Mark Lewman

The Freestylin' Editor Who Wrote His Way In From Kalamazoo

A Legend Bike Co. industry page · sources: Mark Lewman's own account in the Slam City Skates interview, Legend Bike Co.'s Andy Jenkins and Spike Jonze pages, and the Freestylin': Generation F and Freestylin' II book credits

At a glance

Role BMX racer, then Freestylin' assistant editor, then magazine editor and creative director
Scene Kalamazoo, Michigan, BMX racing (early 1980s); Freestylin' magazine, Torrance, California (1985–1989); skate and youth-culture publishing (1989–present)
Magazines Freestylin', Homeboy, Dirt, Grand Royal (editor), Big Brother
Known for Writing his way into a job at Freestylin' on fan letters alone, co-founding Club Homeboy with Andy Jenkins and Spike Jonze, and co-authoring Freestylin' II: The Book with Craig "Gork" Barrette

Mark Lewman never sent a resume to Freestylin' magazine. He sent letters — dozens of them, typed at two and three in the morning on his mom's Smith-Corona, fueled by Mountain Dew and Minor Threat, about the BMX-and-punk-rock world he and his friends had built in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It worked. He talked his way from a small-town race track into the newsroom that helped invent the voice of BMX freestyle media, then rode that voice straight into skateboarding, into music magazines, and into a career that's still going.

A Loaned Bike at a Field in Plainwell, Michigan

Lewman got into BMX the way a lot of Midwest kids did in the early 1980s: secondhand and sideways. Around age 12 or 13, a kid down the block told him about a BMX track out in a field in Plainwell, Michigan. Someone loaned him a bike and a helmet, someone else covered his entry fee, and he was hooked — even though, by his own account, he was bad at it for years. Racing was cut-and-dry, gate drops and finishing order, and it took him four seasons to crack the top three. What kept him coming back was the community: kids building their own bikes, bartering parts, mowing lawns to fund the next upgrade. All the energy in the sport, as far as a kid in Michigan could tell, radiated out of Southern California and a Torrance, California company called Wizard Publications, publisher of Bicycle Motocross Action — renamed BMX Action by 1983.

The Letters

Lewman graduated high school in June 1985 with no real plan — no SATs taken, a school full of military recruiters, and a summer stretching out ahead of him with nothing on it. He worked a paper route, rode his bike everywhere, and hung around Burn's Sport and Cycle, his friends' independent bike shop in Kalamazoo. His mom gave him a graduation gift of stamps, envelopes and stationery, meant for thank-you notes to family. He let it sit for a month. Then, one night after riding, wired on Mountain Dew and Minor Threat, he pulled his mom's typewriter out of the closet and wrote a letter to Andy Jenkins, the 21-year-old founding editor of Freestylin'. He wrote another the next day, and the next — about the Kalamazoo crew, the music they liked, the ramps they built out of stolen construction-site plywood — for about a month straight.

An envelope came back from Torrance, stuffed with stickers: Jenkins telling him he was a freak, but a funny one, and that the magazine needed new voices. He offered Lewman a freelance tryout — an article on backyard ramps called "Project Vert Search," and a mock product test of a Vision skateboard, written up the way Car and Driver tested cars. When the office fax machine broke before deadline, Lewman read the whole piece to the Freestylin' staff over the phone. It worked. Jenkins offered him a job, and Lewman bought a one-way plane ticket to California — about a year into Jenkins' own tenure as editor, according to Legend Bike Co.'s own Andy Jenkins page.

Inside the Freestylin' Newsroom

Lewman, Jenkins and, about a year later, Spike Jonze — hired out of the Rockville BMX shop in Maryland — ran Freestylin's voice and photography through the magazine's best-remembered years, effectively living at Wizard's Torrance warehouse during deadlines. Nights got strange: skating the curbs out front, rolling a 500-pound steel girder found in a dumpster back to the office on skateboards, rehearsing Jenkins' band in the warehouse after hours. Lewman's own early paycheck-to-paycheck routine — loading up at the Wendy's salad bar to stretch a few dollars, building himself a new Hutch complete out of test-bike parts — was, in his words, living the dream.

Club Homeboy grew out of that same after-hours energy. By Lewman's own account, he was making a xeroxed zine at night to send to readers who wrote in — stickers, inside jokes, extra color beyond the magazine itself — and stuck a fake ad on the back for a mail-order fan club called "Club Homeboy," a play on the Devo Fan Club. Publisher Bob Osborn found the spread on Lewman's desk, asked what it was, and once Lewman explained the concept, Osborn suggested making it real. Andy Jenkins' own account of the same story, carried on Legend Bike Co.'s Andy Jenkins page, frames Club Homeboy as a joint bit among all three editors that started almost as an aside in a fall 1986 zine review column. Both are first-person tellings from people who were in the room; the group clearly built the thing together, and we're presenting both accounts rather than picking a single inventor. Either way, the joke snowballed into a mail-order club with roughly 15,000 card-carrying members and its own spinoff magazine, Homeboy.

