Foreward: Back in the days of BMXNJ.com, I tried to do a mix of old and new coverage of people involved in BMX in NJ. One of the big guns of the early days of BMX in both racing and freestyle was Harry Myers. Harry was a huge advocate for BMX and was there at a lot of the big moments in our area as well as nationally. I was lucky enough to find the guy again during the BMXNJ era and sat down one afternoon to do a phone interview with him about his career in BMX and what he saw and was involved in during that time. What follows below is transcribed from that conversation. Know your roots man, it helps your future.
Just for the love it. The Harry Myers Interview.
What was your motivation for the interview:
What motivated me is the fact that the teenagers who used to ride at Craigmeur are now parents of teenagers in many cases; it just seems hard to believe that 30 some odd years have passed since that time.
What year did you get involved, how did you get involved, what year did you open Craigmeur?
The very beginning in 1977 I moved to NJ from Yonkers NY. My son had an Iverson bicycle that we bought in a department store and he busted it. There was bike shop in the town of Butler NJ called All Sports and my son had picked up a BMX magazine, he was only 6 or 7 years old but he saw it and we bought it for him and he said, “I’d like to get one of those types of bikes”. So I went to this bike shop and it was managed by a young man who was in his early 20’s named Ron Lipner. Who by the way now is with Kent Bicycles and is the manager of their Cadillac Bicycle Division. But anyway Ron was 23 years old at the time or 22 and he sold us a Raleigh Rampar bike. The Rampar was made by Raleigh and that was a BMX style bike, it was strong enough to take the bumps and the jumps and my 7 year old son who was already proficient in riding mini-bikes and bicycles, really got carried away with it and loved it. Ron Lipner at the bike shop said, you know they have BMX racing out here at Vernon Valley. It was run by one of the owners of Dean of Sports, somewhere in North Jersey and they have a little track that they have that runs every couple of weeks in Vernon Valley. Why don’t you take your son down there and see how he does. So I did. I took him down there he got 3rd place the first time he ever raced and he loved it. While I was there I met another parent another parent whose kid was racing. Now this parent was a drag car racer who used to like drag racing and he believed in good equipment and his kid had the Redline and it looked..wow! This kid really has the top of the line stuff here and my kid only has a little Rampar but at that time I had just got it for him and I didn’t know how far he was going to go with it. His name was Jeff Platt, so I spoke to Jeff and I said Jeff this track is a good idea but I’m willing to bet that it could be turned into a real serious sport. Not just once every now and then on a little piece of dirt in the back. I’m willing to bet a lot of kids would show up for this and it would become a major sport, if it’s just promoted properly. He agreed, so I spoke to him and he said Harry, “I’ll tell you what, I have a background in excavation and stuff like that”, he said he would know how to form it. “If you wanna go ahead and see if you can get this organized go for it.” At that time I was not in the bike business, I was selling boxes for a corrugated company. (At this point Harry asked if I was with him so far and I explained I was recording the conversation completely, little did he know that I was sitting there fascinated at 42 years of age learning how BMX took shape in my state, LOL) So what I did and this was late in the fall when all this racing was taking place Jeff Platt and I said this would be a good idea and I spoke to Ron Lipner from the bike shop and said how would you like to get involved with this you could do the administration of the races themselves, kinda organize the track and see if we could put it all together so it’ll make sense. He said he’d love to do that. He was a real bicycle enthusiast himself. So the three of us decided to form a partnership that we decided to call Bicycle Racing Enterprises, we even incorporated it. What I did was, I would travel around while I was selling corrugated boxes on the road representing the company. I would stop at the bike shops and ask them what they thought of the idea and they said if you could do something like that it would really benefit our business. We know it’s beginning to develop on the west coast but it’s non-existent here. Well, that gave us a good shot in the arm. For the love of the sport and because I saw that my son liked it so much I really pursued it very, very aggressively. I went to every bike shop, got their support, went to Schwinn and they gave me an 8mm film and a projector and I looked around and I went to Craigmeur and I asked the owner, “Ya know I live just a few miles from you but I’ve noticed in the summer time you guys don’t do anything. I know you have some restaurants but there’s no skiing. Ppeople come here because they know you exist but not much really happens. I said if I could bring people out here with a sport that would certainly be a cross section of people that would know more about your ski area, and would use it during the winter time, also at the same time, would patronize your restaurant and would bring you some revenue as a result of the