Generation Evel

For most of us kids in the 1970's, it started like the  kids in the clip above.  I never jumped anywhere near that far on my banana seat bike.  But I did jump it on a regular basis.  Inspired by daredevil Evel Knievel, we jumped tree root sidewalk lips on our mild steel banana seat bikes as little kids.  Then we moved up to scrounging bricks, concrete blocks, and random pieces of wood lying around our garages, and building rickety wooden jumps.  For most of us kids across the country, we went through the 70's not knowing that a handful of crazy Californians had started modifying their Schwinn Stingrays and started racing bicycles motocross style.  Bicycle Motocross was below our radar until the late 70's.

For me, seeing the Schwinn Phantom Scrambler in red and black in the window of a bike shop in Plymouth, Ohio in 1979 started the idea.  I never did get that bike.  In fact I moved to Carlsbad, New Mexico the next year, 9th grade for me.  I had a cheap ten speed then.  I used to ride it to an area called The Flume, where there were a bunch of off road Jeep and motocross trails.  I wished I had that Schwinn Scrambler then.  I still didn't know BMX actually existed.  One kid in 8th grade told us about it, but he was a hillbilly kid who lied all the time, so none of us believed him.

As luck would have it, I bought my first BMX bike, a Sentinal Exploder GX, for $5 off my friend Mike, a few days before we moved away from New Mexico.  It was red, mild steel, of course, and had curved, blade forks, and six spoke aluminum mags that I later realized were heavier than Motomags.  It was a piece of shit.  Even worse, it had a coaster brake that was all messed up.  Sometimes the pedals would go all the way around twice before it would catch and turn the back wheel.

We moved to Boise, Idaho, and my Exploder sat in the garage for a year.  Then my parents decided to buy a double wide mobile home and move to a trailer park outside of town.  The idea was for them to save money for a year so they could buy a house.  Little did I know that my Sentinal Exploder GX would change the course of my life while in that trailer park. 

Yes, folks, Freestyle BMX Tales is back... for a limited run, until February 1st, 2017.  More on the reason in the next post.