices SOARED.  The hotels and a lot more trendy shops soon followed.  Welcome to Irvine by the Sea.  A whole different group of people moved into Huntington Beach.  

In addition to Pierre, Don, Hans, and Jeremy practicing at the Huntington Beach Pier, other freestyle skaters like Per Welinder and Bob Schmelzer, as well as street skaters like Mark Gonzales, Ed Templeton, and a pack of locals, came by to skate on a regular basis.  Here's Bob Schmelzer on a street board in 1986, with a layback on the H.B. Pier bank, under the big chain.  This is from the August 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine (page 8), a Windy Osborn photo, I believe.  This is what the pier bank looked like in 1987 and 1988, in my early years riding there.  

One weekend in the spring of 1989, I rolled down to the Huntington Beach Pier on a Saturday morning, and a few skaters were skating the pier bank.  The huge chain blocking it off had disappeared.  As a BMX freestyler who was always up for a good bank session, I joined in, probably throwing a backside boneless (can-can footplant) first.  Then I started trying some kickturns and other stuff.  Game on!  The Huntington Beach Pier Bank, long blocked by the monster chain, was back in play.  

At that time, I lived way up on the north side of Huntington Beach, near Bolsa Chica and Warner.  I didn't have a car then, so I would either take buses up PCH, and into Costa Mesa, to work at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company.  Or I'd make a 10 mile ride on my BMX bike, riding the entire 8.3 mile length of the H.B. bike path, with a headwind, as part of my route.  

I rode right by the pier going to and from work, when I rode my bike.  Once the chain was down, the nightly sessions were on, in the spring of 1989, and they were some awesome sessions.  Some times I'd ride the bike path home, and other days I'd ride down the 19th street hill in Costa Mesa, through the what later became the Sheep Hills BMX jumps area, and I'd hit a bunch of little streets spots, and then the pier bank, on the way home.  Those nights it was a three or four hour ride home, with a bunch of little sessions along the way.  

Every single night that I rode up to the pier bank, there would usually be one or two, maybe three or four street skaters, sessioning the bank.  Some of them were guys I knew from Vision, both sponsored skaters or workers that skated.  Sometimes they were people I didn't know.  Every once in a while, it would be just me, and I'd listen to Ramones Mania on my Walkman, which I carried in my Vision hip pack, and I'd session alone for an hour or more.  

It was a really mellow bank for bike riding, but it was fun to session.  As weird as it sounds today, almost no one wandered by the lower part of the pier in those days during the week.  A few bike riders rode up and down the bike path, and maybe a runner or two.  The H.B. police, oddly, left us alone down there.  I think once or twice a motorcycle cop rolled up the bike path and checked us out.  I sort of remember them asking if we knew what happened to the chain.  If they told us to leave, we'd take off, and just come back the next night.  We weren't really bothering anyone down on the bank, so the sessions continued.  Then one night, I rolled up, ready for another session... and the chain was back up.  Game off.  

We were all bummed.  The rumor at the time was that a couple of local skaters had cut down the 300 pound chain, and dragged it out onto the beach, 100 feet away, and buried it.  But beaches attract all kinds of people, including metal detector guys, looking for coins and gold rings.  Somebody found the chain, told the cops, and the session stopping monster chain was back.  The Pier Bank sessions stopped.

Life went on, I still went down to ride at the pier nearly every weekend, unless there was a contest somewhere.  I still went street riding on the way home from work, just hitting other spots, along the way.  Then, about a month or so after the chain went up, I rolled up to the pier, and someone was skating the pier bank again, they chain had once again disappeared.  The nightly and weekend sessions began again.  

This is me, doing one of the tricks I learned at the H.B. Pier Bank, a 270 bunnyhop to 90 hop to rollback and 180 out.  It wasn't that hard, just a fun little bank trick.  This is on a bank in San Diego, while on a video shoot with Eddie Roman, for my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend (36:22).  In 1986, while at a contest in Canada, I saw Eddie Fiola do a trick he called the Expo.  He'd flyout on the quarterpipe, and land sideways on the deck, on both wheels.  He'd hop on both wheels, once or twice, and then hop back into the ramp, turning 90 degrees, and landing fakie, going in backwards.  It looked pretty gnarly, a cooltrick at that time.  This trick was inspired by the Expo.  Doing a 90 on a bank, then 90 back in fakie, was pretty easy.  So I turned it into a 270, and it became a fun little bank trick.

None of us were sure if the chain was going to reappear, and shut down the pier bank again, so the two or three dozen skaters that sessioned the bank from time to time, made the most of it.  Other BMXers showed up once in a while, but most of the time it was me and a couple of skaters, during the weeknight sessions.  Sometimes on the weekends, there would be ten or more skaters hitting the bank.  

In time, after a month or two, rumor got around that the city probably wouldn't find the chain again.  The story was that the guys who took the chain down dragged that 300 pound beast way out under the pier, during a low tide, into about chest deep water, and then dove down and worked it into the sand, burying it under water, the best they could.  To the best of my knowledge, that's where the chain has been ever since, 100 yards or more out from the bike path, 20 or 30 yards past the low tide water line, under the center of the pier.  If that rumor was true, it has probably worked deep into the sand and mud, in the 35 years since.  While the metal detector guys looking for money and treasure scour the whole beach area every week, they didn't go chest or neck deep into the waves looking for rings and  coins.  So the chain is probably slowly rusting away in the silt.  

I'm sure the city thought it was B.S. when the chain disappeared again.  They had no idea how determined a couple of skateboarders can be to open up a great session spot.  I forget the actual dates, but from about late May or early June, the pier bank was open to ride and skate, until well into the fall.  I think the city finally bought a new chain, and installed it, in late September or October.  The skating and bike riding on the bank went on all summer of 1989.  

