Badlands movie Kickstarter didn't fund... yet.

Here's vert legend Mike Dominguez in the Pipe Bowl at Pipeline skatepark in 1985.  This was the contest he uncorked the no-footed can-can.

I've been pushing the old school BMX world to support Don Hoffman's Kickstarter campaign to make the "Badlands" documentary, which would tell the story of Baldy Pipe, Pipeline skatepark, and the influence it had.  It's primarily a skate story, but BMX vert is part of the story.  The campaign ended a couple days ago, and it found 115 backers pledging $16, 843 (43!) towards the $150,000 goal.  Don isn't giving up.  He's going to regroup and keep working on getting this done.

For me personally, Pipeline was a place I first read about in BMX Plus in 1982 or 1983, as a high school kid in Idaho.  The skatepark, and its riders, instantly became legendary to our little Idaho riding crew.  It seemed like a magical place a million miles away then.

As the years passed, I ended up riding Pipeline a few times right before it closed.  In fact, I had my front tire crab in the pipe while oververt the last night it was open.  That sent me into a Superman dive straight down 11 feet onto it's hard, hard concrete.  I ended up going to the emergency room, thinking my wrist was broken.  I was actually stoked that I might have the last broken bone from Pipeline.  It turned out to be a really bad palm bruise, and I couldn't hang onto my grip for a month afterward.

Since I worked under Don Hoffman at Unreel Productions then, I got to go up and shoot video, and ride, several times after the park closed.  The fences were getting torn down, which opened up a whole bunch of lines not possible before.  I was jumping out of the four foot bowl and doing a little nose wheelie into the ditch, among other things.  During those sessions, Fiola, Blyther, Steve Alba, Micke Alba, and several Vision skaters had some epic sessions.  It was great being able to ride without little kids yelling "Next after after next" before rolling in.  I chipped about eight blue tiles out of the shallow part of the Combi right after Malba and Salba got themselves some.  I didn't bother going up the weekend in got demolished for the last session, I think there was a freestyle event that weekend.

I really hope Don manages to get this movie made, because it's a big part of the history of everyone who's ridden vert in ANY sport.
 

I do most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform designed specifically for writers.  Check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

BMX park comp at 43 degrees lattitude

I heard about this comp from a post by Mat Hoffman on Facebook.  I was really stoked to hear that there was an X-Game qualifier in the city of Boise, where my life in BMX started.  In a trailer park outside Boise, known as Blue Valley by us residents, a bunch of us white trash kids started riding our bikes every evening and trying to out-do each other.  After a few months, someone heard there was a BMX track near downtown Boise.  We packed four guys and three bikes into Scott's mom's Ford Pinto, and went to our first race.

The Fort Boise BMX track was built in an abandoned sewer pond at the edge of the foothills.  I can't tell you how stoked we were to see a place actually built for BMX riding.  In October of 1982, that seemed amazing.  Looking back, it wasn't much, but it was something.  Scott, Jason, and Brian raced as I watched and coached.  All three guys went home with trophies.  The next weekend, we packed all the BMXers into my dad's van, and headed to the track.  It was the last race of the season, and we all raced and had a blast.  I was hooked on BMX.  Here's what our track looked like back in 1983.
I know that the sketchy old BMX tracks of the 1970's and 1980's spawned better tracks and later skateparks all over the country.  When I got serious about BMX freestyle in late 1983 and 1984, I was the third freestyler in Boise, and the whole state of Idaho, following Justin Bickel and Wayne Moore.  Wayne retired at the ripe old age of 17, and Justin and I reformed their trick trick team into the Critical Condition Stunt Team.  We did shows everywhere we could in the Boise area, and also rode in parades, stoked to share our weird little sport with the people of that area. 

It was only a couple years ago that I learned that Boise sits just above 43 degrees latitude, which stoked me out.  Not many freestylers out there started riding at 43 degrees above the equator.  As one of the pioneers of freestyle in the Boise area, I'm stoked to see that they've actually built a great skatepark there, and that it was picked to host an X-Games qualifier.  It's cool to see some amazing new school riding going down in the little city in the middle of nowhere that gave me my start. 

I have a new blog about side hustles, gig jobs, small businesses, economics, and making a living in the recession, check it out:

Small Business Futurist

The first time the S&M guys and P.O.W. House were in a video

Next weekend in Riverside, California is the annual Boozer Jam, combined with the 30th anniversary party for S&M Bikes.  I won't be there, and I doubt anyone really cares.  I've told many BMX stories over the years, but few about my interactions with Chris Moeller, S&M Bikes, and the P.O.W. House.  This seems like the perfect time to throw some of those stories out into the blogosphere.

I first heard of Chris Moeller from Gork, the editor of BMX Action.  He and Windy went to shoot photos of some pro racer at some jumps on Brookhurst by a grocery store in Huntington Beach.  Gork came back freaking out about this 16-year-old kid doing all these insane jumps while they were there.  That kid, of course, was Chris Moeller.

