Donny Jones

BMX Action's 1977 Test Rider, ‘Building Leapin’’ of the Pit

A Legend Bike Co. rider page · primary sources: BMX Freestylin' (Wizard Publications, 1982) and Bill Ryan, firsthand

At a glance

Scene Torrance, California, from 1977
Role BMX Action magazine testing staff, joined 1977 alongside R.L. Osborn and Ike Eisenacher
Known for The nickname 'Building Leapin'' Jones, and riding the Pit with a young Bill Ryan years before Supercross BMX existed

Donny Jones has a hard date attached to his name, which is more than most riders from BMX's earliest years can say. According to BMX Action's own 1982 book, BMX Freestylin', Jones joined the magazine's testing staff in 1977 — the same year as R.L. Osborn, son of BMX Action founder Bob Osborn, and a rider named Ike Eisenacher. That puts Donny Jones inside the magazine's inner circle at its Torrance home base from BMX's earliest organized years, testing bikes on the same dirt where a young Bill Ryan — later the founder of Supercross BMX — was riding for fun, before he knew the sport had a name.

Joining BMX Action's Test Staff, 1977

BMX Freestylin', credited to Mike Buff, Bob Osborn, R.L. Osborn, and Len Weed and published by Wizard Publications in 1982, states plainly on page 13: R.L. Osborn joined the BMX Action testing staff in 1977 alongside Donny "Building Leapin'" Jones and Ike Eisenacher. R.L. Osborn would go on to co-found the magazine's BMX Action Trick Team and become one of freestyle's founding names — which makes his 1977 testing partner worth putting on the record in his own right. Testing staff in this era meant riding whatever the magazine's Bob Osborn and his crew wanted beaten on and written up, mostly on the same home turf the magazine used for everything else: Torrance.

The Pit, and a Kid Named Bill Ryan

That home turf was the Pit, an informal dirt spot close to BMX Action's Torrance offices. Bill Ryan rode it from around age 7, before his mother brought home a copy of BMX Action and he realized the riders in its pages — Donny Jones among them — were the same guys he already knew from the dirt. “The guys in the pages — Donny Jones, the Emrich brothers, Scot Breithaupt — I already knew them from riding the Pit with them,” Bill has said of that period. He has separately placed Donny Jones in the same circle again in the spring of 1981, when Bill was 12 and getting to know Scot Breithaupt — meaning Jones's presence around that Torrance scene held for years, not just his single testing-staff credit in 1977.

The Nickname

"Building Leapin'" is how BMX Freestylin' lists him, in a book whose foreword — written by Bob Osborn about his own son — leans hard into that same era's habit of tacking a nickname onto anyone worth remembering. The book doesn't explain where Jones's nickname came from, and no further record of it turned up in the archives checked for this page. It's logged here exactly as the source states it, nothing added.

Where the public record runs thin

Beyond the 1977 testing-staff credit and Bill Ryan's own account of the Pit, Donny Jones's birth details, hometown, individual race results, and any BMX Action byline under his own name are not documented in the archives checked for this page — oldschoolmags.com, bmxsociety.com, bmxmuseum.com, 23mag.com, and the USA BMX Hall of Fame. He does not appear in the Hall of Fame. What's here rests on two primary sources: the magazine's own 1982 book and Bill Ryan's firsthand recollection.

Where Donny Jones fits in the bigger story

Riders: R.L. Osborn, Scot Breithaupt. Publishers: Bob Osborn. Magazines: BMX Action. The Pit sat near Entradero and the rest of the South Bay's early track scene, and this page is one thread in Bill Ryan's own account of growing up in it — see Bill Ryan. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

BMX Freestylin' — Featuring the BMX Action Trick Team, © 1982 Mike Buff, Bob Osborn, R.L. Osborn, and Len Weed (Wizard Publications), p.13 — R.L. Osborn joining BMX Action's testing staff in 1977 alongside Donny "Building Leapin'" Jones and Ike Eisenacher. Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX — firsthand account of riding the Pit in Torrance from around age 7 alongside Donny Jones, the Emrich brothers, and Scot Breithaupt, as published on his own Legend Bike Co. page. oldschoolmags.com, bmxsociety.com, bmxmuseum.com, and 23mag.com were checked for independent period coverage of Donny Jones by name; none returned results beyond general BMX Action-era archive material at the time of research.