That was a time when all BMX tricks were brake tricks, but I got sick of working on my bike at some point, since I've always been a lousy mechanic.  So I rode brakeless for much of that spring and part of the summer.  During those sessions on the H.B. Pier Bank, I learned a bunch of weird little bank variations.  I learned foot jam nosepicks, tailtap 540s, and no footed bunnyhops to fakie.  None of those are very hard, but they were fun tricks, and the no footed bunnyhops wrecked my shins, because I slipped my pedals a lot learning that trick.  I also started jumping out of the bank, doing 180's a lot.  They were tiny, only a few inches off the ground, but fun.  

After a while, I started doing a little bunnyhop when I did the 180 out of the rollbacks.  That turned them into BMX half Cabs, which the skaters often thought were cool.  In that era, I was actually riding with skateboarders more than I was riding with BMXers, so I did some skateboard tricks on my bike.  I was already doing backside bonelesses, a can-can footplant on a bank, but in a more sweeping movement than the vert version of that trick.  I learned a no-comply on a bike, where a skater did a footplant to 180.  So half Cabs (half a Caballerial- a fakie 360 air on vert, then later on flat ground) were another skate trick on a bike.  

After a while, I tried to twist a lookback while doing the 180 jumps.  They were far from fully clicked, but were partially twisted.  Then I started trying lookbacks in the half Cabs.  I could do really small 180 bunnyhops, hopping off of both tires, and spinning really quickly, so I could keep a lot of speed going backwards.  I rode a freewheel, so I had to back pedal faster than the cranks would spin backwards on their own.  

Unlike today's freecoaster riders, the natural back pedaling of the cranks gave me and edge doing half Cabs.  I could catch the pedal, and really get leverage to get some pop in a half Cab.  So those started on the pier bank in the summer of 1989.  Eventually, I could do my tiny 180 bunnyhops at nearly a full sprint, and then land rolling backwards at real speed.  Then I could hop the half Cabs farther and farther.  I was doing 6 to 8 foot half Cabs by late 1989 or so, and fairly clicked lookback half Cabs.  But those weren't even considered a trick then.  Eddie Roman and maybe a couple of the San Diego guys did BMX half Cabs off ledges, but they were rarely seen by anyone.  The real video era of street riding was just beginning.  So no one else did them, and I didn't even bother to shoot video of them when I made The Ultimate Weekend video in 1990, because I didn't think they were a big deal.  Lookback half Cabs were just some goofy trick I did, and nobody else.  But that was the best trick of mine that was spawned from all of those sessions at the Huntington Beach Pier bank.  

One more weird story from those sessions.  I was riding alone at the pier bank one night, well into the summer of 1989, and it was fully dark out, so it was probably after 9 pm or so.  I heard a skateboard coming up the bike path from the north.  Around the bush on the corner of the bike path came this kid, knee riding on a skateboard, pushing with one leg, hands on the front of the board.  

At first glance, I thought it was a little kid, and wondered who was with him.  But it turned out to be a young guy of maybe 18 to 20 years old, I think.  I think he asked if I minded if he skated the bank, and I said something like, "Sure go for it."  And that's when I noticed.  His lower legs were deformed, his feet pointed backwards, his legs were almost like a cricket, bending in a weird way.  His lower body was totally built wrong, a birth defect, obviously.  But he pushed up to the bank, pushing with one back leg, hands on the nose of the board.  Then he put a hand down on the bank, sort of a beanplant/or boneless type thing, and picked up the board and spun it around, like a varial.  

The kid had obviously been skating for quite a while, and he had a whole series of handplant and board flipping tricks, that worked for his unusual, mutated body.  And the kid was good.  This kid I'd never seen before, never heard of before, with a body shaped liked none I'd ever seen... he was a skater.  So we sessioned together, taking turns hitting the bank, for maybe 45 minutes or so.  When he did something cool, I'd say, "Yeah!," and he did the same to me.  He was just another skater, who was built in a really weird way, and he had developed a whole series of tricks that worked for his body.  They were all things that would be nearly impossible for a normal bodied person to pull off.  

That night, at the pier bank, I learned why there are no paralympics in skateboarding (or BMX).  There are only people, skaters, or even BMXers, with a different body shape, people you'd never want to play a game of SKATE or BIKE against.  The kid amazed me, reminding me that we're all fucked up in one way or another, and we started skating or BMX freestyle to help deal with it.  His issues seemed mostly physical, while most of us were kinda fucked up in the head from our crazy families, childhood trauma, or whatever.  "Normal" people didn't skate or ride BMX back then.  

After a while, he was done skating, and he just said, "Later," or something like that, and pushed back around the corner, into the darkness, heading north on the bike path.  The crazy part is that the only things that way were the one condo complex by the beach, a couple hundred yards away, or the parking lot.  I couldn't figure out where that kid came from, in the dark that night, or where he headed back to.   He was alone, he wouldn't be able to drive a car.  He just came out of nowhere, we sessioned the bank together, and then he disappeared into the darkness.  I didn't get his name, and I've never heard of a skater like that from anyone else.  No one else seemed to have seen or heard of the guy.  That became one of my great memories of that summer, riding the Huntington Beach Pier Bank.  

These are my best memories of one of my favorite eras in 20 years of BMX freestyle riding, all the cool sessions at the Huntington Beach Pier Bank in the spring and summer of 1989. 