I've learned over the years that just when you think you have Chris figured out, he surprises you.  So here's a story that will surprise many of you.  I first met Moeller when I rode with Gork to a national in Lake Elsinore.  On the way, we picked up Chris who'd ask Gork to hitch a ride to the race.  Gork and I were in the front seats of the Wizard Publications Astro van, and Chris sat on the floor in the back with his bike.  I don't think Chris said two words for the whole trip, which was about an hour.  My first impression of Chris Moeller was that he might be a great jumper, but he was really shy.

Sometime after that, Gork showed us at Wizard this amazing series of photos of Chris doing a no-footer, head high, for about 25 feet, on a downhill jump at Hidden Valley in Huntington Beach.  Without a doubt, it was the craziest jump I'd ever seen photos of at that point.  Gork took the photos, Xeroxed them (ask you dad what a Xerox is, kids), and made this amazing, multi-image sequence... totally by hand.  It was awesome.  I met a slew of amazing riders in 1986, Mat Hoffman, Joe Johnson, Josh White, and Chris Moeller, among others.

After getting booted from Wizard, I landed as newsletter editor at the American Freestyle Association in Huntington Beach.  I was in the area, but as a freestyler hanging out at the pier, I rarely ran into Moeller then.  I went on to work at Unreel Productions, the Vision video company.  In early 1990, Unreel was dissolved, and I moved to the Vision main office.  it was there one day that Vision BMX team manager, Mike Miranda, told me about four riders that rented an apartment in H.B..  They called themselves the HBP's, or Huntington Beach Pros.  Some months later, I learned that several more riders had joined the pack and rented a house in Westminster, the much more affordable city inland of Huntington Beach.  They renamed themselves the Pros of Westminster, or P.O.W.'s.  It was the first serious rider house in BMX. 

That same year, I decided to shoot and produce my own video.  I'd produced six videos for the AFA, one for 2-Hip, and worked at Unreel when they made a bunch of really hokey videos, like Freestylin' Fanatics.  I decided to make a video that showed real riding, and CURRENT riding, which only Eddie Roman and Mark Eaton were doing then. And to be honest, those were really sketchy at the time, though the riding was insane.  So I shot video most every weekend through 1990, and edited the video in October of that year.

I wanted good jumping in the video, not just freestylers doing flyout jumps.  The best doubles jumpers in the sport then were the S&M and P.O.W.'s.  So I called them up, and I went to shoot at the P.O.W. House, and then later at Edison, some jumps squeezed in a little area behind the high school.  The clip above is what I came up with for the video.  It's short, but it was insane jumping for that time.  Here's a list of most of the guys in this segment:

John Paul Rogers- :17, :26 (S&M rider, P.O.W.)
Alan Foster- :29, :46 (P.O.W., I didn't know he had a little brother who rode then)
Chris Moeller- :31, 1:06, 2:00 (The "M" in S&M Bikes, and the guy who built the company into what it is today)
McGoo- :33 (Official comedian of the BMX industry)
Dave Clymer- :40, :56, 1:09, 1:24 (S&M rider and P.O.W.)
Eric Milman- :50, 1:11 (P.O.W.)
Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson- 1:02, 1:22, 1:28, 1:32, 1:36, 1:45, 1:45, 1:50, 2:04 (S&M Rider)
Greg Scott- 1:30 (The "S" in S&M Bikes originally)

Also in the clip are Dave Cullinan, Kim Boyle, Josh White, and Mike, a local kid.  The toe -dragger tailwhip that Crazy Red does at the end is the first tailwhip over doubles in a BMX video ever.  The 360 that Moeller does at the end was the biggest 360 I'd ever seen at that point.  The music is two live tracks by The Stain, a Toledo punk band.  Someone has to be pioneers in everything, and the S&M/P.O.W. guys were the main pioneers when dirt jumping was starting to turn into its own sport.

I've got four new blogs now:

The Big Freakin' Transition- about the future and economics

Crazy California 43- Cool and weird locations in California

Full Circle- about writing and the writer's life

And a fiction blog- 

Stench: Homeless Superhero

 

Early video of Eddie Fiola at Pipeline Skatepark

This past Monday, Memorial Day, was also the 40th anniversary of the opening of Pipeline Skatepark in Upland, California.  It opened with the namesake full pipe attached to a bowl that was amazing for BMX bikes.  Pipeline wasn't far from the already legendary Baldy Pipe, which had already been skated for a while.  Baldy was a 16 foot diameter pipe, Pipeline's was 20 feet.

 Here's Eddie Fiola, the original King of the Skateparks, being interviewed by Don Hoffman.  Don's parents, Stan and Jean, owned Pipeline, which took both skating and BMX vert to a whole different level.  Eddie is rocking the MF jersey, which stood for Morales (as in Bob) and Fiola.

