The Importance of Creative Scenes

Me getting creative on my freestyle bike, underneath the Huntington Beach Pier, 1987.  Apparently I was too broke to get a haircut at the time. 

 

We've all heard of cities that have a good music scene or a great art scene.  But what does that mean really?  What is a scene?  While a lot people like to go see a live band in a bar or club, or check out a gallery of local artists, do these things really matter much?  Aren't art and music scenes just place where artists, musicians, hippies, weirdos, and other people who don't want to really work hang out?  As a kid growing up in the 1970's and 1980's, that was what I heard about art and music scenes.  

My own interest in what I now call "creative scenes" began in October of 1982.  I was in my junior year in high school in Boise, Idaho, and my family lived in a trailer park outside of town, that we called Blue Valley.  We weren't diehard trailer trash, my parents moved there to save money for a year or two, so they could buy a house in town.  Unlike most of their financial plans, that plan ultimately worked.  

But, over the summer of 1982 in Blue Valley, us teenage guys in the park got more and more into BMX riding, since there wasn't much else to do.  That fall, someone heard there was actually a BMX track in Boise.  Four of us packed into a Ford Pinto, with 3 bikes, to go check it out.  Scott, Rocky, and Brian all won trophies in their first races, while I watched and coached.  We were hooked.  The next weekend, we packed the whole posse, 9 or 10 of us, with all our bikes, into my dad's Ford van, and headed to the Fort Boise BMX track.  It was the last race of the season.  That day, something weird happened.  Us trailer park kids, with cheap, crappy, bargain store bikes, in blue jeans and T-shirts, with paper plate number plates, all raced really well, for our first or second races.  Every one of us went home with a trophy, most for 1st or 2nd place in our class.  The Boise track locals, on $400-$500, high end BMX racing bikes, in their fancy racing leathers, couldn't figure out who we were, where we all came from, or why we were all so damn fast, for newbies.  

For us in Blue Valley, over several months, BMX was our thing.  We had been going out to our little jumps on the edge of the desert, and trying to out ride each other, day after day after day.  I later realized, we had developed a BMX bike scene.  We were a small group of people, with one dominating common interest, who got together, (daily, in our case) to push each other to get better.  That's what I now call a "creative scene."  We weren't making art or music, but we were learning jumping tricks on our bikes, and trying to invent a trick or two.  Not super creative, but somewhat creative.  We raced each other, practiced carving through turns, and speed rolling jumps.  But mostly we tried to jump for style better than all the other guys. At that time BMX racing was a sport, only 12 years old, and BMX trick riding, an offshoot, was just morphing into a sport of its own, called BMX freestyle.  

As I got more into freestyle in 1983 and 1984, a sport born in Southern California, I began to hear of small groups of freestylers around the country, and later in Canada and the U.K.  The BMX magazines sometimes covered these little scenes, or sometimes kids got letters published in the magazines, about their local group of riders. BMX freestyle was about doing learning tricks on BMX bikes, and inventing our own tricks, and it was highly creative, as well as a physical "sport."  

As BMX freestyle grew, it seemed to pop up in small groups, in different places around the country.  Freestyle didn't grow evenly across the U.S., town by town, city by city.  After the original riders, like Bob Haro, Bob Morales, R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff, in the South Bay area near Los Angeles, groups of freestylers popped up in San Francisco, San Diego, Kansas City, Austin, New York City, and obscure places likeYork, Pennsylvania, Elgin, Illinois, small towns in New England, and the three of us in Boise, as well as couple dozen other places.  

One or two riders would see a factory team trick show, get hooked on the idea of BMX freestyle, and get a couple other people into it, and start their own trick team.  That trick team would do shows and spread the word of this weird little sport in their area, drawing more riders in.  I didn't realize it then, but along with trying to eventually become a pro BMX freestyler, by riding daily, I was also witnessing how a creative scene grows from a couple dozen people, to a worldwide sport and industry.  BMX freestyle was also a part of the larger action sports movement, spawned mostly by surfing and motocross, and including skateboarding, snowboarding, rock climbing, mountain biking, wake boarding, and other new sports.  Our weird little sport, credited to one person, Bob Haro, is now worldwide, on TV, the internet, and social media, part of the X-Games, and will demo in the next summer Olympics.  None of that was planned in the early 1980's, it just happened organically.  It started with high school age kids having fun on bikes. 

