I had another story from the 90's in mind for today. But Rich Bartlett had a post on Facebook with a pic of him testing the single blade Kastan forks back in about '89. That photo instantly took me back to one of those epic nights in the tiny, one bedroom apartment we called the Winnebago. In about 1991, Chris Moeller, founder of the fledgling bike company S&M Bikes, lived in a tiny apartment on Alabama Street in Huntington Beach, California. An enterprising apartment owner had taken 8 feet off the back of a few garages and made it into a long, narrow, completely unpermitted apartment. The whole thing would have fit into a semi trailer. First you had to walk through a gate into a private backyard, and then to a door that shouldn't have been there. The door led to the tiny living room, which led to the tiny kitchen, a hallway passed a tiny bathroom on one side, then the small single bedroom. A door out the other end of the bedroom led to a single car garage. That garage was the home of S&M Bikes in 1990-91.
Chris Moeller, pro racer, amazing jumper, BMX Action/Go test rider, entrepreneur, and certifiable weirdo, lived in the bedroom. After getting fired from my job at a video duplication company while working on the first S&M Bikes video (Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer), I wound up sleeping on the floor of the living room. Shaggy, an East Coast transplant who looked like a real life Shaggy from the Scooby-Doo cartoons, slept on the two cushion couch, with his legs hanging off the end. The weird apartment had the dimensions of the inside of a motorhome, hence the name, The Winnebago. We could literally lay on the living room floor and touch our hands to one wall and feet to the opposite wall.
For those of you who remember 1991, it was a time of national recession, and a full on depression for the BMX world. At the bike trade show in early 1989, a mantra was repeated by the whole bike industry, "BMX is dead, mountain bikes are the future." Unfortunately, no one asked us BMX racers and freestylers if we minded if they killed our sport. The corporate money pulled out of BMX, many pros lost sponsors, and only us hardcore riders were left. We struggled along, making our own videos, starting our own little companies, and promoting our own contests, and getting really good at making multiple types of meals out of ramen.
In those years of the late 1980's and early 90's, a few new ideas hit the BMX world. Linn Kastan, the guy who gave us tubular forks, Redline V Bars, and Redline Bikes, became enamored with the single sided landing gear on small airplanes. He decided that by making single sided BMX forks, riders could get rid extra weight on their bikes. Hey, it worked for airplanes weighing a couple thousand pounds, why not a BMX bike? Well, BMXers quickly answered, "small airplanes don't do tabletops, Leary's, and 360's." Kastan got a few racers to try the crazy forks, but it didn't last that long.
Around the same time, my old bosses Todd Huffman and Bob Morales came up with the Auburn BMX bike, which had a bolt-on, replaceable back end. The idea was that you could quickly change to a longer or shorter back end of your bike depending on riding conditions. Unfortunately, they never made any alternative back ends. Hey, I rode an Auburn for a couple years, as a freestyler, and I liked the bike. But the whole bolt-on back end idea didn't go anywhere.
So one night, Moeller, Shaggy and me were sitting in the tiny living room, probably eating spaghetti or ramen, and drinking 40's of Mickey's. Chris started going off about all these crazy bike ideas people had come up with. Then the magic happened. "We should make the most ridiculous bike possible and see if kids would actually order it." I think this was around the time that Steve Rocco and crew at Big Brother magazine came out with the Big Brother Brick. They put an ad in the magazine for a normal brick with a Big Brother sticker on it, and charged $400 (+ shipping & handling, of course). The word was that they'd actually sold three or four of them.
Anyhow, Chris grabbed an old pair of forks, a hacksaw, and cut one leg off. We were off to the races, literally rolling on the floor laughing half the time. A couple hours later we had the prototype for the S&M Bikes BS 20 Neon. The single bladed fork came with front wheel drive, a bolt-on front end (your choice of the Weak Link or Missing Link versions), a single bladed rear end (I think) and the high weight/low strength S&M Herbal Tea handlebars. Once we had the pile of junk bolted together, we opened more beers and the next step was obvious, we needed to make an ad for it. The ad above actually ran in some magazine. Maybe more than one, I really don't remember.
My stomach hurt from laughing so hard. I think Chris and Shaggy's did, too. But that wasn't the last laugh. We actually got three or four orders from really stupid kids when the ad came out. What can I say? I (kinda) love the 90's. We did send really sarcastic letters to the kids to tell them it was a joke. At least one kid was totally heart-broken. Sigh.
As of the late summer of 2023, I'm going in a new direction with my writing. Check out my new stuff on my Substack.
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