Freestylin' II: The Book (1987)

In 1987, Lewman co-authored Freestylin' II: The Book with fellow Wizard Publications editor Craig "Gork" Barrette, credited on the cover as "Mark 'Lew' Lewman." Published by Wizard Publications out of Torrance with photography by Windy Osborn and art direction by Kurt Smith, it was a trick-instruction manual — flatland, ramp and combo how-tos pulled from Freestylin' and BMX Action content, closing on the line "ride, don't pose." It's a different kind of book than the magazine work Lewman is better known for: less voice-driven essay, more hands-on manual, but it put his byline on one of the era's most-used BMX how-to references.

Homeboy, GO, and the End of the Wizard Years

By the mid-1980s, Wizard Publications had grown to include BMX Action, Freestylin', and, starting winter 1987, Homeboy — a BMX, skate and music tabloid Lewman, Jenkins and Jonze ran together, later bringing in Kevin Wilkins, a zine writer from Lincoln, Nebraska, as editor. As skateboarding boomed and BMX freestyle's magazine market fragmented into too many competing titles, Wizard's publisher made the call to merge Freestylin' into a new title, GO: The Rider's Manual, covering both sports under one masthead.

Dirt, Grand Royal, and Big Brother

Homeboy folded as a financial loss despite the following it built, and Lewman, Jenkins and Jonze regrouped around a new idea: a men's youth-culture magazine modeled on the teen-girl title Sassy, which they'd been getting by mail-order accident. That became Dirt, which put the Beastie Boys on its first cover after Lewman tracked down their management by mailing his own driver's license as collateral for a reply. When Dirt's publisher sold the title and the new owner shut it down, Lewman moved over to edit the Beastie Boys' own Grand Royal magazine. Around the same period he wrote for Big Brother, including a 36,000-word interview with World Industries' Sal Rocco Jr., taken on at a dollar-a-word rate.

Generation F (2008)

In 2008, Lewman reunited with Jenkins and Jonze for Freestylin': Generation F, 1984–1989, a Nike SB-sponsored retrospective hardback covering the magazine's full 53-issue run. Lewman handled word direction, Jenkins design direction, and Jonze photo direction — the same three names that had run the magazine's voice more than two decades earlier, pulling the archive back together one more time. His own intro essay in that book recounts the Kalamazoo origin story in his own words, matching the account he's given in later interviews.

Girl Skateboards, Crailtap, and Nemo HQ Today

As BMX and skate media contracted, Lewman's writing found a long home inside the Crailtap network — Girl Skateboards, Chocolate, and the wider family Jenkins art-directed. He wrote slogans, ad copy and video-skit dialogue for the group for years, including a scripted intro for Chocolate Skateboards' 2022 video Bunny Hop. As of that period, Lewman was a partner and Creative Director at Nemo HQ, a creative agency in Portland, Oregon — still, by his own description, in the mix with the same friends decades later.

Where the public record runs thin

The Club Homeboy origin story is told two slightly different ways by the two people who lived it — Lewman's own account and Andy Jenkins' — and this page presents both rather than resolving them. Lewman's exact birth date and the precise years of his tenure at Dirt, Grand Royal and Big Brother are not pinned down in the sources checked for this page. oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were checked directly and returned general period Freestylin' archive material rather than additional biographical detail on Lewman himself.

Where Mark Lewman fits in the bigger story

Magazines: Freestylin' Magazine, BMX Action Magazine. People: Andy Jenkins, Spike Jonze, Craig "Gork" Barrette, Don Toshach, Josh White, a rider whose overnight-fame cover story ran during Lewman's own Freestylin' years. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

Mark Lewman, interviewed by Anthony Pappalardo, "Bike Mags to 'Bunny Hop': Skate Media's BMX History," Slam City Skates blog, blog.slamcity.com — primary first-person source for the Kalamazoo origin, the letter-writing campaign, the Freestylin' newsroom, Club Homeboy, Homeboy, Dirt, Grand Royal, Big Brother, and his current role at Nemo HQ. Freestylin': Generation F, 1984–1989 (Nike SB retrospective book, 2008) — credits page naming Lewman as word director, and intro essay recounting his Kalamazoo hire story. Freestylin' II: The Book (Mark "Lew" Lewman and Craig "Gork" Barrette, Wizard Publications, 1987, ISBN 0-941111-01-6) — cover and credits. Legend Bike Co.'s own Andy Jenkins and Spike Jonze pages, checked for cross-consistency on the Freestylin' hiring timeline and Club Homeboy origin. oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were checked directly and returned general period magazine-archive material rather than additional primary facts on Lewman.