percentage of whatever we bring in, would you be willing to do that. And they said, “sure”. I said, I noticed you had a bulldozer, would you volunteer your bulldozer free of charge for us to carve our track on a portion of the area that you really don’t use for skiing. And they said, really no problem, we’re willing to take the risk. The owner of the ski area was Bill Murray (honest but just not THAT Bill Murray), and what I would do is I would take that 8mm film and I would play it at the ski area. And this was from November through February. People got interested, I made posters, I even put out an ad in bicycle motocross action to attract people. The problem with our group of guys is that we just didn’t want to invest a lot of money into it but we knew that the industry, if they took interest would be more than happy to help us out. So I went to Raleigh and I spoke to vice president of sales and asked him if he would be willing to loan us some bicycles for rentals for kids that would come out there out of curiosity that didn’t have a bike to race. He said sure, he gave me like a dozen bikes. He said I’m not going to loan them to you, you can have them, if you can do something like that, they’re yours. Then I went to get some helmets and a company called Joffa who made protective knee and elbow padding for the hockey industry and also helmets for them gave us all kinds of protective equipment. So we were ready for opening day, we had everything we needed. Then opening day came in the spring, sometime around the middle of March.
And we had over 500 people show up that day, on our opening day from all the promoting.
From that point on it took off and I was offered a job at Puch a company that made mopeds and had a small line of high end bicycles and they wanted to get into the BMX bike business and they hired me away from the box industry, so I now became part of the bike industry. Craigmeur became a very thriving track that drew so much attention that the Schwinn National Tour that started out in California and was supposed to end in Chicago and decided they were going to continue on and have the NBA in NJ. By the way that’s the sanctioning body we used which was the NBA, the one we saw in BMX Action. NBL, ABA was just starting up at the time.
So the NBA nationals came to Craigmeur instead of ending in Chicago and that’s when all of the top stars that you saw in the magazines, ya know Stu Thomsen, the Pattersons, you name em, all those guys were there. It made quite a commotion and it really spurred BMX on in the northeast to become a very viable sport, more and more people were now hearing about it, the bike shops were stoked and they were forming teams. It got to the point where Craigmeur was the place to go if you were into BMX. So Jeff Platt, Ron Lipner and myself ran the track along with our spouses. Now Ron didn’t have a spouse but he did quite a bit of work. Jeff, who loved drag racing even made a sequential starting gate with lights on it like in drag racing. He was really into it. Ron decided at a given point that it was a little too much for him and he was more interested in being someone who was just involved with the kids and not so much the administrative duties of the track. So he dropped out and it became Jeff and I, we took over.
Awakening of NJ’s power.
We found out from the national event that came from California that these kids you read about in the magazine including Bob Osborn the publisher of BMX Action, said we have never in our lives seen anything like this. This is a real commercial track. I mean this is a track that is run like it’s a business, not that like it’s a little backyard thing. He said although our photography may lead you to believe that BMX, even though it’s a very popular sport out here, the tracks are not of the caliber of what you are doing. Not even close. And I wanted to continue it at that level. So Jeff dropped out and started another track which was NBA, and I was approached by the ABA at that time headquartered in Arizona (still is!) So I mentioned to all the families, we’re going to transfer all your NBA points over to ABA points but we’re changing the sanctioning body. Which we did. And it continued as an ABA track till it’s last day. But around this time more tracks were beginning to open up, there was James Vincent and Braddock BMX, he was one of our original people who used to come out. He had a team and he wanted to localize the sport and tracks just started popping up. We had a lot of visitors from all over the tri-state area that would come out, one of them was Clayton John, who is now the president of the ABA, he had a bike shop out at State College called John’s Derailleurs, he was a regular there. We had a lot of people that used Craigmeur as a model to start their own tracks and improve upon it as well. The Gleason’s as well at Howell, said give me some ideas, Harry you’re doing the right thing. I said Bob, the more tracks the better. There was another track that opened about the same time we were opening, in Vineland (yes, THAT Vineland, a certain famous racer is from there.) The people that were the principles there were the Zeuners. They had a son named Sal Zeuner who was a very accomplished rider as well, (NJ’s first Pro BMX racer AND BMXA coverboy) and we used to visit their track occasionally just to see how they were doing it. And it started to grow and that’s…basically what happened.