This skateboard documentary, Downhill Motion, is dated at 1975 on YouTube, and has some great mid-1970's California skateboard film in it.  There's even a couple of BMX riders riding a pool with skaters, at one point.  But right in the beginning, at 1:43, you can see several kids sessioning the Huntington Beach Pier bank, probably in 1974 or 1975.  Jay Adams, one of the Z-Boys from Venice Beach, is in there, in his blond hair and dark blue Zephyr T-shirt, along with another Zephyr skater.  There was probably a contest in H.B. that day, bringing skaters from around SoCal together.  The really young kid you see skating in this film is Kele Rosecrans.

This blog is rolling up to the 1,000 blog post milestone, since I started it in 2017.  This is post #997

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"Born to Party" The Metal MC BMX jam in Huntington Beach- Summer 1988

First of all, it was 1988.  Keep that in mind.  The band Metal MC was supposed to be part Anthrax and part Beastie Boys.  It was neither.  On one hand, blending hard rock and rap in one band did get huge about a decade later, with Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, and others.  So you can't blame the guys for trying.  Maybe they were just the wrong guys, maybe they were too early on that idea.  But Metal MC didn't take off.  But they did give us SoCal BMX freestylers an excuse for a really fun jam, one summer afternoon in 1988.  

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The area on the bike path, underneath the Huntington Beach Pier, looked like this when I first rode up in the early spring of 1987.  That's French freestyle skater Pierre Andre' in the video, one of the H.B. Pier locals in those days.  That is the best video showing the area we rode and skated every Saturday and Sunday, in the late 1980's and into the 1990's.  There's an open restaurant area in this spot now, where there used to be an arcade, a bike rental place, and the Green Burrito Mexican restaurant on the south end of the building.  The bike path is still there, but the whole are looks much different now.  Here's a quick history of the H.B. Pier, from 1902 to 1985.  The end of the pier got trashed in another storm in early 1988, and was rebuilt and reopened in 1991, I believe.

Most of what people now know as "Main Street" in Huntington Beach today, didn't exist in the 1980's and 1990's.  The Main Street I was introduced to was a bunch of two story brick buildings, and there were a few empty shops.  There was a liquor store one block inland, on the corner, and very few people, like a handful, walking around at night.  The legendary Golden Bear nightclub, where Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and hundreds of other great musicians played, from the 1930's to the early 1980's, had closed down in 1983.  

There were about 5 bars in Downtown H.B. then.  Cagney's was behind Jack's Surf Shop on PCH.  Heading inland there was Perq's, Ma(fuckin')zotti's, The Long Board, and Skeefer's. Maybe one or two more.  Main Street was dingy, and most people in the city didn't come down there often at night, they went to the Newport Pier area bars, or other spots to party.  The Electric Chair record shop was just inland of where the fountain now is, a small storefront, with milk crates of punk albums and 7 inches on folding tables.  The P.O. Curb, now replaced by the low wall protruding from Rockin' Fig Surf Shop (still in the same location) was getting skated every night.  

Huntington Beach was a weird, occasionally wild, little surf town then.  There were oil pumps all over downtown then, even right on PCH (Pacific Coast Highway).  As a Midwest kid who spent high school in Boise, Idaho, I'd never seen a town like Huntington Beach, except maybe Venice Beach, but that had a whole different vibe.  The H.B. scene of the 1980's was something much different than it is today.  There were surfers, skaters, BMXers, wandering punkers and a few skinheads, and a bunch of weird characters.  Then there was the crowds that came to the beach on the weekends. That was the Huntington Beach I moved into in early 1987, to work for the American Freestyle Association as the newsletter editor/photographer, and all around assistant to Bob Morales.

There were always a few BMXers and a few freestyle skaters, that hung out at the Huntington Beach Pier on the weekends, in the late 1980's and into the 1990's.  There were a bunch of reasons for this, besides the hot women in bikinis.  The long wide area of pavement next to the building, on the south side of the pier, was a good place to both ride skateboards and BMX freestyle bikes.  During the week, there really weren't many people riding or walking up and down the bike path.  Under the pier itself it was concrete, which was sandy and slippery, so the pavement worked better for us.  

The main skaters were English freestyle skating champ Don Brown and French freestyle skating champ Pierre Andre' (Senizergues), and often Swedish freestyle skating champ Hans Lingren, along with local freestyle skater Jeremy Ramey.  Why were three of the top European freestyle skaters in Huntington Beach?  They rode for either Vision or Sims Skateboards (then owned by Vision), located in nearby Costa Mesa.  Although he rode for Powell-Peralta, Per Welinder rolled by fairly often as well.  At the time, all these freestyle skaters were the low paid demo skaters for the Big Three skate companies, while the vert skaters, like Tony Hawk, Christian Hosoi, and Steve Caballero, were making the big money.  In the 1990's, the freestyle skaters took over the skate industry, and were sometimes jokingly referred to as the "Skate Illuminati." In about 1989, another top freestyle skater came up, Darryl Grogan, and he came down the pier now and then, as well.  

On the BMX freestyle side, the most local rider was Mike Sarrail, a tall guy from the San Gabriel Valley, who was really good at Miami hop hops.  He drove over an hour every weekend to session.  There was a crew of  good amateur riders in the Lakewood area who came by often to bust out their flatland skills.  In no particular order they were Nathan Shimizu, Ron Camero, Jeff Cotter, Ron McCoy, Dan Hubbard, and Derek Oriee.  Sometimes they brought Tim Cotter, Jeff's little brother, who also rode.  Most of those guys were featured in Vision's Freestylin' Fanatics video.  The spandex brothers, Chuck and Joe Johnson, showed up once in a while.  It wasn't unusual to see Martin Aparijo or Woody Itson show up, the original flatland guys.  From the desert, Randy Lawrence moved to H.B. for a while and found work as a bike mechanic, and he joined the locals around 1988-89.  Those were the guys there most often in that era.  Because the pier was a well known scene, pretty much anybody could just randomly show up and ride or skate.  Ed Templeton and Mark Gonzales showed up on a regular basis, along with a whole crew of H. B.'s amateur skaters.  