A Kickstarter campaign for a Pipeline/Badlands documentary is getting going.  More on all that later.  I'm moving this week, so I'll be adding more posts in 2 or 3 days.

I've got two new blogs now:

Crazy California 43

WPOS Kreative Ideas

Support the creative people who stoke you

At fifty years old, I'm way overweight after years of taxi driving and bad eating habits.  I'm starting to lost the weight.  As an old BMXer, I went looking online for a good bike to get me riding again.  I kept seeing Todd Lyon's posts on Facebook, he's the SE Bikes brand manager now.  I checked out his video for the SE Fat Ripper, and that's when I found this clip by Seth's Bike Hacks YouTube channel.  This video is the reason I decided to start saving up for a Fat Ripper.  I've become a fan of Seth's YouTube channel.

As most of you reading this know, I've been telling old school BMX stories in my blogs since I moved to North Carolina in November 2008.  Moving here,  I lost all my bike videos and DVD's, I lost all the master tapes to videos I produced, and I lost dozens of hours of raw footage ranging from 1989 to 2007.  I had been planning to make my own documentary of BMX freestyle at some point.  Because I couldn't borrow money to get my stuffed shipped from California, I lost one of the best raw footage collections in the freestyle world.  All I had left were memories.  So I started blogging.

In the last nine years, I've written about 800 posts about the early days of BMX freestyle, and I have lots more to tell.  I'd like to thank all of you who've read and enjoyed my bike tales over the years. 

When I came to NC, I couldn't find a decent job.  It was late 2008 and the bottom was dropping out of the economy, so I wasn't alone.  I eventually drove a taxi here for a while, and spent a year struggling to survive while living in my taxi.  I've also been selling my Sharpie artwork here and there to make a little money.  I'm too old to get hired at entry level jobs here, and my "eclectic"work history seems to keep me from getting a good paying job in some other area.  But I spent most of my life in highly entrepreneurial Southern California.  When I couldn't find a decent job, I thought, "OK, I'll create my own job."

But the truth is, I wrote most of 800 or so posts on the different versions of Freestyle BMX Tales while I was homeless and looking for work.  At the same time, I've been educating myself on how writing and art works in today's world.  It's a completely different industry than when my zine landed me a job at Wizard Publications in 1986.  In today's world, many magazines have died, websites have taken over, and most make money from ads and links.  But something else has happened thanks to the web and today's crazy technology.  Millions of people have started websites, blogs, YouTube channels about things they are actually passionate about.  This blog is one of those things, and so is Seth's You Tube channel above.  Today's tech let's creative people in little niches create all kinds of stuff to share with the world.  But there's been one huge problem.  Money.

Either creative people need to finance their creative work from their job, and do it as a hobby.  Or they need to dumb it down for a mass audience and try to be one of the small number of people who makes a ton of money on YouTube from ads or through affiliate links on blogs and websites.

But there's another option.  With a service called Patreon, you can support creative people doing cool stuff in a way that doesn't require us to dumb stuff down or sell our souls just for advertising dollars.  You can now support people just because you're stoked on what we do. 

I've done a lot of things over the years.  Telling stories about the early days of BMX freestyle is not my main focus now.  My main focus is writing zines, blogs, and doing artwork to encourage people to build creative scenes.  After reading lots of books that would bore most of you, I've learned that "creative scenes," like local bike scenes, skate scenes, art scenes, music scenes, actually play a huge role in creating jobs in today's world.  We got into BMX freestyle in the 80's because we liked this weird, new, creative sport-type thing.  Along the way, we formed little local scenes.  We also discovered the DIY ethic and started shooting photos, putting on shows, making zines, videos, magazines, and bike companies.  Because we liked riding, we created an entire industry that created a ton of jobs.  The same thing happened in skateboarding, snowboarding, high tech, and dozens of other creative areas. 

But now we're in a world where tech is taking over human jobs by the millions.  One industry after another has lost jobs to new forms of technology.  The high paying factory jobs of our childhood are gone, and no one is replacing them.  People looking into the future are really worried about jobs for humans in the next few decades.  I see one viable solution.  Millions of people will have to create their own jobs, in new businesses in dozens of new industries.

I'm taking what I've learned from being a part of many creative scenes, and taking those ideas to a new generation of creative people.  Some will be middle-aged geezers like myself, but most will be younger people who create stuff, but haven't experienced how a creative activity, like BMX freestyle, can turn into a whole new industry.  This is my work.  Writing and drawing IS MY JOB NOW.  If you want to support my work, you can do it on my Patreon page.  You get goodies, by the way, for different levels of support. 

You can also support Seth's YouTube channel on the link at the end of the video above.  Welcome to the world where you can directly support and communicate with the creative people who do stuff you're stoked on.  You now have the power to support the people doing the things you think are good in the world.  Go for it.

