Action Now Magazine — When SkateBoarder Widened Its Lens to BMX (1980-1982)

Legend Bike Co · BMX heritage series

SkateBoarder was already skateboarding's magazine of record when, in August 1980, it changed its name and its scope at the same time. It came back as Action Now, and for the roughly year and a half it lasted, it ran BMX coverage in nearly every issue, alongside skateboarding, surf, and roller skating — including two covers built around Bob Haro during the exact months freestyle was becoming its own thing. Action Now folded before most BMX kids of the era knew its name the way they knew BMX Action or BMX Plus!, but its archive is a real, sourced piece of freestyle's founding record, and it belongs in this library.

SkateBoarder, before the rename

SkateBoarder started as The Quarterly Skateboarder in 1964, founded by John Severson, and lasted four issues before the first skateboarding boom went quiet and the magazine folded with it. It came back in 1975, relaunched by editor Steve Pezman under Surfer Publications, Inc., the Dana Point, California company that also published Surfer and, later, Roller Skating Magazine. Through the second half of the 1970s, SkateBoarder became the defining title of skateboarding's second boom — and as skateparks began closing and the boom cooled again toward the end of the decade, the magazine started adding roller-skating coverage, then BMX, reaching for a wider readership as its original core narrowed.

August 1980 — the rename

SkateBoarder became Action Now with Volume 7, No. 1, dated August 1980 — an 84-page issue with Stacy Peralta and Eddie Elguera on the cover alongside Mike Benavidez and bikes, continuing the same volume and issue count SkateBoarder had already been running rather than starting over at Volume 1. The Skateboarding Heritage Foundation's own archive lists the title formally as SkateBoarder's Action Now, which is the more precise name for what's usually shortened to just Action Now. Whether Surfer Publications remained the publisher of record on Action Now specifically couldn't be confirmed on a masthead directly — but with the same volume numbering, no reported change-of-ownership story anywhere, and the magazine's continuous production run straight through the rename, the reasonable read is that it stayed a Surfer Publications title. This page states that as the likely case, not a confirmed fact.

A real BMX record, issue by issue

This is the part that matters most for a BMX history library, and it's well documented. An issue-by-issue archive of Action Now shows BMX content running through nearly the entire life of the magazine — not a token gesture, a sustained editorial thread:

• October 1980 (Vol. 7, No. 3) — BMX profile on Brian Lewis
• November 1980 (Vol. 7, No. 4) — Red Zinger Bike Race and BMX contest coverage
• December 1980 (Vol. 7, No. 5) — BMX feature on Jeff Watson
• January 1981 (Vol. 7, No. 6) — Bob Haro cover and centerfold interview, written by D.D. Morin, photographed by James Cassimus and Dean Bradley; ABA Anaheim BMX race coverage
• February 1981 (Vol. 7, No. 7) — NBA BMX Nationals coverage, BMX feature on Kevin Harlow
• March 1981 (Vol. 7, No. 8) — BMX contest coverage
• May 1981 — cover feature on cruiser-class racer Jeff Kosmala
• June 1981 — "Ramp Building," a BMX ramp feature with Bob Haro
• July 1981 — BMX coverage from Rancho San Diego, alongside beach-cruiser content
• August 1981 (First Anniversary Issue) — Joe Claveau cover; a feature on the Jag BMX 500; photo credits including Bob Haro himself as a contributing photographer, plus Mark Barnett and Tinker Juarez; Haro Designs advertising
• September 1981 — a freestyle BMX feature
• November 1981 — cover feature on Greg Hill
• January 1982 — cover photograph of Bob Haro doing a high-speed nose wheelie

Bob Haro appears twice as the cover subject and once as a contributing photographer inside a single 18-month run — a genuinely early documentary record of freestyle's founding moment, running in parallel to what BMX Action's Trick Team coverage was doing the same year, from a completely different publishing house.

Who wrote it

Dean Bradley is documented as running the bicycle side of the magazine. His path afterward connects Action Now directly to the wider BMX magazine world: he went on to editorial work at BMX Plus! and later became the founding editor of Mountain Bike Action — a real personnel thread between Surfer Publications' action-sports experiment and the dedicated BMX press that outlasted it. Writer D.D. Morin is credited on the January 1981 Bob Haro interview. Photographer James Cassimus, SkateBoarder and Action Now's photo editor, shot BMX material for the magazine alongside Bradley, including that same Haro cover story — his own page on this site goes deeper on his career and his real, if secondary, BMX work. No single editor-in-chief of Action Now turned up anywhere in the research for this page; what's documented is the section-level structure above, not a full masthead.

The fold

Action Now's run ended around 1982, after roughly 19 monthly issues — two independent sources agree the final issue was Volume 8, No. 7, though one other source states Volume 8, No. 6, a small discrepancy this page states rather than silently resolves. No single trigger event is documented anywhere in the record. The most consistent account is that the magazine's broadened, multi-sport format cost it its core readership — hardcore skateboarders who wanted a skateboarding magazine, not an action-sports magazine, left in real numbers — and that loss, layered on top of a skateboarding industry that was already contracting through the early 1980s, eroded the readership and advertising base until the title folded. It reads as a slow bleed-out rather than a sudden closure.

Where Action Now sits in the wider BMX magazine story

Action Now never overlapped with the Wizard Publications side of BMX print — BMX Action and, later, Freestylin'. Nothing in the research for this page ties Action Now's staff to Bob Osborn's operation; they read as two entirely separate publishing houses, Surfer Publications and Wizard Publications, independently covering the exact same freestyle explosion at the exact same time, each from its own side of the fence. That's worth sitting with for a second: in 1980 and 1981, at least two separate magazine companies with no connection to each other looked at a kid doing tricks on a bike in a parking lot and decided it was worth putting on the cover. That's a real signal about what was happening in the sport, independent of either magazine's own account of it.

Timeline

• 1964 The Quarterly Skateboarder launches under John Severson; folds after four issues.
• 1975 SkateBoarder relaunches under editor Steve Pezman, published by Surfer Publications, Inc.
• Late 1970s SkateBoarder becomes skateboarding's dominant title; begins adding roller-skating and BMX coverage as skateparks close and readership contracts.
• Aug 1980 Relaunches as Action Now, Volume 7, No. 1 — Stacy Peralta and Eddie Elguera cover.
• Jan 1981 Bob Haro's first Action Now cover and centerfold interview.
• Aug 1981 First Anniversary Issue; Bob Haro himself contributes photography.
• Jan 1982 Bob Haro's second Action Now cover.
• 1982 Final issue, Volume 8, No. 7 (per two sources) — the magazine folds after roughly 19 issues.

Sources

skateboardingheritage.org — the Skateboarding Heritage Foundation's vintage magazine archive, source of the formal title SkateBoarder's Action Now and the 1980-1982 run dates. 23mag.com, Action Now archive — issue-by-issue index used for the BMX content list above, including cover subjects, feature subjects, and photo credits. vintageskateboardmagazines.com/ActionNowUSA.html — corroborating run dates and issue-count detail. surfertoday.com, "The Story of SkateBoarder Magazine" — SkateBoarder's 1964 and 1975 origin, Surfer Publications as publisher, the roller-skating and BMX broadening into Action Now, and the source of the Vol. 8 No. 6 final-issue variant. fatbmx.com, quoting the original January 1981 Bob Haro Action Now interview — confirms the D.D. Morin byline and the Cassimus/Bradley photo credit on that piece. oldschoolmags.com — checked directly; confirmed the archive does not include Action Now or SkateBoarder, BMX-only in scope. bmxsociety.com — unreachable for direct verification during this research.

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