“Long haired freaky people, need not apply”
Since the light of my life, Christine Blake, has told me on many an occasion that I would make a decent writer, I am going to give myself a crack at my own bio. Somehow weaving a story of how an introverted little nerdy child who was mistaken as a 
girl on several occasions because: A. I was adorably cute. (No, really…my Mom said I was…um……) B. As mentioned above I had sorta longish bushy hair turned into a relatively decent middle-aged dude with 
much shorter hair who was able to wiggle his way into touring across the country as BMX rider, snag a beautiful woman to be with, build a home with said woman and make a decent living in a field he knew nothing about before he started in it.
So…where to begin. I was born in North Jersey,Plainfield to be exact. My Dad was also a WWII vet, (which for people of our age, Generation X, was sorta strange…we were late in life kids for them.) and my Mom and Dad like Chrissy’s, stayed married their entire lives. People sticking out marriages today for over 50 years are few and far between.
So anyway in the earliest years of my life I lived in Dunellen, NJ…like the first year. After that my parents made the move across the border to a brandie new home they built in Middlesex on Misty Lane. It was here where I would remain during much of my formative years right till we moved out during my junior year in High School. The years there where fun and adventurous with the norm being snow forts in the winter, hikes through the woods at the local park down the street to building a little BMX track in the backyard.
My job as a kid was pretty simple, get good grades, stay out of trouble. Two things I just happened to be very proficient at. Unfortunately I was also not your typical kid. Sports like baseball, football, etc…not for me. Girls? Way too shy. For me the 
passions were science fiction and BMX. BMX was so huge for me that even in High School I rigged career outlook tests to show my career path as “bicycle shop owner”. Yea…I was a tricky devil.
So I muddled my way through school, getting picked on for having goofy hair, riding a BMX bike and basically being different. You can imagine my relief when I was told at 18 that you did not have to continue on
with school and instead could enter the workforce and move on in life.
Which I learned also had its ups and downs. Ya see during my school day BMX years I would ride after school, go out and race 3 to 4 times a week and generally live on a bike. In the “real” world, I’d spent most of my time making the cheddar and wishing I was riding. All that racing, well in order to pay the bills, went to the wayside. Luckily around this time a new part of BMX called freestyle came around and I jumped on that since riding my bike was what I loved more than racing anyways. So 9.5 hours of work a day, ride at night…and start doing freestyle shows on the weekend. Which led to going to contests, which led to sponsorships, then to summer tours and for a couple short years, living the dream of just riding my bike for money.
Ya see for those few short amazing years I was able to work part time for my Dad as a mason and head out when I needed to so I could be “Brett Middaugh General Bicycles Team Manager and rider”. Yay me. Reality though was there was nowhere’s near enough money in that to support any real life.
As the days of touring with a BMX freestyle team came to a close, I started to work with a local bike shop doing freestyle contests. This actually worked out well and it went from just doing local contests in a parking lot to building a BMX specific 
outdoor ramp park and eventually, during the dark times of BMX when it wasn’t the big X-Gaymes, Dew Tour cash cow it is today, hosting a pretty big NBL Freestyle BMX contest of its day right at that park. During all this I was able to sneak in a few years of basically just managing a bike shop, ramp park and get this…slot car track. Definitely a place ahead of its time and just a lot of fun to do.
Reality really set in though when the rent kept going up, the BMX recession really hit hard and riders dropped out, the slot car fad faded fast and well…our location just wasn’t optimum. Long story short as heck,
we went out of business.
Woa, quite a change not having any income at all for the first time in my adult life. I luckily had a good friend from BMX who owned a temp agency and was able to get me a job for awhile until we “got a new place
to put all the park stuff , bike shop, etc.” Well…my buddy was able to get me a job but getting the shop going again just was not meant to be and 18 years later I am still at that temp job, although at much higher pay, more responsibility, full time and looking back and saying, “WOW, where did 18 years go?!”.
Well…amazingly enough I can encapsulate those 18 years pretty quickly. I kept working…which is basically what I have done since leaving High School, rode my bike on and off, helping occasionally to make things happen, met a girl, got married…a few years later got divorced, got heavily back into BMX with a website and magazine, found Miss Chrissy Blake, fell madly in love with her, sold my place, moved in with her, built a house with her and well now…I try to figure out ways to balance being with her, dabbling in BMX, graphic arts, photography, playing with our home and just generally enjoying what is a pretty good life.
I mean it hasn’t all been easy going…there’s been fun stuff, like knee surgeries, the aforementioned divorce, the passing of my Dad, almost dying from not taking care of an appendix quick enough but yea, overall it’s been pretty amazing.
Being here though, at the Woo with the greatest gal in the world, Chrissy Blake has been the highlight of it all. The future should be pretty interesting indeed.
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