That's what "creative scenes" do, at times.  They start with one or two people, with some new idea involving some form or creativity.  It can be a new style of art.  The Impressionists, were a scene in their day, taking painting in a new direction.  It can be music.  It can be entrepreneurial, spawning a new business, or even a new industry.  It can be technology.  Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, creating the first Apple Computer to share with the local Homebrew Club, in San Jose, in the 1970's, that was both a technological scene (computer enthusiasts), and soon after, an entrepreneurial scene, Apple Computers (now simply Apple).  These scenes just kind of happen, and it's hard to engineer one to grow into a worldwide movement or industry.  Research centers in major companies and universities are attempts to create creative scenes, usually around technology of some sort, but with major business potential.  These centers of innovation come up with a lot of ideas, but most don't take off and go very far. Some do, and spawn new products, businesses, and industries.

The best scenes, judged by overall influence on society, just seem to happen, and they seldom happen where major corporations want them to.  Jobs and Wozniak borrowed ideas from corporations that were trying to create major technological breakthroughs, and then created the personal computer revolution in a garage, a few miles from highly funded research centers.  

Creative scenes don't have to spawn major businesses to be highly successful, influential, and beneficial to society.  The Beat Poets didn't become billionaires, but their initial small poetry scenes influenced a huge part of their generation, as did the Acid Rock bands and Hippie culture of San Francisco's Haight/ Ashbury District in the late 1960's.  Whether that was mostly a good influence or a bad influence,depends on who you ask.  A lot of great art, music, and things like meditation became popular as a result.  But then, hallucinogenic drugs became popular, also.  

Some creative scenes just give local creative types a place to try ideas, experiment, and become more creative people in general. Those scenes are incredibly important in the overall scheme of things.  Those are the "nursery" scenes where a lot of people, often afraid to try new ideas, find out, "Hey, I can make something interesting."  The kids who have good creative scenes, some organized, others totally unorganized, gain some confidence, and begin to get better at bring creative in general.  Often great creative people had little known scenes they were a part of early in life, that sowed the seed of using creativity on a regular basis.  Those seeds often blossom years later, in art, music, or other creative endeavors.   

Other creative scenes take root in a part of a city or town, and then attract more creative people, of various kinds.  Some creative scenes become legendary places in their genre's.  Think of Hollywood (a mile form me, as I write this), a major creative scene for movies, TV, and music.  Broadway in New York City is a legendary creative scene for live theater.  New Orleans is a famous creative scene for its culinary and music roots.  Nashville is the major creative scene for country music, and now all kinds of music.  Austin, Texas became a creative scene for music, followed later by art, movies, and high technology. When it comes to the business end of things, the world's most famous creative scene (and creator of billionaires) is the San Jose, California area, aka Silicon Valley, for computer related high technology.  

In the 1990's, as computer technology, and other tech began to take off exponentially, it became apparent that these new high tech businesses clustered in a few areas.  Silicon Valley/San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin were the standouts.  The Raleigh Research Triangle (Raleigh/Durham/Cary) in North Carolina was the first major high tech campus area.  But Silicon Valley, and the others listed, sprang up faster and larger.  Dozens of other cities were trying to create and build high tech centers, but the best start-ups kept gravitating to these, and a few other cities.  

Professor Richard Florida, then at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, dove into the research on this phenomenon, trying to figure out why high tech firms clustered in certain areas.  After all, the rise of the internet, and personal computers, meant people could work from most anywhere.  After several years, he wrote The Rise of the Creative Class, in 2002, sharing his initial  findings (here's a speech from then).  While there were many reasons for this clustering, the underlying theme was that tech people were highly creative people, and creative people liked to be around other creative people.  The high tech workers creating the new technology liked to set up in cities that had good art and music scenes, and other groups of highly creative people, already living there.  They also liked to live in places that were tolerant of weird and unusual people.  Computer nerds really were mostly serious nerds then, and they'd been picked on enough.  So they migrated to places tolerant of all kinds of people.  That explains Austin, Texas as a tech hub, their city motto is "Keep Austin Weird."  

So while creative scenes can happen anywhere, and most live as small local scenes, some scenes spark a new idea that takes off in art, music, technology, or some other area.  Places with solid creative scenes in one area, often attract more creative people from other facets of the creative spectrum.  And these areas attracted tech workers, and still do.  So our most innovative cities and areas, that are now a huge part of the U.S. economy, and centers for most of our innovation, often started with tiny art or music scenes, decades ago.  Over years, they attracted other creative people, and became "scenes of creative scenes," inter-meshed with each other.  Some of these cities eventually became the tech hubs where most of the United States economy is now centered.  There are both good and bad aspects to this arc of creative scenes into known "creative cities", and into tech hubs.  Ask the old time locals in San Francisco, Seattle, or Austin about real estate prices, the Yuppie invasions, and often homelessness issues, as well. 

