The Birth of Club Homeboy

The Birth of Club Homeboy

 By late 1986, I'd fallen into the rhythm of working at Wizard Publications.  Gork, the editor of BMX Action, and Lew, the assistant editor of FREESTYLIN', were my roommates.  We had moved into a three bedroom apartment in Hermosa Beach.  Andy Jenkins FREESTYLIN's editor, and his wife Kelly, lived half a block down the alley that our apartment faced.  Most mornings, after a quick breakfast, we'd pile into Gork's van, he'd crank up Metallica, and drive to the office.  Some days we'd ride our bikes the three or four miles or so to the Wizard office.  On an average day we'd end work around 5:00 or 6:00, pile back in the van, and head home.

Check out my epic blog post explaining why action sports exploded in popularity when they did 

"The Rise of the Action Sports"

After our bachelor suppers, Lew and I would jump on our bikes and head down to The Spot, our riding area on the north end of the Redondo Beach Pier.  Like any riding spot then, there were a handful of locals.  Most nights it was Lew, Craig Grasso, Chris Day, and me.  Gork came down to do some flatland 3 or 4 nights a week.  R.L. Osborn came down to ride on a regular basis.  Andy skated down a couple of times a week.  That was our core crew.  In addition, McGoo, the CW freestyle team manager at the time, showed up now and then, sometimes with Dizz Hicks and Ceppie Maes.  We'd practice our flatland and goof around for a couple of hours.  Some nights we'd take off and do a little street riding, jumping curbs or hitting local banks.  The Spot wasn't much different than most of the small freestyle scenes at the time, except for a couple of things.

One, we were right by the Pacific ocean, so we could hear sea lions barking off in the distance, and the ocean breeze brought a lot of moisture that made our brakes really sticky.  The second thing about the spot was that Andy and Lew had mentioned it in FREESTYLIN' from time to time, so every rider in the world knew it was there.  When an AFA contest was happening, we could roll down to the spot and find 75 riders from across the country riding there.  Everyone had to make a trip to The Spot when they came to Southern California.

One night, after our session, Lew and I rode over to Andy and Kelly's apartment to hang out.  Lew was a man of continual, and often pretty crazy, ideas.  On that particular night, he decided he wanted to find a name for The Spot locals.  I sat on the couch sipping a Coke as Lew and Andy threw different names around.  As I recall, Lew was getting into rap music at the time, a pretty new thing then.  But the term "posse," used often by rappers, didn't seem to fit our group.  Then, out of nowhere, Lew said, "How about Club Homeboy?"  They didn't like the name at first.  A few other names were tossed around, but Lew came back to Club Homeboy, and the name stuck.  So Lew, Gork, Me, Craig Grasso, Chris Day, Andy, and R.L. Osborn were original members of Club Homeboy.

For a few days, we just said the name as a little joke.  Then one night, Lew bought some sticker paper, and that night we stayed late working, giving him time to assault the Wizard Pubs copy machine.  While Andy, Gork, and I worked on magazine work, or petted Cosmo the factory watch cat, Lew flipped through a bunch of random, non-BMX magazines, lying around as creative inspiration.  He found a photo of this weird old guy.  He typed up the words, "Feelin' Nifty" on a typewriter, and started blowing up the words and giving them some distortion.  Half an hour later, the first Club Homeboy stickers were made and cut.  Long, skinny stickers with the weird old guy's face and "Feelin' Nifty" beside it.  He handed us each a few.  When we went home that night, I put one on the underside of my helmet visor, where it stayed for well over ten years, until I lost that helmet.

A couple nights later, Lew got some more sticker paper.  Flipping through a Japanese magazine called Popeye, he found the photo of Buckwheat from the Little Rascals.  Lew's amped up imagination went to work, and by the end of the night, the iconic Club Homeboy stickers with Buckwheat's face were being handed out to all of us.  That first batch was white, paper stickers.  A few days later, Lew found a place to buy neon green sticker paper, and he made a few dozen Buckwheat CHB stickers. 

The funny thing was, we were not supposed to use the copy machine for non-work activities.  So we actually hid Club Homeboy from Oz, our boss and the owner of Wizard, for quite a while.  But Lew went to the first 2-Hip King of Vert contest, in a barn in Wisconsin (or was it Minnesota?) soon after.  In any case, Lew took dozens of the Club Homeboy stickers with him, and slapped them all over the barn where the contest was held.  Nearly every top pro rider had a Club Homeboy sticker on their frame after that.  From that point on, random riders were always asking Lew for the stickers.

When I got laid off a couple months later, then end of December 1986, Club Homeboy was still, "officially," just The Spot locals, though other riders were asking for the stickers, putting them on their bikes.  A couple months later, Wizard hired Spike Jonze, who was a BMXer/skater kid, barely 18 years old.  He'd worked at Rockville BMX back east, then hopped in the Haor tour van, and became their roadie.  He wound up living at Ron Wilkerson's Enchanted House, with Kevin Martin.  

I wasn't the right fit for the Wizard office, and Spike Jonze definitely was.  As he got going in his first real job in California, Club Homeboy was evolving.  Oz finally asked Andy and Lew what Club Homeboy was, since he kept seeing the stickers everywhere.  They told him about it, and Oz liked the idea.  With his backing, suddenly little ads and mentions of Club Homeboy began popping up in FREESTYLIN'.  Already popular among the pro riders, and SoCal riders, it quickly took off and became an actual, paid membership organization.  For $20 or whatever, riders got a CHB T-shirt, a zine, a few stickers, a membership card, and a coupleof plastic wristbands.  

I was working down in Huntington Beach, at the AFA then, and I asked Lew for a T-shirt the next time I talked to him on the phone.  As an original member of Club Homeboy, that seemed like a reasonable request.  But in the few months I'd been away from Wizard, Club Homeboy  had morphed into something much bigger.  The original idea of it being locals from The Spot had faded away.  I kept bugging Lew, and finally got a Club Homeboy T-shirt for free.  But I never got the other stuff, or a membership card.  Being the uptight dork that I was then, I had some sour grapes against Lew for a while, over the Club Homeboy thing.  But I got over it, eventually.

As the next couple years went on, I heard Club Homeboy had thousands of members, and the "Chuck Brown" T-shirt, the Charlie Brown design, sold thousands of shirts.  The Club Homeboy Buckwheat logo wound up being one of the most iconic logos of 1980's BMX freestyle.  It's up there with the Haro chevron logo, the GT letters, and the Vision Street Wear logo in image recognition.  

If you google "Club Homeboy BMX" and search images, dozens come up.  Looking back from 34 years later, the cool thing about Lew's weird little idea turned icon is that it is a BMX freestyle thing.  The hardcore racers of the day don't get it.  And the Old School skateboarders, inline skaters, and snowboarders from that era don't know about Club Homeboy.  It's a freestyle thing... you wouldn't understand. 

I have a new blog now, checking out bike, skate, art, and other interesting spots, check it out:

The Spot Finder

 The Spot Finder      #thespotfinder