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:
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