About Ernie Alexander, Bob Osborn and the NBA
He was the one who started the NBA. He was a very stereotypical type of Californian. I mean he was so laid back and he came out with his girlfriend and they put on the national races. He was shocked; he couldn’t believe that it was as big as it was here. It just blew him away; he said where are all these people coming from? He said, this is New Jersey! I told him, hey you started something. I mean he was the guy who really got it started had it not been for the NBA and all of the original riders from California and Bob Osborn and his magazine BMX Action it wouldn’t have happened the way it did. He was the motivation and he was the inspiration. The one who made it look real was Bob Osborn. He took a backyard sport which the NBA was all about. Ernie was originally a motorcycle promoter, he would take a big elastic band put it in front of the riders, let it go snap and everybody took off on their motocross motorcycles. I mean that was Ernie Alexander’s thing. And then he thought BMX would be a cool thing to do for the kids. And Bob Osborn, because he was a genius when it came to publishing, made a magazine that would make this look like the best thing since sliced bread for kids. Which he did, and I believed it. That’s what inspired me to do Craigmeur, I said ya know if they can do it there, we can do it here and obviously they must be doing it at a very professional level. That’s why when the California kids came out and looked at Craigmeur, they said, this is nothing like what we have, and downhill, this is too gnarly we’re gonna get hurt on this, lol. But, we’re gonna do it anyway, and these rocks, where did these rocks come from? They had never seen anything like that before. We didn’t know, I said look, this was all in our mind’s eye of what BMX racing should be. They said well, you kind of took it to a different level but that’s cool. And they were good, they were still winning, it didn’t matter. They blew away all those kids when they came because of all the experience they had and the weather they had year round, which allowed them to ride the way they did. But Ernie Alexander, he was really the guy who made it all happen from the very beginning.
(I’m gonna stop the interview here for now, I’m sure that’s enough to get ya going. I’ll put up the next segment in a few days, where Harry goes a little deeper into his days with Craigmeur, friends, and Puch. Then of course….General Bicycles.)
End of the NBA at the track
Ah, the NBA was a good sanctioning body however, what happened was Jeff and I had a falling out. He was leaning more towards what the NBA told him to do and I said, ya know if we do what they tell us to do we’re not gonna be our own person anymore.
The end of Craigmeur and BMX loses its first historic track.
What was the demise of Craigmeur? I took on another partner, I got a little burnt out and said you take it over, I was already well entrenched in the bike business with Puch and developed a BMX bike for them called The Trak Pro, which was made by Thruster.
A little about Puch
(yes that Thruster) They were people from NJ. (at this point Harry asked me if I ever heard of Thruster, I was a JV local, I lived around those maniacs! OF COURSE!LOL) They made the Trak Pro for us. Unfortunately they had to close down. (Thruster not Puch) But in their time they were doing very well, they had some of the top welders that you could imagine. The interesting thing is prior to using Thruster as the producer of bikes for Puch, I had gone to California and I had visited with CYC, I visited Skip Hess, he told me the history of Mongoose and how that came about. He was willing to make a bike for Puch. Linn Kastan from Redline. They were all willing to do private label for us but because Thruster was local and close by to us we decided that based upon their quality we would have them do our bikes. It was quite an adventure and a very good experience.
But that was the early days of BMX and when Craigmeur went away there was enough tracks to pick up the slack.
