Howie Cohen — The Importer Who Brought Kuwahara to America and Landed the E.T. Bike Deal

A Legend Bike Co. founder history page. Sourced from Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, Wikipedia's Kuwahara (bicycle company) article, kuwahara-bmx.com, Silodrome, and the British BMX Hall of Fame podcast.

Howie Cohen spent his whole life finding good bicycles other people hadn't found yet. He found the Japanese factory that built the bikes that became Nishiki. He found the Osaka bicycle maker that became Kuwahara in America. And in 1982 he found himself supplying the BMX bikes for a Steven Spielberg movie that made his imported brand a household name overnight. He died in 2013, and the BMX side of the American bike industry still runs partly on the distribution model he built.

Born into the bike business

Cohen came up in the bicycle trade through his parents' shops, first in Minneapolis and later in Los Angeles. The family grew the retail side to three Southern California locations before selling it off and launching a distributor, West Coast Cycle.

Japan, twice, on his mother's orders

In the early 1960s, West Coast Cycle and its dealers were unhappy with the quality of the higher-end bikes the company was importing from Europe. Cohen's mother, RosaBelle, sent him to Japan — twice — to find something better. He visited dozens of factories before settling on Kawamura Sangyo, which in 1964 built the first run of West Coast Cycle's American Eagle bikes. Those bikes were later rebranded as Nishiki. Cohen priced them well above the cheap Japanese three-speeds the discounters were selling and backed the price with real parts, pushing suppliers like Shimano, Sugino, Asahi, and Dia-Compe to build higher-quality components specifically for his bikes. They sold out in months.

West Coast Cycle's next brand, Azuki, did well too. In 1976, at 37, Cohen retired.

1978 — Everything Bicycles and the Kuwahara deal

Retirement didn't take. Cohen came back and launched a new company, Everything Bicycles, as a BMX-only wholesaler in 1978, distributing brands including Powerlite and Torker. He also had an existing relationship with a bicycle maker in Osaka, Japan, called Kuwahara, and he built that relationship into the first major BMX distributorship in the country. To turn the name into something kids actually knew, he ran a promotion giving away free stickers to any kid who called a toll-free number and could correctly pronounce "Kuwahara." He was also among the first to bring anodized chainwheels, brake levers, and other components into the American BMX market.

1982 — the E.T. deal

Kuwaharas took flight — literally — in Steven Spielberg's 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Universal contracted Cohen and rider Robert Cardoza of Everything Bicycles, working out of Torrance, California, to build the BMX bikes used in the film — 25 bikes total, five identical builds for each of the five boys on screen. Cohen scored the worldwide rights to sell bikes carrying the E.T. name, a marketing coup that turned Kuwahara into a smash-hit brand practically overnight. Full story of the bikes, the stunt riders, and the famous flying scene: the E.T. BMX page.

1989 — selling it back, and life after

Cohen sold the Kuwahara name back to its Japanese parent company in 1989 and formally retired from the industry. He kept doing occasional consulting work afterward and maintained a personal project, an online cycling memorabilia and bike collection site, almost up until his death.

Death, 2013

Howie Cohen died July 11, 2013 in his hometown of Lafayette, Colorado, at age 74, surrounded by family. He'd been treated for lymphoma for eight years before it spread to his liver in his final weeks. Industry consultant Jay Townley, a former Schwinn executive who'd sought Cohen's counsel when Schwinn got serious about BMX in the 1970s, said "one thing that everyone in the industry knows about Howie is that he was never without smile." His wife Kay called him "a forerunner in most of the things he did in the bicycle industry." He's survived by four children and three grandchildren.

What we don't know

Cohen's exact birth date isn't confirmed in the sources we could verify — his 2013 obituary lists his age as 74, which places his birth around 1938 or 1939, but we haven't pinned down an exact date. The precise division of labor between Cohen and Robert Cardoza in physically building the 25 E.T. movie bikes also isn't fully documented; period sources credit both men jointly.

Howie Cohen and Legend Bike Co.

Cohen's Everything Bicycles distributed Torker — the brand Bill Ryan owns and runs today — alongside Kuwahara and Powerlite starting in 1978. The distribution networks Cohen built are part of the same industry infrastructure that put Torker, and later Legend Bike Co., in front of American BMX riders.

Related pages

Kuwahara · E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and the Kuwahara BMX · Torker · History of BMX

Sources

Bicycle Retailer and Industry News — "Beloved industry figure Howie Cohen, 74, dies" (July 12, 2013). Wikipedia — Kuwahara (bicycle company). kuwahara-bmx.com — Kuwahara Bicycle Company History. Silodrome — "For Sale: A 1981 Kuwahara BMX Bike From 'E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial'" (May 26, 2024). British BMX Hall of Fame Podcast with Robert Cardoza — "Steven Spielberg, Kuwahara & the Legendary E.T. Bike Chase" (June 22, 2026). bmxsociety.com community forum — "Welcome Howie Cohen" thread (February 5, 2009); accessed via search snippet only, as the forum is JavaScript-rendered.