I was in seventh grade at Willard Jr. High School in the small town of Willard, Ohio when a hillbilly kid told me about riding in a BMX race. He said there was a water jump that had goldfish in it. Unfortunately, he was a known liar and nobody believed him. That was about 1978, and it was the first I heard of BMX. A couple of years later I lived in Carlsbad, New Mexico and bought a Sentinal Exploder GX BMX bike off my friend Mike for $5. The bike wasn't really worth $5 because it had a coaster brake and sometimes the pedals would go around twice before the back hub would catch and move the wheel. The bike sat in our garage for a year when we moved to Boise, Idaho.
The next year we moved out to a trailer park in the desert outside of Boise. There was nothing much to do in the trailer park, so all us young guys would hit these little jumps on our crappy BMX bikes. We called the trailer park Blue Valley, and that's where I got into BMX in the summer of 1982. We all started breaking parts on our cheap bikes, and scraped up money to buy quality parts to replace what broke. We also continually pushed each other to get better. That fall we learned there was a BMX track in Boise, and four of us and three bikes crammed into Scott's mom's Pinto (not a hatchback) and headed to the our first local race. I watched as the other three guys raced. Despite their cheap bikes, all three of them got trophies. The next weekend the whole trailer park piled into my dad's Ford van and went to the last race of the season. We all got third or better. There were seven official teams that day, and the Blue Valley crew, had we been a team, would have placed second. I was hooked. BMX changed my life, and I headed in a far different direction than I thought I would in life. This remake of my former blog is about that journey.
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