Whatever happened to Puch BMX?
What happened with Puch, is that it was taken over by its distributor in Canada called Bombadier, even though they still maintained the name Puch. They had some major management changes. I had a huge territory and business is business sometimes when you have a huge territory and you’re making a lot of money, I’m talking about not just a good living, A LOT, way more than your bosses, they say , “well I think you’re territory is a little too big, we gotta split it up, we don’t know how you can handle it. Basically that’s what happened. It was a parting of the ways.
The average BMXer and how it felt to have everyone at the track.
Had it not been for the people who came out to the track especially the parents and their kids. The families that were dedicated, I mean I could just rattle off a couple names. Ya know…the Schachel family, Kathy and her brother John. There were so many good families that were regulars there and just kept coming back, week after week, bringing their friends. Forming like a family of people that would come to the track, this was their lifestyle. I was just very proud and very honored to be part of something that I saw was more than just a sport. If anything touches me more than anything else it was the fact that this society has gone through some pretty rough times over the years with all kinds of problems with drugs and what have you. Ya know if BMX racing saved one person from getting involved with something that could had killed them if they had not had a good diversion to keep them busy then I feel that my work has been done. And judging from what I saw amongst the families and it was a very big cross section of different socio-economic groups that came to the track, but when they were all together it didn’t matter whether you were rich or poor or highly educated or not, it was just one common interest and that was enjoying the sport rooting for the kids and everyone having that one thing in common that kept them going from week to week. It was a good healthy sport. Very hard to do drugs and race bikes. It was an interesting time. I’m not saying you can’t…but it’s very hard. (We had a laugh there)
A little about Charlie Litsky.
Charlie Litsky, the late Charlie Litsky. Ya know it broke my heart when I heard that he died. But at least he died doing what he wanted to do. Ya know he was mountain biking at the time. Here’s really what Charlie Litsky was all about, because I read so many things that are so untrue about Charlie saying he was the one who started BMX. Charlie rode for a bike shop called Gapi Components. A family whose real name was Gaponivich. They were in Bogota New Jersey. Charlie was 16 or 17 years old, his dad was an editor for the sports section of the New York Times, he had just moved from California, he was a very personable kid, and he was like an unofficial factory rider for Mongoose when he came here to the east coast from California. And we asked Charlie as we would clean the track together. Charlie you have some experience, give us some ideas on how you think the track should shaped to make it really competitive and interesting. He gave us some really good ideas and he was very active in coming out and giving us suggestions and being a promoter for the track. There was one day though when I got a little tired of announcing and I saw a 17 year old who had some of the greatest verbal talents I had ever seen and I said “Hey Charlie, How’d you like to do some announcing here” and he jumped at the opportunity and he did for a few times. But that was the extent of Charlie Litsky in the early days of course he went on during his college days and his career to become a sports announcer. He actually had done some announcing for the Olympics for cycling. The myth of him being the creator of BMX in New Jersey is not really the case. He was one of the active people that was there and making the suggestions and was ever present when we needed him. He was really good he spoke the language perfectly. I was very impressed with Charlie and we remained good acquaintances over the years and as I went through the biking business I saw him develop into a really good young man. And just when he got married, I mean he wasn’t even married a month and he passed away. It was….really, really…really sad. He was only in his early 30’s at that time. But he was always willing to help people out, he was a very supportive individual and I can see why so many people liked him. He was very sincere. He, he was a good guy.
Memorable events.
I remember James Vincent Bikes putting on indoor racing in the Jersey City Armory. One of the races there actually took place the day after John Lennon was shot. I remember asking for a moment of silence in memory of one of the Beatles. It’s been a lot of years and sometimes there are things my family reminds me of that I don’t remember, LOL.