On any given Saturday or Sunday, we'd start showing up around 11:00 am or so, and just start riding or skating.  The skaters would get a crowd, and skate for 15-20 minutes, until the police showed up and said the crowd was blocking the bike path.  Then they'd stop skating, the crowd of beach going spectators would wander off, and then us BMXers would take over.  A crowd would form, usually 100 or so people, maybe 200.  At times we'd get 500 or more people watching.  We'd take turns busting out our latest and best flatland, for 15-20 minutes.  Then the police would roll up, say the crowd was blocking the bike path (which we actually told them not to do), and we'd stop.  The crowd would wander off, and then the skaters would get going again.  That was our weekend.  Week after week, year after year.  We'd head off to grab some food or take a leak when needed.  We'd talk to girls, or try to.  Mostly we just rode and skated in front of crowds from 11:00am or noon until about 7 or 8 pm.  That's our weekends played out, unless there was a contest somewhere.  I once figured out that I rode in front of at least 140,000 people, 100 or 200 at a time, from 1987 to about 1992, on all those weekends at the pier, from about 1987 to 1992.  The same was true of all the other riders and skaters.

Because so many, literally thousands, of random people watched us ride and skate every weekend, we'd often meet people who who said they wanted to put us in a video, a movie, at TV show, or something like that.  BMX freestyle was a new thing in the late 1980's, even most Californians hadn't seen it live and in person.  Most of the people who wanted to put us in a video or TV show were completely full of shit.  But not all of them.  The guy behind the Metal MC video wandered up and started talking to Mike one afternoon.  Mike explained freestyle, and that there were a lot more riders, jumpers and vert riders, too.  

The talk turned into a real project, and the guy rented the empty lot on PCH and Main (where Huntington Surf & Sport stands now), where we often had local AFA contests.  Mike told him to contact GT, to rent the Stonehenge, their four sided jump ramp, and we called around to tell riders to show up for the jam.  Boom, a fun BMX jam happened, and the guy's crew shot a bunch of footage to make the Metal MC video.  It was an all afternoon jam.  

In the video above, you see mostly Brian Blyther (in black) jumping, East Coast rider Dennis Langlois (grey jersey), and San Diego thrasher Brand Blanchard landing a 540 on the deck.  Also at the jam were NorCal legends Dave Vanderspek and Maurice Meyer, San Diego street rider Eddie Roman, several of the Lakewood crew, pro racer/jumper Rich Bartlett, Craig Grasso, Randy Lawrence, George Smoot, Scott Robinson, and about 30 more riders, myself included.  We had this kind of jam a couple of times.  This one, and another for a guy who made mass marketed video that sold in places like Kmart.  At the time, all day BMX jam sessions with some top riders and no contest were a rare thing, so this and the other Stonehenge ram jam were two really fun events Huntington Beach during the late 80's.  

This blog post was inspired by a great photo of Brian Blyther doing an X-up, that Steve Giberson, aka Guy B, shared on Facebook recently.  

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H.B. Tuesdays - Weekly Old School BMX freestyle- 1/7/2020

The main guy spearheading H.B. Tuesdays every week, longtime GT pro back in the day, Martin Aparijo.  Backwards wheelie in a circle.  I still haven't learned everybody's names, so just enjoy the remaining photos.

 The Huntington Beach Pier area is a skateboarding spot going back the the late 1970's.  BMX freestylers started riding there regularly, on the weekends, in the mid-1980's.  I was one of the locals there, nearly every weekend, from 1987 through about 1992.  SoCal flatlander, Mike Sarrail, though living in Covina, far inland, was the main local then, and Randy Lawrence rode there a lot for a while.  The Lakewood crew, Ron Camero, Nathan Shimizu, Jeff Cotter, Ron McCoy and a couple more, came by once or twice a month.  Martin Aparijo and Woody Itson, and other flatlanders, came by when in the area.  The current H.B, Tuesdays jam goes back 7 years (maybe more).  Because it's a known scene, and gets covered in social media and websites (like my blog, now), people from all over the world may show up on any given Tuesday.  If you're an Old School freestyler, stop by and session when you're in the area. 

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H.B. Tuesdays- Weekly Old School freestyle jam - 1/7/2020 Post #2

H.B. Tuesdays is a weekly Old School flatland jam, spearheaded by Martin Aparijo and Eddie Fiola.  I snapped these photos two weeks ago yesterday.  Here are the "chamber of commerce" style beauty pics.  "Come visit beautiful vacation spot, Huntington Beach, California.  Business people love our thriving economy and relaxing on our wide sand beaches.  Tourists travel here from worldwide to see Martin Aparijo do backwards wheelies with palm trees in the background."

 Martin, with a Captain Morgan framestand.

 H.B. Tuesdays scene from up on the Huntington Beach Pier, just north of the pier, on the wide part of the bike path, in front of the amphitheater.

Forkwheelie, backwards, I think, out of a fire hydrant?  Can't remember, I was just trying to get the photos in frame while we had that cool golden light just before sunset.

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HB Tuesday 9/3/2019

 It was pretty quiet this past Tuesday, for the HB Tuesday, since it was the day after Labor Day.  Here are my pics.  As always, it was fun hanging with the Old School BMX freestylers, talking some smack, and jokin' around.  Above, Martin Aparijo with a circular backwards wheelie, with the H.B. Pier in the background.