I've got two new blogs now:

Crazy California 43

WPOS Kreative Ideas

BMXers who rode in my taxi

I'm working on a big zine telling my crazy taxi driver stories, which is why this blog is on hold this month.  You can read the post about the well known BMXers and other reasonably famous people I gave taxi rides to here:

The White Bear's Stuff

OK, I gave up on that blog, here's my new blogs:

Crazy California 43

WPOS Kreative Ideas

The Retail Apocalypse is here... and will hit the action sports world at some point

Around 5,000 retail stores, all from major chains, have closed in the last year, are closing now, or scheduled to close this year.  What Napster did to music, Amazon and outlet malls are doing to department stores and mall stores.  Here's an update on my Get Weird Make Money blog.  

I gave up on that blog, here's my new ones (October 2021):

The Big Freakin' Transition- about the future and economics

Crazy California 43- weird and cool locations in California

Full Circle- about writing and the writers' life

And a fiction blog...

Stench: Homeless Superhero

 

Freestyle BMX Tales: The Book

This is Freestyle BMX Tales: The Book, part 1.  That big square up top is all the pages of part 1, (20 full size pages) laid out.  I'm calling this "the coffee table book of BMX zines."  It's either one of my greatest ideas... or one of my worst.  I'm never sure.

Here's a few excerpts:

"On another street, I followed Rick Thorne between two big rig trucks, both of which were moving slowly.  Unfortunately for us, they were moving closer to each other.  We both hit the gas, cranking hard to get past them.  Rick pulled up his front wheel and turned the bars to squeak through the narrowing gap.  I did the same thing right behind him, yelling in excitement as I cleared the trucks."

"The sound wound up, and with a yell, Scot came screaming around the corner of the warehouse racks on an 80cc dirtbike.  Jay and I looked at each other, wondering if that was a normal thing in the SE warehouse."

"A few weeks later, completely out of nowhere, Andy (Jenkins, editor of FREESTYLIN') called me up at home, in San Jose, one afternoon.  He asked me if I was planning to go to the next AFA Masters comp in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  I told him I was.  'Would you like to cover it for us?'  I grabbed a putty knife to scrape my bottom jaw off the floor.  'Uh...yeah.' I muttered somehow."

"This punk kid sailed 25 or 30 feet down the hill, head high, blasting a huge no footer.  Nobody jumped like that back then.  Those were the first photos I saw of Chris Moeller..."

"'Uh-boo-buh-kuh,' Andy told me, I don't know what the trick is or how you spell it.  He's coming here in an hour and you'll be driving Windy and Ron to the photo shoot.'"

I got into BMX in a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho in the summer of 1982.  I saw my first local freestyle show in the spring of 1984.  BMX freestyle became my thing, and I dreamed of being a pro rider someday, getting free bikes, and touring the country.  I never did become a pro, but I did get some free bikes and managed one skateboard tour.  I didn't have the guts or charisma to start my own company in the 80's or 90's, so I became a kind of wandering sidekick, the right hand man to some of the top people building freestyle.  I became part of the Golden Gate Park scene in 1985, getting to know Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson and the rest up there.  My zine landed me a job at Wizard Publications, where I worked with Andy J., Lew, Gork, and Windy.  I went on to work for AFA owner Bob Morales, the guy who turned trick riding into the sport of BMX freestyle.  That led to video work, and I worked for Don Hoffman at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video company.  A lot of BMXers don't know Don, but he made several of the first freestyle videos, and his parents owned the legendary Pipeline Skatepark.  I went on to self-produce a video called The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990.  The next year, young Chris Moeller, who ran S&M Bikes out of the garage of a one bedroom apartment at the time, called me up to make their first video.  I became his sidekick/roommate for quite a while, and also lived in the P.O.W. House during the early 90's, rooming with guys like Dave Clymer, Todd Lyons, John Paul Rogers, Alan and Brian Foster, and a bunch more.

I have a lot of stories.  I'm putting the best ones into a weird book of sorts.  It's a handmade thing, a D-Ring binder, filled with 20 pages to start, all hand laid out by me, zine style.  It comes with a few custom stickers and a couple of 11" X 17" copies of my drawings.  Each book is signed and numbered, and I'm hand numbering the pages of every copy.  Part 1 of Freestyle BMX Tales:The Book is out now, and costs $20.  Every 4 to 6 weeks, I'll have another 20 pages (and some goodies) for $10.  I've got a lot of stories of those old school days of BMX freestyle.  I'll keep putting some on the blog for everyone to read.  But the best collection of my stories, thoughts, and lessons from those days will be in the book.  You can order yours today at my Go Fund Me page.  The books are numbered as the orders come in.  #3 is up for grabs as I write this (11/262016).  Order yours today.