After Puch, enter General Moped
(after Puch) At that point another friend of mine named Chet Ribner, who used to be with Puch, was the vice president of General Moped. He said Harry, I hear that you and Puch are not doing too well with each other, how would you like to come with us and sell mopeds. I said, well…I’m ok with that, I’m gonna do that and… I did. So I joined General. But unfortunately very shortly after I joined them, what happened was the legislative body of New Jersey decided that you can’t just get on a moped and ride it regardless of age. Now you’re gonna have to be a certain age, you’re gonna have to wear a helmet, you’re gonna have to get license plates. Mopeds took a sudden plunge. Really seriously and here I am at General now, making a nice living as well and I’m looking and I’m saying, “my days are numbered here”. This is going to go downhill really fast. (actually a very good reference from the guy who started NJ’s first downhill BMX track) So I mentioned the possibility of being in the bike business. And honestly, they said, except for one person, “Harry, that’s not a good idea, do you know how many bike companies are out there at this time?” I said yea, but you know, I don’t think there is a bike company that makes a bicycle that falls between the mass merchant quality and the bike shop quality. And most of my customers who were moped dealers were bike shops. And they all said, ya know these department store bikes are killing us. They really are, I wish we had something to compete with them, something in between. I said if we could come up with something like that, we’d be in good shape. So what I did was I spoke to the owner of General, who was not an active member of the organization. He was simply a financier. He was actually an older man, approaching his 80’s who started General because the stock market wasn’t doing well and his nephew. Who incidentally has been the vice-chairmen of the NYSE in recent years named Robert Faganson, was the chairmen of the board of General and oversaw it. But the old man named Joseph Slifka was the financier and his wealth was somewhere around a billion dollars back then, back in the early 1980’s. Just as a footnote, he has the Yale University Institute for the study of Jewish culture named after him. (yepper, Google the name!) He said Harry, ya know, I think you’re right. He said, I’m gonna give you free reign. You do whatever you want, if you can create a bicycle line for us we’ll do it. So I what I did was I went around to all the bike shops, one of my biggest supporters was a shop called Beacon, down in Northfield, NJ. (NJ residents should be familiar with that chain) The person who was really doing their bicycles was a young man at that time named Mitch Rogan. Mitch said, Harry I got some ideas for you. So I went around to a lot of different bike shops and they all had a lot of ideas on what they would want in a bicycle line. So we made prototypes from frames that I got and components that they said should go on there. And Mr. Slifka, that’s how I always referred to him, he had a summer home in Long Branch. He said, let’s have a little party for all these dealers. There were 12 dealers who were really major contributors. He said, why don’t you bring all the bikes there and we’ll make a really big shindig so they can look at the bikes and have a really good time. We’ll get the best food we can get, and turn it into a real happening. So they all came down, they looked at the bike line, they critiqued it, tweaked it, and Slifka said “you know we have the approval of these bike shops, we’ve got a core of good bicycle shops here in NJ, I’m willing to bet that if we make these bikes fast enough in time for Christmas. This was around September. He said if we can do this and have bikes by Christmas, we’ll be in good shape. He said, do you have a passport. I said no. He said Iook I have connections, I’ll get you an emergency passport, you’re going to Taiwan to meet with our agents that have all the connections with bicycle manufacturers and we’ll get this done. So….we did! And we had a bicycle line with General from Mountain Bikes to road bikes to BMX bikes to children’s 16” bikes, we had an entire line. And one of the innovations that I made because I knew that bikes were always being ripped off in New York was the quick release front wheel, because people used to chain them to the pole at the time. I said you know if you can chain that to a pole and we can get that front wheel off it’ll lower the theft rate because who wants to steal a one wheeled bike. And for some reason, someone who was very smart, liked that idea and started putting quick release on all the mountain bikes and just making the quick release a little stronger. That’s sorta the funny reason you see mountain bikes with the quick release on the front of them.