My point here is that a group of weird, screwball, seeming degenerates can be the seed of a great place for innovation in many different areas, and that can ultimately grow into major business ventures at times.  It's for this reason, and my fascination with Creative Scenes since that BMX race in October of 1982, that I'm focusing most of my time and energy on this concept in the coming months, and maybe years. 

We have a ton of major issues to work out in society right now, and creativity itself, new ideas and new solutions, are needed.  A handful of people, who just start doing creative things on a regular basis, usually come up with these new ideas that ultimately transform society in a meaningful way first in neighborhoods, then towns and cities, and then across regions and nations.  Those little creative scenes, the ones that will transform our lives in the next 10-20-30 years, could be happening ANYWHERE right now.  

While forcing creative scenes rarely seems to have good results.  Creative  scenes CAN be nutured as they grow.  Our country needs that right now.  Pretty much everywhere.  I'll have lots more insights and ideas on art, writing, creativity, and creative scenes, in coming blog posts on this blog.

Thoughts on failure

This video takes a while, but ultimately this guy pulls up a good sized vase, it's off center, and it finally wobbles and goes splat.  Is this a failure?  My best friend in high school, a guy named Darrin, got me into pottery, and we came up with a different take on failure while throwing pots on the wheel.

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I have a much different view of what "failure" is, than most people.   This started with throwing pottery while I was in high school.  At the beginning of my junior year at Boise High School, in Boise, Idaho, a guy named Darrin and I hated our small, half size lockers, and we went looking for a couple of open, full size lockers to take over.  We found two, side by side, and became best friends as the year went on.  Being one of the best pottery students at the time in our school, he got cleared to go into the pottery room at lunch, to throw pots on the wheel.  I started going in and hanging out with him, and he soon taught me how to throw pots on a wheel.  

Making pottery on a wheel is a weird idea.  You start with a wet lump of what it basically mud, and on a good day, you have a vase, a pot, a jug, a spittoon, or a bowl when you finish.  Once you get the basics down, it's just a lot of fun to create pottery on the wheel.  As we threw pots and talked during lunch hours, Darrin and I talked about the different results of a session at the pottery wheel.  We would sit down each time with some really cool vase or jug idea in our mind.  That was the goal for the day.  

The thing with clay is that you have to continually add water to it while working on the wheel.  So as you center the clay, open the hole in the middle, and then pull up the walls of the initial cylinder, the clay gets softer and softer.  You can see that process in the video above.  All the while, you need to keep the clay cylinder centered, and push the limits of that hunk of clay.  

If you let the clay get off center, or it gets too soft, it wobbles and the top part falls.  Usually you can catch it, and cut the top part off with a needlepoint, and there's still a chunk left on the wheel.  There's not enough clay to make a cool shaped vase, jug, or large bowl.  But even after losing the top part of the cylinder, you can make a spittoon shape.  If you keep pushing the clay, and the spittoon flopped, you still had enough clay to make an ashtray.  OK, this was the 80's, and we all knew people who smoked, and you could always find someone to give the ashtray to after it was fired and glazed. 

If you totally screwed up on the pottery wheel, and couldn't even make an ashtray, you scraped the little hunk of clay left off the wheel.  Was that a failure?  Darrin and I debated this.  Every time we sat down at the pottery wheel to make something, it was fun.  Most of the time we didn't end up with the cool shaped vase or jug we wanted to make, it was still fun.  Darrin and I came to the conclusion that there was no "failure" when working on a pottery wheel.  The worst case scenario was that we scraped the clay off the wheel when done, and  called it a "learning experience."  So our four stages of making pots were: Vase, Spittoon, Ashtray, and Learning Experience.  There was no failure, the worst that happened was that we had fun, and learned something that would help us the next time.  

With my year and a half of throwing pots in high school, my concept of what failure had changed.  I was getting seriously into BMX freestyle at the same time, where that new idea of failure also came into play.  Some days I landed my tricks well, some days I didn't, but still had fun.  Either way, the long term trend was continual progression.  In BMX freestyle I really learned how important failure is to eventual success.  BMX freestylers, skateboarders, all the action sports people, as well as many mainstream sports, spend much of their time "failing," missing their tricks, in order to further improve and perfect their physical skills.  "Failure" is what action sports people do every day, so they can later do incredible tricks and stunts, often for a crowd, a video camera, or at a contest.  