 Still forget this guy's name, sorry man.  But he's all about the fire hydrant variations.  Good thing, he was on fire.

 The Cowboy, Chuck Johnson, with his home made high tech freecoaster/direct drive combo back hub.  He's actually pedaling from left to right.  Really. 

Huntington Beach at dusk from south of the pier.  It's great to be able to see this view in person once again, after only seeing this on Facebook for ten years... 

Next Tuesday is the anniversary of Martin and Eddie's H.B. Tuesdays, big party farther down the beach.  Check Martin's Facebook page for details...

Josh White's First Tailwhip Jump

Here's GT pro rider Josh White working the first four quarterpipe set-up at an AFA Master's contest in the fall of 1987.  Blasting out of obscurity (pun intended) in Oregon, to instant fame in the BMX freestyle world, Josh raised the bar considerably as he broke onto the scene in a big way.  He was known for going incredibly high for the time period, hitting honest 10 to12 foot plus airs when that's where the ceiling of the best riders was, and doing variations a 7 or 8 feet up.  Keep in mind the ramps then were 8 foot high by 8 foot wide, wobbly, wooden quarterpipes, that usually came just up to vert.

Josh also set himself apart with his super stretched variations.  This was said to come from years  of training in kickboxing (MMA didn't exist then, BTW), and daily stretching through all those years.  But the thing that I never could figure out about Josh was that he would approach the ramps at what seemed like half the speed of any other vert rider, amateur or pro, and then blast 9 or 10 feet out.  He could just pump more air out of his speed than anyone, and even he didn't seem to know quite how that happened, because I actually asked him about it once.

As fate would have it, I met Josh in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, on a layover to the Tulsa, Oklahoma, AFA Masters contest in April of 1986.  I traveling on my own, but had been tapped to write the article about that contest for FREESTYLIN' magazine.  So I knew it was going to be a pretty cool weekend for me.  That amazing weekend started when I saw GT pro freestylers Eddie Fiola, Martin Aparijo, and some blond kid in the DFW airport.  I'd met Eddie in Whistler, British Columbia the year before, where he and Chris Lashua hung out for a week on a tour break.  I knew he didn't remember me, but it gave me, a pretty shy guy by nature, a reason to go say "Hi."  Eddie was really cool, remembering the week in Whistler, and introduced me to top flatlander Martin Aparijo, and the new guy, Josh White.  Eddie added, "Josh just did his first photo shoot for FREESTYLIN' the other day."  I said, "Oh, cool."  We talked for about fifteen minutes, until the last possible minute to board our plane, and then took our separate seats.

The next day, I saw just how good of a vert rider Josh was, holding his own (and then some) with all the heavy pros like Fiola, Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez, and the rest.  I wound up hanging out with the Haro team all weekend (since I was traveling on my Pizza Hut salary and had no room or rent-a-car), and spoke with Josh, Eddie, and the others here and there over the course of the weekend.  Almost all the pros, and many top ams, were staying at the same Holiday Inn motel, playing pool, and doing flatland in the parking lot all weekend, and everyone was talking about the new GT vert guy, Josh White.

In another bit of coincidence, that photo shoot Josh did with FREESTYLIN' led to a small, and completely amazing, photo on the cover of the August 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN'.  In that same issue happened to be an article about zines, where my zine, San Jose Stylin', was listed at the top BMX freestyle zine in the country.  And, my article about the Tulsa contest also was published in that same issue.  Now I'm definitely biased, but I also think the cover design was the coolest cover FREESTYLIN' ever did, which says a lot.  They had many amazing covers.  This is it:

In those days, magazines took three months to come out, from writing and photos to finished copies, so this epic issue hit newsstands in late June.  A one hand no-footed can-can was simply unheard of  then.  A seven foot high, super stretched one hand no-footed can-can, on the famous T.O.L. ramp, was simply un-fucking-believable.  This cover, all by itself, raised the bar of BMX vert riding, and the article inside raised it even higher.  The icing on the cake was Josh's quote, blown up in big letters, "I consider myself a ground rider."  With this issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine, Josh White exploded onto the national BMX scene.  Meanwhile, deep inside the magazine, I kind of oozed quietly into the background periphery of the national freestyle zine, as a writer/zine guy.

Within days of this magazine hitting the stands, I interviewed for, and was hired at, Wizard Publications.  So this issue changed the course of Josh's life, and my own, and shed light on some other up-and-comers in the freestyle world, little Mathew Hoffman got his first editorial photo, Joe Johnson got his first magazine mention, and NorCal bros. Chris and Karl Rothe got a photo.  For an obscure part of the country to have a freestyle contest at the time, the 1986 Tulsa AFA contest shined a light on a lot of new blood in the BMX freestyle world.

By the time the magazine hit, Josh was already touring the country for GT Bikes.  I moved to Redondo Beach, California, and began a new life of my own, first as a magazine guy for a few months, and then as the guy you yelled at when the ramps moved at AFA contests, and as their newsletter editor.  While I never knew Josh well, we knew each other, talked from time to time, mostly at mostly at contests. Josh became legendary as part of the mid-1980's quarterpipe riders, pushing the older skatepark riders in the rapidly progressing vert scene.  Josh went on to join the high air posse of Todd Anderson, Dino Deluca, and the other Camarillo riders.

In my life, I spent the last half of 1986 working at Wizard Publications, then nearly all of 1987 working for Bob Morales at the American Freestyle Association down in Huntington Beach.  Bob got me into video work, which all happened at Unreel Productions in nearby Costa Mesa.  Unreel was the video unit of Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear, which were soaring in popularity at the time.

