I don’t know about you, but in my hometown in the early 80’s BMX was a big deal. A huge deal, actually. On top of having an official, honest-to-goodness BMX racing track, there were off-road bike trails scattered all over town. They seemed to pop up everywhere. Some were just off-road trails that cut through fields and wooded areas while others had actual jumps and turns and hazards. Every kid my age had a BMX bike. The time frame I’m talking about is roughly 1981-83 so I was 11, 12, 13 years old. But BMX bikes weren’t just used for transportation and recreation. They were also a status symbol. In a sort of weird hierarchy, the type of bike you had said a lot about your social standing, your riding ability and, much like gang territory, whether you were allowed to ride on certain bike trails or not.
There were three levels of BMX-ness. Level one was reserved for top-tier bikes like Hutch, Kuwahara, and Haro. This was rarified air. These bikes were expensive, and they were like Bigfoot: you heard stories about them but had never really seen one. There was one kid we knew of who had a bike in this category. He raced BMX – not only on our small-town track but regionally as well – and had a tricked-out Kuwahara. It was sleek and gorgeous and light as a feather. It had a number plate on the front with his earned competition number. He wouldn’t let ANYONE ride it. He was also able to perform all manner of tricks and stunts so when he was around we just stood there with our bikes for fear of looking stupid while riding in front of him.
The next level is where I LONGED to be but never reached. This level was reserved for mid-range bikes like Mongoose, Redline, and Diamond Back. I knew several guys who had bikes in this category. One kid in my neighborhood, Jesse, had a Redline Pro that he had saved enough money for and bought by working a paper route. God, it was a thing of beauty. Red, white, and chrome with red alloy rims (the picture below is a near replica). He had just graduated to this level of BMX and knew what it was like to be us, so he was cool enough to let us ride it from time to time. That is until one of us wrecked it while trying to jump off a brick retaining wall and scratched the body. Man, he was hot about that.
Then there were the rest of us. Kids that didn’t have a lot of money, who rode bikes from K-Mart, Walmart, and OTASCO. Schwinn, Huffy, Murray. They were heavy and clunky and not nearly as sexy as the bikes in the top two categories. I rode a Huffy Pro Thunder. It was plain and heavy as hell (mostly due to the enormous yellow mags) which made it nearly impossible to do anything on outside of ride. Not that I didn’t try, though. I can’t tell you how many times my bike was completely disassembled so it could be spray-painted (if I remember correctly, my bike was four different colors in its short lifetime). I also tried adding cooler accessories to it in hopes of making it seem like a nicer bike, but it was pretty much like putting lipstick on a pig. A spray-painted pig.
The one glaring difference in our low-end bikes and the bikes in the other categories was that our bikes had coaster brakes while the nice bikes were freewheel. What the heck does that mean? A bike with coaster brakes meant all you had to do to slow down (or “brake”) was pedal backward. Freewheel bikes, however, allowed you to pedal backward “freely” without slowing or stopping, and achieve that soothing, ASMR “clicking” sound as you did so. Freewheel bikes had a hand brake for the rear wheel that allowed you to slow or stop. So desperate were we to have freewheel bikes that we actually figured out how to convert our coaster brake rear wheels to freewheels. Who am I kidding? We didn’t so much figure it out as we accidentally stumbled onto the modification while experimenting with the idea. The only problem was that until we could install a hand brake, the bike didn’t have any brakes at all! An issue that brought several of us perilously close to death’s door on multiple occasions.
All this interest in BMX only lasted a couple of years but man what a couple of years it was. Full of painting and modifying, selling and trading, wrecking and repairing, accomplishments and injuries. I have scars on both my shins and one of my elbows to this day because of BMX incidents gone awry. For many of us, those bikes fell by the wayside when we hit junior high school. At that point, some kids aged out of BMX and into motorcycles (not me). Some of the guys that road BMX moved on to skateboarding (again, not me). Somehow, I ended up with a Schwinn ten-speed for a couple of years before abandoning bikes altogether.
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