General takes freestyle BMX seriously
And then I hear about freestyle and I’m thinking, and anything I wanted to do they let me do, because the bike line took off immediately. General now had a bike line that gave bike dealers a chance to compete and it took a long time before other companies jumped on the bandwagon and did the same thing. But they listened when I suggested the freestyle line. This is a growing sport I like the idea. Let’s start a little freestyle team and we did. And Steve Rulli was one of the original members of it, it really wasn’t a fancy team. But what we decided we would do, is we were going to put on an event at Madison Square Garden. They looked at me like I was out of mind. They said Harry, Do you know how much it’s gonna cost us? I said yea, but think the name General will be all over the place and it will really start to grow and then we could see if we could get some pros. The biggest objection I had was that the name “General” sounded so lame. I wish we had a different name, ya know General was like a generic name. But Slifka said nope, General is the name and it’s gonna stay that way. I mean ya know we coulda picked a cool name for freestyle. At that event we saw a lot of different riders. One of them was Matt Hoffman, he came, flew in with his dad in a private plane which just blew everyone away. There was whole bunch of interesting personalities that were there. Fred Blood was one of them. We didn’t think he was the best rider but we thought he would be a really good promoter. So we asked him if he would be interested in being sponsored and he jumped at the opportunity. He didn’t have a real sponsorship at the time that was worth anything. And RL Osborn who was very well known, we spoke to him too and it was a tough negotiation and it cost us 100,000.00 a year to have him. Plus all of the equipment for his tours, we bought him a dualie and a trailer and it was insane, but it paid off for awhile, because General was doing well. But freestyle started to fade out and the competition became very, very intense. Our arch rival was GT. They were bent on getting us to be humbled to them and they were very good at it. They spent a lot of money competing. But none the less freestyle did change and General kinda was getting a little mismanaged maybe because they listened to me too much and spent more than they had or then they wanted to. There were times when they were putting money into this business that really wasn’t justified just to keep it going until finally they came to the realization that it’s not profitable anymore. It just wasn’t profitable. So we had to dismantle a lot of things that we had. One of them was no longer keeping RL Osborn. The one that really broke my heart was firing Tinker Juarez. Who got started with us as a mountain bike racer, who blew everyone away over the years. I don’t know if he still races. (Yea, we discussed Tink, and his AWESOME career, and yea guys and gals, he started with General on the mountain bike scene and of course started with….BMX) But amazing things had happened that hurt us but none the less were necessary. But the legacy of what General left behind was the fact that it was a group of people, it wasn’t just me and my cheerleading for the company and all the promoting I did because that was my job it was the fact that they honestly believe there was a business to be had there if you go about it properly. And we tried.
What was your position at General?
I was the director of advertising and promotions. I also maintained a territory, that gave me some serious additional income because they gave me a commission. And as an example because New Jersey and Long Island was my territory when the scooters came out I was getting commission off all that stuff. Back in 1985-86 just from the scooters alone in one month I made like $14,000 dollars in commission just from that, that was separate from everything else I was earning. So I was a busy guy at that time. I kinda miss that, LOL. Now I’m living a nice modest life in the country out here but, back then things, things were good for awhile. It’s like anything else you know, you have your peaks and your valleys. You enjoy things when they are good and when they are not as good as they used to be you still appreciate what you have. People are very resilient; we can adjust to a lot of different levels and lifestyles, if we’re cool about it.
Point Pleasant Bicycles and the scooter explosion:
(At one point, Harry asked where I was living and I said it was a town over from Point Pleasant Bicycles which led to …scooters) As a matter of fact had it not been for point pleasant bicycles, remember the scooter? had it not been for him, who happened to have one of the mongoose scooters in stock at the time that wasn’t selling. I looked at it and said well, this thing just needs some improvement and if it’s improved upon and marketed properly it will sell. I actually called skip hess who was the owner of mongoose at that time, I said Skip and I knew him pretty well from previous things in BMX, I said “do you mind if I innovate your scooter a little bit by copying the basic design and adding a few things?” He said, “Harry, if you can do anything to get my scooters to start moving, go for it”. And that’s when I started, at that time neon was popular so I started using neon colors, turn em into little freestyle scooters and all of a sudden they just took off. Yea so I got the idea for the first time when I saw the scooter at Point Pleasant Bicycles.
F1’s?