My life turned to one of either taking the bus or riding my freestyle bike the length of Huntington Beach every morning, then cleaning up at work.  On the days I rode, my 11 mile ride home was a wandering cruise to a whole series of H.B. street and flatland spots.  I spent most of my weekends sessioning under the H.B. Pier with inlander-but-local freestyler Mike Sarrail, and freestyle skaters Pierre Andre', Don Brown, Jeremy Ramey, and the random locals who came by, like Mark Gonzales and Ed Templeton.

On one of those many weekends at the Huntington Beach Pier, in later 1988, I think, Josh White rolled up.  We got to talking, and busted some flatland for the beach crowd.  Then Josh told me a friend of his said there were some walls right by the beach that would be good to ride on.  Wall rides were a brand new thing then, and everyone was looking for good walls to ride.  Josh told me where these walls were supposed to be, right on the beach, from Goldenwest south.  I rode the bike trail day after day for over a year, right by there, and was always looking for new places to ride. I told Josh would have seen them if they were there.  But it sounded like something worth looking for, so he and I headed off to find these mysterious walls.

We rode north from the pier, and where the bike path headed up the hill, kind of across PCH from Taco Bell, (about 11th street), he asked about the lower, dirt path.  For some reason, I'd never ridden it.  It was dirt, and when I was heading to the pier to flatland all day, I didn't want to get my brakes all dirty, I guess.

So Josh White and me ride up this wide dirt area, below the bike path and above the beach itself.  It's actually where the railroad into H.B. was built in the early 1900's, just before the big oil boom of 1920, as I found out later.  Much to my surprise, there were all these old, crumbling, slightly under vert, concrete retaining walls, about 11 feet high, with murals on them.  Most of them had thick sand in front of them, preventing a ride up to hit them for wall rides.  We finally found one that didn't have much loose sand, the wall with the Blues Brother mural, and the Three Stooges painted on it.  On the very left corner of the wall, there was a built up mound of dirt, maybe 18 inches high, a lip to get your bike up on the wall.  Obviously, someone had ridden it before.

Best of all, the wall was just a bit under vert, maybe 80-85 degrees steep, which made it easy to get much higher up than any normal wall ride.  Josh was doing 4 or 5 foot high wall rides right off the bat, and nearly 7 feet up before we left.  I wall ride the other way, and found a tiny lip, a few inches high, farther down the wall, and got maybe three feet up the wall.  I was stoked. Being able to actually grip on the wall, rather than the wall slides we had been doing, made us feel like a hero on the Blues Brothers Wall.

Then we got into a fakie wall ride session.  While I'd done fakies on small walls with launch ramps before, I could never get the back wheel bounce to do a true fakie wall ride and land it.  But I could roll up the Blues Brothers Wall, like a ramp fakie, and I was having a blast.  Josh was getting a couple feet higher up the wall.  Hey, he was Josh White, vert superhero.  No surprise there.  Right before we gave up on that session, he was doing fakies, pulling off the wall, and tweaking a nearly clicked turndown on the way down, and landing them.  I'd never seen anything like that before.  While Josh rarely came by the H.B. Pier after that, I started riding those walls on a regular basis.  I did have a couple of more sessions with Josh, and others, over the next year or so.  So that day, I got to know Josh a bit better, just as a rider.  The Blues Brothers Wall, and several others, are in my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend (below), from 10:57 to 12:20, and around 13:26.

At that time, I had moved jobs from the AFA to work at Unreel Productions, which was on edge of  the Costa Mesa mesa, looking north over the oil fields near what is now Sheep Hills.  The Sheep Hills trails we know now didn't exist then, but there were some jumps above Sheep's current location, where the condos above Sheep Hills are now, by the bottom end of 19th street.  There was a good sized hip jump, and a roll-in then flyout ditch jump, and also a four foot deep, concrete ditch, with banked walls, at the bottom of the hill.  As a freestyler who was never good at jumping doubles, I was all about the ditch jump.

This jump was 5 minute ride from the Unreel office, and I realized I could hit it on my lunch break.  This was probably the spring of 1989, I think.  I started riding over there and getting a quick, half-hour jumping session in at lunch, then hitting the deli near our office on the way back for a sandwich, and eating in my dub room as I got back to work.  Life was good.

One day, I was hitting the ditch jump on my lunch break, and Josh White rolled up.  I was trying to learn tailwhip jumps, something I'd been struggling with for two years at that time.  Joe Johnson did tailwhips on vert then, and even doubles, and I think Mat Hoffman was doing single tailwhips at that time and learning doubles.  But no one had done a tailwhip off a jump yet, even off a flyout jump.  I had worked out the basic move, leveling the bike off and getting the back end around, but I couldn't land them.  I was always beside the bike, not up over it so I could land it.  I'd also been trying bunnyhop tailwhips for a year and a half at that point, which everyone knew was impossible.  That was just my stupid idea that would never, EVER happen.  That's how different the thinking was at the time.  Saying you wanted to land a bunnyhop tailwhip in 1989 would be like telling people you want to land a bunnyhop double backflip today.  Never gonna happen.  (Watch, someone will do a bunnyhop double back off a drop in or something now, give it a year).

At the ditch jump, Josh said he'd thought about learning tailwhips off jumps, but just never tried it.  So we took turns hitting the flyout jump, getting maybe 18 inches off the ground, and trying to land a tailwhip.  I got close, but couldn't land it.  Josh worked out the basic movement pretty quick, and then was getting about to the same point.  Neither of us could land it.  I headed back to work, leaving Josh riding alone, and that was the last time I saw him at that ditch jump.