Getting used to "failing," and making it part of the process, in art, action sports, or many other things, the fear of failing diminishes, which opens us up to more creative ideas, in many cases.  

But I've also worked on TV crews, hanging lights as a roadie type guy, and at Cirque du Soleil, where people could get seriously injured, maybe even killed, if someone failed at their job.  When you're holding a belay rope for someone climbing up a 32 foot high climbing wall, for example, failure is not an option.  But most of life falls somewhere in between, usually a lot closer to the pottery level.

About 90 days ago, I got a good-sized chunk of money from the pandemic unemployment program.  My goal was to get the best deal on a room to stay in (since I was homeless then), and I'd have 60 to 90 days to build some kind of business to support myself, which would take a $2,500 to $3,000 a month of income.  That's a tall order.  Guess what, I failed.  Then money got shut off long before I expected, the best deal on a room cost me a ton, but it was during a full pandemic shutdown mode.  I did manage to write a 250 page ebook during that time, and sold 50 copies inexpensively.  But I had banking issues, couldn't get my online store fully functional, and now I'm back close to where I was 90 days ago, financially.  Failure.  

I don't know anyone else that has started a business, and had a cash flow they could live off of in 90 days, but I couldn't manage it.  What I have learned from years of "failing" and successes, like throwing pottery on a wheel in high school, and years of learning freestyle tricks on my bike, is that the next step is what matters.  I've learned to get back up and keep going after a "failure," no matter how big or small.  I do my best to turn it into a learning experience.  Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.  But in the long run, persistence usually pays off at some point.  Keep on keeping on.  That's where I'm at... after a BIG learning experience.  And hey, I've been wanting to write an actual book my whole life.  OK, it was electronic, and not earth shattering by any means.  But 250 pages qualifies, I've written my first book.  So in a big "failure," a kernel of future success, perhaps.  Onward.

Stolen Bike parts, Cheap Bike parts, and Team Payless

Stealing's bad.  We all know that.  But nearly everyone has stolen something at some point.  Mine is pretty much limited to free refills at fast food joints in desperate times, but stealing is stealing (unless you're Wall Street, then it's cool).  I'm against stealing bikes bike parts, but I've had one or two stolen parts on my bike back in the early days, so I can't pretend I've always been above it.  Besides, this is a great song by Jane's Addiction.

As I've written several times, I got into BMX riding in a trailer park we called Blue Valley, outside of Boise Idaho.  It was the summer of 1982, there were about a dozen of us teenage guys in the park, and not a lot to do.  We all had cheap BMX bikes, and a little "track" on the edge of the park.  It had two berms, roosted by a motorcycle rider couple years earlier, and 4 small jumps.  We just started spending more and more time in the evenings riding our bikes, and less playing football, basketball or throwing rocks at each other.  

As we got more into BMX riding, we started breaking bike parts.  Goosenecks, as we called stems back then, were often the first to go.  When we broke something, like a gooseneck or a pedal, or bent a sprocket, that created the problem of replacing it.  For things like pedals, we could often find somebody who had a rubber-style pedal off an old ten speed or kid's bike, to buy for $2 or something. But the more expensive parts, like the goosenecks, forks, handlebars, and rims, cost $40 or more.  That meant we had to come up with a fair amount of actual money. 

There were three main ways to make money as a teen, in a trailer park, outside of town in 1982.  Mowing lawns, babysitting, or selling drugs.  The drugs were mostly sold by the older guys (20-somethings) in the trailer park, or by kids at school.  None of us were really into drugs then, a few kids smoked a bit of weed, but that was mostly it.  It was a trailer park, in the desert, where the grass was dry, yellow, and grew really slow.  Blue Valley was mostly lower middle class working people, with some poor trailer park-stereotype White Trash people mixed in.  Nearly everyone mowed their own lawns.  Sometimes you could mow lawns for one of the older couples and make $5 a lawn.  But getting more than 2 or 3 lawn mowing jobs a week was the best anyone could manage, and that was only if one of us was trying to make money that week.  None of us had our own cars, and we were 7 or 8 miles outside of Boise itself.  Getting a "real job" for $3.35 an hour wasn't a viable option for most of us.