We even used the velodrome in California and put on the F1 races, using that little hybrid, that little 10 speed or 12 speed BMX bike. I’m not sure if everyone remembers that, it was a very brief period. And I remember the editors of the major bike magazines asking me, Harry why are you pursuing this? This is not going to happen. It’s just not there. And I disagreed with them, I mean I thought with Shimano making components they would really push it, but they didn’t. And that was the end of that.
The very earliest days of General’s Freestyle Team
I played a very small role in that if any. I would just set up the events themselves. The team members would just go to the events and perform. I don’t even remember if we had a ¼ pipe at that time, I think it was all flatland stuff in the beginning. (I mentioned seeing them at Beacon Bikes for a pre-show for GT with Steve Rulli and Pete Kearney) Oh, we had a team even before that. The original team, I think, consisted of Steve Rulli, who was not really part of Pete Kearney and Brian Belcher and Mark Roldan, they came a little later after Steve. I remember one of Steve’s friends, one of their names was Josh, and these guys were real…beginner to intermediate level, it wasn’t until we were introduced to some of the better riders that were at the intermediate to expert level that the team took off and we started getting the pros. That’s when we had two national tours running as well. One was Fred Blood and one was RL. The RL one was really the big one because he was so well known. The Fred Blood one was secondary but it did travel all over the country. And then we had the local teams that did the local bike shops. From time to time I did have to travel out to some of the events or accompany the team, but I didn’t do much traveling. I was too busy doing a lot of other things at the time with General .
Where did the General equipment wind up?
A lot of the stuff was just given away. When the company finally broke up, whoever had what they had could keep it. RL had his stuff, it was his to keep, we never asked him for the truck back or anything like that. The other stuff, the stuff that went into the trailers…I honestly don’t know where that wound up. They may have stayed at the warehouse for all I know got stored there and died there. One thing about Robert Faganson who was the chairman of the board of the company he was a very generous guy and he gave everything away to anybody who asked for it, he gave me the t-shirt machine. He said Harry, you can have it, what are we gonna do with it. Make t-shirts if you want to for the fun of it. He gave me the generator that was used for the PA system. He said what am I going to do with this stuff, ya know we’re not gonna auction any of this junk off, keep it, it’s not worth our time to do that.
Harry’s enthusiasm
(I always remembered Harry as being smiling and pumped on BMX everytime I met him, I mentioned this to him.) Ya know to tell you the truth, I was very sincerely pumped up because I don’t think that many people were as fortunate as I was to have a career in a business that I truly enjoyed. Where every day was a new adventure and exciting and challenging. I would get up in the morning and just be ready to take off from the starting gate and just go full bore from start to finish every day. That’s how it was and I still can’t believe the enthusiasm I had. The day that I went to Craigmeur and gave my proposal was one of the worst snow storms we had. Here I had to climb this mountainous area in a Chevy Monte Carlo, I must have spun out 10 times before I even got there. I barely made it, but I was so driven to get this sport off the ground that I became unstoppable. It’s amazing what enthusiasm can do. Now if you put me on a snowy road, I won’t even get behind the wheel! LOL!
Now that I think about it, now would be a great time for me to do that again, lol. Because, here I have pretty much retired with a few
Looking back.
But anytime I see BMX, I think back and the history of it, the people that were involved and these legendary names that these people who are older that are gone. Like Chuck Robinson who had Robinson Racing Products, and Skip Hess who is older than me, his son Skip Jr. became a very prominent figure in the bike business. And people from GT, like Gary Turner when he got started with the company and the people that succeeded him, a lot of these people are gone. They’re not even alive anymore. I must say for some who was very laid back he made quite an impact and that was Ernie Alexander from the NBA.
projects that are fun but plenty of spare time. I mean I’m basically retired, I don’t work for anybody. I just do my thing. I’m 66 years old, but I think, maybe it’s the number, I don’t know, 66, shit, golly ya know I get pumped up on the things I’m working on from time to time, but to have that day to day enthusiasm is just not the way it is. I enjoy being a grandparent and just doing things that are a lot more mellow.