A couple of days later, back out at that jump, I snapped my chain heading into the ditch, went over the bars while just rolling in, and dove, Superman-style, into the sandy dirt.  The whole side of my face and body was covered in dirt, those painful, stinging scrapes, and then some blood.  I scootered my bike painfully back to Unreel, washed up in the bathroom, and went back to work.  All afternoon, one person after another walked into my room and asked, "What the hell happened to you?"  I only went for a couple more lunchtime jump sessions after that, and started hitting the jump, and other local spots, after work, on my long, sessioning, ride home.


This is my 1990 self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend.  The footage was shot over the spring, summer, and early fall of 1990.  If you go to 23:16, you'll see me do three quick double peg grinds on a ledge with screw-on, knurled pegs, and then it leads into a section at a flyout jump.  That jump was called Oceanview, and was an epic spot for a few years, in Huntington Beach.  It was located at Oceanview High school, on the corner of Warner and Gothard in H.B., and was a big skate spot, as well, in the 1990's.  A big addition was built onto the school years later, and this spot is under roof now.

This video section is from a collection of about 6 or 7 different sessions over a few months.  Keith Treanor is the standout rider, in the black T-shirt obviously, and John Povah, Woody Itson, Josh White, and Andy Mulcahy are also in it.  Josh has the white T-shirt, gray shorts, and light hair.  All the footage with Josh was shot in half an hour, one evening when I ran into him there.  It was just us, and one local kid, who wandered off  pretty quickly.  After shooting him doing a bunch of his standard vert variations, some of which he'd never tried on dirt.  Josh and I got talking about that time we were both trying tailwhips the year before, at the ditch jump in Costa Mesa.  He told me he'd never tried them again.  But Oceanview was the perfect jump to land one.

So... with my two-hour camera battery fading, and dusk approaching, Josh White started trying to land his first tailwhip off a jump.  He got the feel back pretty quick, and was coming real close.  Remember, NO ONE... EVER, had landed a tailwhip off a jump then, as far as I know.  If you go to 25:19 in this video, you see Josh come close to landing one, and then, off balance, come running towards the camera.  That was the second to last try Josh took that night.  I know this because, on the next try, Josh White landed the first tailwhip off a jump I had ever seen, or heard about.  Even today, 29 years later, I believe that was the first tailwhip jump ever landed.  And my battery died as his bike left the jump.  My camera shut off when bike was mid-air.  I missed the shot.  I missed the shot of the first tailwhip jump ever landed.

I screamed.  That wasn't out of place, because Josh White screamed, too.  He was super stoked.  He didn't realize we were screaming for different reasons.  Josh was about ready to strangle me when he asked to see the footage, and I told him my battery had died while he was mid-air.  We watched it back, and I think it clicked off just as his bike was leaving the jump.  Darkness set it, both in the Huntington Beach evening, and in our souls, knowing what I'd just missed documenting.  Ultimately, we just shook our heads and rode off in our separate directions.  Sorry about that one, Josh.

If you go to 35:48 in the video, you'll see Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson do what I believe is the first dirt jumping tailwhip to ever appear in a BMX video.  This one happened at Edison Jumps, behind Edison High School, on the other end of Huntington Beach.  That's located at 21400 Magnolia in H.B.  It's a toe dragger, but it's a tailwhip, and it happened on double jumps, not a flyout jump, about three months after the one I saw Josh do.  Josh White is also all over this section, but that was shot on a different day than the session with Crazy Red, Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer and the rest.  I never met Crazy Red until that day.  By the way, this section is the first time the S&M Bikes/P.O.W. House crew appeared in a video as well.

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Crazy California

Chris Moeller in "Leg Muscles": The Chain Wallet

The S&M Bikes 30 year book, Behind the Shield, is coming out soon.  So I figured it's a good time to tell a few of my stories from the days of being part of the S&M posses and longtime roommate to Chris Moeller.

In 1990, as Vision Skateboards was collapsing, and Unreel Productions, their video company, where I worked, was shut down.  Since I was the cheapest guy on staff and knew how to work most of the equipment, they kept me around and moved me to the Vision main headquarters building in Santa Ana, California.  Oddly, that's a block from where the S&M (and Fit) Bikes headquarters is now.

Anyhow, tired of being a peon on all the kinda goofy Vision videos, with no say in how they were made, I decided to self-produce my own BMX freestyle video.  I wanted to show the actual riding we did day after day, no uniforms, lots of street, and no riding on minature golf courses.  I shot footage all year long, put all my money into it, borrowed a grand late from Mike Sarrail to finish it (which I did pay back, just for the record), and The Ultimate Weekend came out in October of 1987.  As one of the first rider made videos, it was good for its day.  I spent $5,000 making it, of my own money, and made maybe $2,500 back over the next six or eight months.  I went into the project thinking I'd make like $20,000 or more back.  Yeah...sure...  I was still super shy, and a horrible salesman, and I let a surf video distributor do most of the selling.

I didn't pay off all my credit cards, and soon was working at a video duplicator in North Hollywood for $8 an hour and had $7,000 in or so in debt.  In the days before crippling student debt was a normal thing for people, that seemed like a lot to me.  I worked all the time, rode solo in the San Fenrnado Valley, and was depressed by the "insurmountable" amount of debt I had.

In 1991, while working that duplicating job, Chris Moeller found me somehow, and called up saying he wanted to make a video for S&M Bikes.  The entire company then was housed in the single car garage, of a one bedroom apartment, on Alabama street in Huntington Beach, California.  The BMX industry had "died" a year and a half earlier, and times were tight in the 20 inch world.  I was initially hoping Chris wanted to spend $2,000 or so to make the video.  I could have some fun, and pocket a good check.  When I asked him what budget he had in mind, he said, "like maybe $200."  After working at Unreel, where the budget wasn't ever a factor, $200 seemed like nothing.  But it sounded like fun, and I started going down on the weekends to H.B., and shooting video of Chris and the crew.