So that left babysitting.  The standard pay for babysitting kids at Blue Valley in 1982 was $1 an hour and all the government cheese you could eat, no matter how many kids.  Seriously, that's what we made.  I only liked cheese on pizza, and the government wasn't giving out free mozzarella.  The whole government cheese program was to help struggling dairy farmers.  Anyhow, the couples who went out usually were gone for 2-3 hours.  So it took a lot of babysitting jobs that paid $3 and a chunk of cheddar, to buy a new set of handlebars or even a sprocket.  Like broke kids everywhere, we improvised.  

At first we bought many of our bike parts at Payless.  That was a drug store, similar to a Walgreens, CVS, or Rite Aid today, but they had a little more everyday merchandise.  There was a toy aisle that had really cheap bike parts at one end.  There were also no security cameras in those days.  I was way to scared to steal bike parts, I was always afraid of getting into any kind of trouble.  I was in enough trouble from my mom day after day for normal teenage stuff, like forgetting to take out the garbage.  But a couple of the guys at the trailer park didn't mind snagging free stuff, like in the Jane's Addiction song above.  I honestly forget who stole what, but a cheap gooseneck or two, and quite a few inner tubes and patch kits got snagged from the Payless our families all shopped at.  

One kid realized that you could take a 26 inch, thorn proof inner tube out of the box in the store, and pack about 12 normal, 20 inch tubes in the box. The 20 inch tubes were $1.99 or something, and the thorn proof tube was $3.99, I think.  So a couple of the kids would pack the big, thorn proof boxes, and get twelve $2 inner tubes for $4, saving $20.  Those guys quickly became the inner tube suppliers for all of us.  

I think every one of us from Blue Valley had parts from Payless drug store on our bikes at some , most of them bought, in 1982.  When we went to our first race, as a group, at the local Fort Boise BMX track, some local rider asked where we came from.  Suddenly there we were, this sketchy group of 9 or 10 young guys, in Levi's, T-shirts, and with paper plate number plates.  But we were all pretty fast for new riders.  One of our crew told the Fort Boise locals, "We're Team Payless."  The funniest part is that a few kids actually believed that we were sponsored by a drug store.

As we kept breaking cheap Payless parts, we upgraded to what became our local bike shop, Bob's Bikes (and lawnmower repair), on Overland Road in Boise.  A big trend in BMX components at the time was "anodized" aluminum parts.  This was colored aluminum sprockets and chain rings, pedals, hubs, and stems.  Anodized parts came primarily in red, blue, black, and gold.  In this Old School BMX bike clip, you can see anodized parts on bikes #1, 2, 6, 7, 8, and 10.  Red and blue anodized parts were the most popular, and black was a bit less popular then.  But nobody (who actually had money) wanted gold anodized parts.  So one of the guys from Blue Valley went to Bob's to get a sprocket.  He came back and told us he got $3 off on the disc (inner part of the sprocket, that you bolted the chain ring to), because it was gold anodized.  Immediately, gold anodized components became a theme at the Blue Valley jumps.  We bought the ugly gold parts nobody else wanted, usually for 10% to 30% off. I had my gold anodized Diamondback gooseneck for 2 or 3 years.  My dad later took it to the shop where he worked, and had it bead blasted, which left it a raw, silverish, aluminum color, which looked cool, way better than anodized gold.  A couple riders asked me about it at the track, I old them it was a rare, silver, limited edition stem or something.  But it was the same gooseneck I had the week before, just with the gold color blasted off. 

The sketchiest cheap bike part story from Blue Valley came when a new family that moved in.  They bought the trailer right next to the basketball court, where we all met up to go ride, after supper each evening.  Summer days were hot in Boise, so we watched TV or played video games all day, and ventured outside in the late afternoon or evening.  

The new couple had two young boys, about 6 and 7 years old.  Both kids had brand new, K-Mart bought, BMX bikes.  So we spent a few days riding out at our jumps, all with cheap bike parts on our crappy bikes, while the two new little kids rode in front of new mobile home on brand new bikes.  In typical trailer park fashion, one or two of our crew got jealous, those bike got stolen out of their unlocked shed one night.  Two nights later, their dad came out to talk to us teen guys, while we were riding our bikes around the basketball court.  