How do you feel about BMX now?
To see a sport endure over the years, become an Olympic sport. To know that the kids that were racing back then are now adults and in many instances parents of kids that are now involved in the sport, is, it’s just nice to know.
What are you working on today?
I’m pretty much in retirement, but I have a few little projects I am working on to keep myself busy, only time will tell if they’ll develop. One of my hobbies is target shooting, I have a little range that I built behind my house, we have property and it’s private and you can shoot guns all day long if you want to. Out here you can have a concealed handgun license all you have to be is an upstanding citizen without any arrests and you can carry a gun anywhere you go at all. So, I’ve been working on a holster that can be worn in hot weather, under a regular shirt and shorts where a person would never even know that that person has a gun on them, and they tuck their shirt in if they want to. Also because I love animals, we have been developing a line of dog cookies. Harry has a 15 year old mix between a corgi and a healer, they look like an Australian cattle dogs.
The future of BMX.
What excites me is the fact that BMX had its ups and downs and it’s come back now and it’s still a very viable sport. And that’s good news, after 30 some odd years, I mean the proof of the pudding is we are gonna see it in the Olympics! (At this point Harry asked me who was the major organization that got BMX into the Olympics, so I gave him the whole sordid run down of events) We talked about how BMX racing at the local scene has sorta gotten to put it kindly, “soft”. I told him how our largest track of which there are now only 3 gets only at best 100 riders on a local weekend. I also spoke to him of some people’s unwillingness to properly promote it. He had this to say about promotion.
That’s the key, during my career promoting it was number 1. Ya know it’s not an easy thing to do, because it does require an awful lot of time and time really is our most valuable asset. Ya gotta have it to devote. Ya gotta realize that I promoted the idea of BMX while I was still having another job and I sacrificed my income from selling the boxes to stop in the bike shops to start a sport which was JUST FOR THE LOVE OF IT. The concept of making money was never really a factor. It turned into a factor but nothing major. And then it became less of a factor, because once I became part of the industry and that was when all of a sudden mopeds were a necessity back in 1977 because of the gas shortage. The income I got from Craigmeur was insignificant. But I did it because I just loved doing it. It was kind of a little selfish because I had a son who was involved but also because I just enjoyed seeing the results of it. And the challenge of keeping it running and getting better, it also helped my business I suppose once I got involved with Puch trying to get into the BMX business which was short lived. But none the less it takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of determination and until somebody comes along that really wants to do that and has the time to do it it’s not gonna happen like it did before in New Jersey. I mean you have responsibilities outside of that , that you can only do so much, you do the best you can.
What did Harry know about the future of BMX 20+ years ago?
One thing I should mention to you and that was a comment RL Osborn had made. Which was very, very prophetic. When freestyle BMX as a competitive sport, the way it used to be, started to slow down. I told RL, ya know this sport is beginning to lose its impact, you know…what do you think the future is? He said Harry, mark my words, over the years, you’re going to see freestyle transform itself into a street sport. It’s gonna become street. You’re gonna see kids doing more stuff on the street the way they do with skateboards than what they are doing now. They’re not going to be doing it just to be able to compete at local events. They’re just gonna do it, just for fun. There will be those who will be stand outs who will become pros and be very well known. And he was right! He predicted what was going to happen over the next 20 some years. RL in his time, he was pretty amazing. RL at the time he was riding he was already 26-27 years old, so he is now somewhere around 50 years old. That’s hard to believe! It’s nice to be able to look back at times and know that a whole generation had passed but the sport still exists and maybe the best is yet to come. And after China it may very well be the case, depending upon how much play it gets on TV.
Legacy
The thing that I am most proud is not so much that I helped create the sport in New Jersey it was that the sport that I was involved in, is still alive and that it was passed on from one generation to the next. That to me is more important than the creation of something; it’s the legacy of knowing that something you were involved with was good enough to continue. More so than, “it was good in its time” That’s something that I hope will endure, I’m sure it will still have its peaks and valleys but that it will keep on going for another hundred and some odd years.