It's hard to imagine now, but dirt jumping wasn't even a sport then, it was something we all did to some extent, and Chris and a handful of lunatics, did to an insane level for the time period.  They'd have a jump contest at BMX nationals every once in a while, with one, single double jump, and that was it.  But Chris, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, the P.O.W. House guys, and a few others were pro racers who spent a ton of time jumping for fun, and were pushing the progression at the time.  Most of the top jumpers were then S&M riders.  Chris couldn't pay them, but the bikes were stronger, and no other companies had a budget, or even the idea, to steal riders from S&M then.  Basically, S&M Bikes WAS dirt jumping in the minds of most BMX racers and freestylers in 1991.

Chris Moeller, being the guy he was, wanted to fuck with everyone when we made the video.  First was the whole thing of using the bad acting from porn videos in it.  Then, he started the video with flatlander Perry Mervar's section.  He wanted hardcore jumpers everywhere to get the video, pop it into the VCR all excited, and go, "Flatland?  What the fuck is this shit?"  In addition, dorking around and practical jokes have always been a part of BMX, and the whole hardcore punk mentality we had back then.  Basically, we we being jackasses a few years before the Big Brother videos came out, which turned into the Jackass TV show, and ultimately, the Jackass movies.  That first S&M Bikes video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer,  is basically a prequel to the Jackass stuff years later.

I crashed out on the floor of Moeller's apartment one weekend night, and the next morning he said, that to start his section, he wanted to start with skating.  Again, he wanted to do that just to fuck with people.  He said he had this funny idea to make fun of old school skaters, who'd taken to wearing biker-type chain wallets then.

So he grabbed his board, I grabbed the camera, and we rode our bikes down to a little park, Manning Park, on the corner of Delaware and Detroit.  There Chris got the big car tow chain he came up with somewhere, stuffed one end into his front pocket, and the other end into his back pocket, and started skating round the basketball court with it dragging behind.  At first, I thought it was just dumb.  We did the little intro part, where he talks about wearing the beanie ("stocking cap" in my world), another skater trend then, and the old car thing, then leads into the chain wallet.  I didn't even know Chris could skate at all then.  I knew him from a few years back, and had seen him around from time to time, but didn't really know much about him, other than he was a pro racer, about the craziest jumper of the day, and had somehow started a bike company at 16-years-old.

This was one of the first video pieces we shot for the video.  I had my big, full size, S-VHS camera, and shot footage as Chris started skating around, doing little tricks, with the massive chain dragging behind.  The longer it went on, the funnier I thought it was.  That, goofy, dorkin' around, sarcastic sense of humor that morning set the tone for all the video shoots we did for Leg Muscles.  Things got weirder and crazier from there, the opposite of my video a year earlier, where I was trying to be professional.  Even more funny, the kid playing basketball just kept playing, pretty much ignoring us, which made the final video look funnier.  And that's why Chris Moeller started his first real video segment skateboarding.

More weird tales from the S&M Bikes world of the early 1990's coming soon...

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WPOS Kreative Ideas

The Year of the Tent #9

The late Dr. Maya Angelou, 18" X 24," Sharpies on paper, sold.  This one managed to wind up on stage at the garden party at Bailey Park here in Winston-Salem, celebrating Dr. Angelou's 90th birthday party.  That was pretty cool. 

 Joan Jett/I Love Rock n' Roll, 18" X 24," Sharpies on paper.  I started this one for myself, and like so many others over the last couple of years, it wound up for sale.  You may see it in a window on Trade Street, that's where I last saw it. 

 When you wind up homeless for any reason, most people somehow believe that you must have lived a life that would inevitably lead to homelessness.  In almost every case, that's not true.  So here are a couple of photos of me when I wasn't old, fat, and homeless.  Here I am in 1989 as a camerman for Unreel Productions, the video company owned by Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear Clothes.  The camera on my shoulder is a broadcast quality Sony Betacam that weighed 35 pounds and cost $50,000.  I was shooting the AFA Masters Finals, the year end national BMX freestyle contest.  The location is the former Olympic Velodrome, used in the 1984 Olympics, on the campus of Cal State Dominguez Hills.  For you old school rap fans out there, this is a couple miles from Compton.  Photo by Mike Sarrail.

This is a video still (at 1:05) from my 1990, self-produced BMX freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend.  I'm doing a wall ride over my younger sister Cheri's head.  She's a grade school teacher in Greensboro now.  The location is the Blues Brother Wall, a slightly undervert wall, right next to the beach in Huntington Beach, California.  It's near 14th Street and PCH. 

A forgotten Woody Itson trick

If you started riding in the first wide wave of BMX freestyle in the mid 1980's, you remember Woody Itson as a pioneer of flatland.  If you were in the Southern California scene in the early 80's, you might remember Woody riding skateparks or getting an occasional magazine photo jumping.

But here's one even Woody might not remember.  In 1990 Woody's Diamond Back deal was over, and he was riding just for himself, according to a interview bit I just found on 23mag.com .  During that year, I was riding the amazing flyout jump at Oceanview High School in Huntingtin Beach often.  I was also shooting video for my first self-produced bike video, The Ultimate Weekend.

I just came across this still I made from the video a while back.  Woody Itson, unsponsored, throwing a switch handed jump.  In 1986, a 14-year-old Mat Hoffman debuted that trick to the freestyle world.  Four years later, Woody was pulling it off.  Heck, I made the video and I forgot this shot was in there.  You can find it at 23:52 in the video.