We all came together, sitting on our bikes, as he told us that his kids' bikes just got stolen a couple nights earlier.  "Man, that sucks!" one of our group replied.  We talked about having bike parts stolen, from time to time.  We told him he should lock the shed, and we thought high school kids from in town came out to steal stuff every once in a while.  None of our bikes had the bright chrome frames his boys' bikes had, so he said he knew we didn't steal them.  But he asked us to keep an eye out for their bikes, and let him know if we heard any rumors about who stole them.  Obviously, they guy thought one o fus had stolen the bikes, and someone else would soon rat them out.  

We assured the guy we would keep an eye out for the bikes, and he thanked us and walked back into his trailer.  Every single one of us had parts of those stolen bikes on our bikes as he was talking to us.  I had one of the pairs of pedals.  Honestly, I felt really bad about that one.  But he bought his kids new bikes about a week later, the guy had a good job.  I don't actually know which guys in our group stole the bikes, but the parts were sold by 3 or 4 guys the next couple of days.  The frames for those two bikes are still at the bottom of the Blue Valley pond, covered in muck and duck poop, as far as I know.  

By the time spring melt happened in 1983, and we could ride our jumps again, we all still had cheap frames, but they were built up with decent quality components.  One day Rocky and Scott decided to ride all the way into Boise to check out a new video arcade.  It was about an 8 mile ride each way.  They made it back after dark, and told us about it the next day.  They told us it was a really cool arcade.  They also told us they met a couple of guys there with brand new, name brand BMX bikes.  They asked the guys how they made enough money to buy such expensive bikes.  Buying a $400 bike with the typical, $3.35 an hour job would take a long time.  Those kids, who lived in a poor neighborhood, told our guys that their old bikes got stolen.  Because their parents had renter's insurance, they got a check to replace their old bikes, and were able to buy brand new bikesmore expensive than the first ones.  That was the first time I heard about trailer park economics, I think.  

Not surprisingly, looking back, Scott and Rocky got their bikes "stolen" at the arcade a couple weeks later.  In those couple of weeks, they just happened to have listed all the parts on their bikes (with a few serious upgrades), and found out that their parents also had renter's insurance.  Sure enough not long after, the insurance bought Scott a Panda with Araya 7X rims, Redline Flight Cranks, and other top name parts.  I never could figure out why Scott bought a Panda frame, of all things.  But it was a good bike.  Rocky went totally first class, getting a brand new Diamondback Harry Leary Turbo, the coolest race bike out, as far as we knew.  Here's Harry Leary doing his his thing on his Diamondback in the UK, coming in 3rd behind Tommy Brackens.  

After seeing, and riding Scott and Rocky's bikes, several guys talked about getting their bikes "stolen" for a while, but no one did.  Scott and Rocky always swore their bikes actually got stolen, but that arcade was right by the Boise River.  None of knew for sure what happened.  But those bikes may have wound up in the river, so they'd never be recovered.  None of us ever knew for sure, except those two, and they kept to their story.  

At the time, the idea of scamming insurance to get a free bike didn't seem like a big deal.  In the many years since, I've seen how prevalent scamming of all kinds is in poor communities (and wealthy ones, too), and that's why many insurance premiums are so high.  It'd be cool if nearly everyone could make a decent living, and this type of scamming would largely die out.  But I'm writing this during the Covid-19 pandemic, when tens of millions of Americans are simply struggling to survive, pay rent, and eat, and most major corporations are alive today because of record setting bailouts last year, and in 2008-2009.  About 30% of the American public get some kind of help form the government at the moment, myself included.

My parents moved back into Boise in early summer of 1983, and I was able to mow a few lawns, and do odd jobs, to keep my bike running from then on.  I wound up buying my Skyway T/A frame and fork set with my high school graduation money, in the spring of 1984.  But in the summer of 1983, the Blue Valley guys quickly faded from the BMX racing scene, and I rode largely by myself day to day that year, and started getting more into the emerging thing called BMX freestyle.  

I just wrote a 250+ page ebook about getting into BMX in the trailer park, all the way up to when I stumbled into the BMX industry in 1986.  I got a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, which changed the direction of my entire life, for the better.  

This story of struggling to get parts to keep our bikes running that first year is one of the chapters I left out of the ebook.   I know nearly everyone had their struggles to buy bikes and parts in those early years.  I wrote this post, reminding us all of those early sketchy days when most of us got a bit shady to keep riding, from time to time.  Hopefully most of you have moved past that shadiness, and left it to the guys offering1985 Redline Flight Cranks for $7,000 a set on eBay now.  

You can learn more about my Freestyle BMX Tales ebook, including how to order one, at this link:

Freestyle BMX Tales: Idaho Dork to Industry Guy