The BMX Family Tree — Layer 2: The People Lineage
Who came up under whom, and the families
A Legend Bike Co. chapter · Layer 2 of 3 · Part of The History of BMX
1. Corporate lineage — who bought, became, or ended whom
2. People lineage — you are on this one
3. Frame and design lineage — which designs begat which
Companies get bought. People get taught. This layer is the human half of the map — the mentor chains, the shop floors, the magazine mastheads, and the families that BMX actually ran on.
Rules I held myself to: every line on this page traces back to a chapter in this library or a source cited on one of those chapters. Where two accounts fight each other, I marked it as a fight and left it there. Nobody’s brand gets pushed to the front, mine included. My line sits in here the same as everybody else’s, because that’s what it is — one branch.
— Bill Ryan
Want this mapped out instead of read? The interactive version — click a name, open a chapter — lives at Six Degrees of BMX →
Layer 2 — The People Lineage
Companies get bought. People get taught. Almost everybody in this sport came up under somebody, and most of them were hired by a person who had been hired by a person. This layer is the mentor chains and the families.
How to read it: arrows run from the person who opened the door to the person who walked through it. No chain here is more important than another one.
The shop and the factory floor
My own chain starts in a dirt lot. I was riding the Pit with Scot Breithaupt, the Emrich brothers and Donny Jones in the spring of 1981 when Breithaupt hired me at SE Racing. I was twelve. From SE I went to GT and ran the Robinson division as team manager. I left GT when Rich Long capped warranty frames at 200 for the year and we hit the cap early. Then Tuni Henry’s La Palma Cycle Center, where Tommy Brackens and I designed and started Brackens Bikes. Then my own shop, Power Plus Cycles in Stanton. Then Supercross BMX in 1989.
Tuni is the other half of that. He taught me to ride at a Harbor BMX clinic in San Pedro when I was ten. Years later I went to work for him at La Palma Cycle Center, from 1987 to 1989. The shop itself was always owned by Tuni and Richard Schaeffer, a CPA who was also Tuni’s coach and manager. I worked there — never as an owner. A secondary bio miscredited me as a co-owner for years; that was never my claim. Ten-year-old kid at a clinic to shop employee in about a decade, which is roughly how this sport works.
La Palma is worth pulling apart on its own, because of who was standing in that shop at the same time: me, Tuni, Tommy Brackens, Kevin Hull fresh off the GT factory team, and a thirteen-year-old named Sean McKinney we hired as the freestyle grunt. McKinney says himself the shop worked because it was staffed by riders instead of businesspeople. When La Palma closed he came with me to Power Plus, then went to Los Alamitos Schwinn and was running the place by twenty-one, then Tip Plus, then S&M Bikes in March 1996, where he has been ever since. He launched Revenge Industries at Interbike in 2002. One shop job at thirteen turned into a thirty-year career.
Steve Potts ran a chain of his own out of the Bicycle Source in Lomita. He built the ACS Rotor watching his younger half-brother Mike Buff ride, then licensed it to ACS. Steve Blackey worked for Potts at that shop, and years later revived the Bicycle Source name himself. In a FATBMX interview Blackey named Potts first on his list of people to thank for his life in BMX — ahead of Buff, ahead of R.L. Osborn, ahead of Bob Haro. That is what a mentor chain looks like from the inside.
Bob Morales built one of the longest runs in the industry out of the same kind of thing. Dyno in 1982. Auburn with Todd Huffman, out of a bankrupt company’s inventory lot they won on a low bid. Then Morales Bikes, KORE components, and ASV Inventions. Huffman went to GT and later into motorcycle documentary filmmaking. Two friends, one lucky auction, and two completely different careers out of it.
Freestyle’s first act
Freestyle as a paid job starts with two guys in the BMX Action offices in Torrance. Bob Haro and R.L. Osborn formed the BMX Action Trick Team in the winter of 1979 and did their first show at the ABA Winternationals in February 1980. Haro left in early 1981 to run his own company. Mike Buff took the open seat, and the Osborn-and-Buff version of the team is the one that toured nationally with Oakley that summer. Both lineups matter. The second one existed because the first one worked.
The press
The magazines had family trees too, and they were literal ones. Bob Osborn sold his house, borrowed from his sister, brought in a third investor, and put out the first BMX Action in 1976 — forty-eight pages, a dollar, 10,000 copies, with a cover shot taken by his daughter Windy. His son R.L. and Windy were both on the masthead from the first issue.
Andy Jenkins was twenty years old when he became founding editor of Freestylin’ in 1984. He brought in Don Toshach as managing editor from day one. About a year in he hired Mark Lewman, who had been mailing the magazine long rambling letters since it launched. A year after that he hired a teenager from Rockville BMX named Spike Jonze, on the strength of some funny postcards. Three young editors ran that magazine’s voice, and two of them went on to careers well outside BMX.
Craig Barrette — gOrk, known by the one name — went the other direction, from the editor’s desk at BMX Action to the ABA. I did the magazine side myself for a stretch, on the mastheads at BMX Plus!, GO and Super BMX. Same as everybody else in this section: somebody let me in the door first.
The families
BMX ran on families more than it ran on money. The Churches are a father and a son in a garage. The Utterbacks put their initials on the company — George, Jeff and Scott are the G, J and S in GJS. Joe and Imogene Kundig bought a Redlands sporting-goods store and turned it into the Schwinn shop behind RRS, and their son Craig turned out to be a better coach than he was a racer. Bill Farrell Sr. shot the trade-show photos and designed the logo for the brand his son Billy drew up in high school. Ronnie and Richie Anderson raced. Tommy and Charlie Brackens raced. My sons work in the businesses with me.
One correction that belongs on any family page: Andy “Mr. Bigfoot” Patterson, the Southern California pro who rode for GT, Skyway and JMC in the same era, is not related to Brent and Brian Patterson. Same last name, same years, no relation. It gets printed wrong constantly.
The fights this layer does not settle
Every real history has holes in it. Papering over them is how legends get built, and legends are exactly what this library is trying to take apart. None of the four open fights on this map land on the people layer — they sit on the corporate layer and the frame and design layer, and this library does not settle any of them.
What does belong here is a correction about me. I worked at La Palma Cycle Center; I never owned it. A secondary bio miscredited me as a co-owner for years; that was never my claim. The shop was Tuni Henry’s and Richard Schaeffer’s. Same goes for Andy “Mr. Bigfoot” Patterson, who is not related to Brent and Brian Patterson no matter how often it gets printed that way.
How this page was built
Every connection mapped above traces to a chapter in this library, and each of those chapters carries its own sources. Where a claim comes from Bill Ryan firsthand, the underlying chapter says so. Where two sources disagree, both are shown and neither is resolved.
People lineage from the Bill Ryan, Scot Breithaupt, Turnell Henry, Sean McKinney, Kevin Hull, Tommy Brackens, Steve Potts, Mike Buff, Bob Morales, BMX Action Trick Team, Bob Osborn, Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman, Spike Jonze and Don Toshach chapters.
The full source statement for all three layers, plus the known holes and the corrections loop, is on The BMX Family Tree front page.
Keep going
The BMX Family Tree — the front page, and how the three layers fit together.
Layer 1 — The Corporate Lineage — who bought, became, or ended whom.
Layer 3 — The Frame and Design Lineage — which designs begat which.
Six Degrees of BMX — the same map, built to click through instead of read.
The History of BMX — the main narrative, start to finish.
The BMX History Archive — every chapter, indexed.
The Bike Shops That Made BMX — where most of these chains actually started.
Send a correction — the fastest way to make this page better.