Richard Schaeffer — The CPA Who Co-Owned La Palma Cycle Center

Legend Bike Co · BMX heritage series

BMX history gets written about the people on the bikes. That is fair enough — they are the reason anybody watches. But every shop that mattered had somebody behind it who was not a racer, who signed the lease, worked out the payroll, and made the numbers hold still long enough for the fun part to happen. Those people almost never get a chapter.

Richard Schaeffer is one of them. He was a certified public accountant, and he co-owned La Palma Cycle Center with Turnell "Tuni" Henry — a BMX Hall of Famer, the NBA number one Pro Cruiser of 1982, and one of the most respected coaches the sport has produced. Schaeffer was also Henry's own coach and manager.

This is a short chapter. It is short because the record on Richard Schaeffer is thin, and we would rather publish a page that is honest about its own edges than a long one that fills the gaps with guesswork. What follows is what we can stand behind.

Who he was: a certified public accountant

In BMX: co-owner of La Palma Cycle Center, Southern California

Business partner: Turnell "Tuni" Henry

Other role: coach and manager to Turnell Henry

Shop era on record: 1987 to 1989, per BlackCycling — the same secondary source that got this shop's ownership wrong, so the dating is recorded, not relied on. See the box below

What became of the shop: it shut down (Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026). No closing date, no cause — only that Power Plus Cycles opened two weeks later

Who worked the counter: Bill Ryan, Tommy Brackens, Turnell Henry, Kevin Hull, Sean McKinney

Living or deceased: the record is silent — see below

The shop was always Turnell and Schaeffer

This needs stating flatly, because the record has been muddled in print and the correction matters to the people in it.

La Palma Cycle Center was owned by Turnell Henry and Richard Schaeffer. Two men, and only those two. That is the ownership, start to finish.

Bill Ryan, who is sometimes listed in secondary accounts as a partner in the shop, was not one. He worked there. In his own words: he never claimed to be a partner in La Palma Cycle Center, only that he was a worker there, and the store was always Turnell and Richard Schaeffer's. He went to work for Henry at the shop after leaving GT Bicycles — for the same man who had taught him to ride as a ten-year-old at Harbor BMX in San Pedro. Coach, then boss. Employee, never owner.

The error traces to a widely read profile of Henry on BlackCycling, which states that Henry was part owner of the shop with Bill Ryan from 1987 until 1989. The name is wrong. That matters for the years too: the same sentence that miscredits the ownership is the only place the 1987 to 1989 dating comes from, so this page no longer treats those years as the reliable half of it. See the box below.

An accountant in a sport that ran on nerve

The detail worth sitting with is the day job. Schaeffer was a CPA.

Late-1980s BMX retail was not an industry with a surplus of financial discipline. It was mostly racers who loved bikes opening shops on optimism, and a great many of those shops did not survive the decade. Plenty of the brands did not either. A partner who understood cash flow, inventory carrying cost and what a lease actually obligates you to was not a small thing to have. It was frequently the difference between a shop that lasted and one that did not.

Schaeffer did not stop at the books, either. He worked as Henry's coach and manager. That is an unusual combination — the man handling the accounts also handling the racing career. Somebody who could read a balance sheet was reading race programs and contracts too, for a rider who went on to a Hall of Fame career. Where and how Schaeffer came into the sport in the first place, we could not establish.

The counter he was paying for

The other thing the record makes clear is who was standing behind that counter. On any given day, La Palma Cycle Center had Bill Ryan, Tommy Brackens, Turnell Henry, Kevin Hull and Sean McKinney working in it.

Read that list again. A Hall of Fame pro cruiser racer. One of the fastest and most recognizable pros of the era. A future frame designer and brand founder. That is not a normal staff roster for a neighborhood bike shop. It is closer to a team roster that happened to have a cash register.

That is the pattern this library keeps running into, laid out at length in The Bike Shops That Made BMX: the shop counter is where BMX careers actually got built. Somebody had to own the counter. At La Palma, half of that somebody was an accountant named Richard Schaeffer.

How it ended

La Palma Cycle Center shut down (Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026). What closed it, and when, are not on the record, and neither is guessed at here.

What is on the record is how fast the next thing happened. Bill Ryan's own shop, Power Plus Cycles in Stanton, opened two weeks after La Palma shut down. That two-week gap is the firm point, and it is worth more than a year, because it ties the two shops together: settle a date for one and the other follows two weeks along. The year itself is open. Ryan recalls 1986 and says he may have been off on the year, so 1986 stands here as his recollection and not as an established date.

Why the record is this thin

Schaeffer was not a racer, and BMX only reliably wrote down its racers. The magazines covered results, teams and product. They rarely covered who held the paper on a shop, and when a shop closed, its records generally went with it. The people who kept those businesses upright are the first names to fall out of the history.

That is not a knock on the sport. It is just how the documentation worked. It does mean that a page like this one has to be honest about how much of it rests on the memory of people who were there, and how little of it can be checked against anything printed at the time.

Where the record runs thin

  • Living or deceased — the record is silent. No obituary, no biographical record and no dated reference to Richard Schaeffer's status was found. Legend Bike Co makes no claim in either direction, and will not, until there is a hard source.
  • Everything biographical. Birth date, hometown, family, education, the accounting firm or practice he worked in, and his life after the shop are all undocumented in anything we could reach.
  • Spelling of the surname. We use Schaeffer, the spelling Bill Ryan uses. Shaeffer and Schaefer both circulate as variants for the same name generally, and no period print source was found to settle it.
  • How he entered BMX. Whether Schaeffer came to the sport through Turnell Henry, through his own kids, or as an investor looking at a business is not established anywhere.
  • The shop's dates. That La Palma Cycle Center shut down is firsthand from Bill Ryan, 2026, and so is what came next: Power Plus Cycles opened two weeks later. That gap is firm. The year is not, and three things bear on it that do not all agree. Bill Ryan recalls 1986 and says he may have been off on the year, so 1986 is his recollection and not a settled date. BlackCycling dates the shop's run to 1987 through 1989 — the only published dating anyone has, but it comes from the same sentence that wrongly made Ryan a co-owner of La Palma, so its reliability on this shop is already poor and it is not weighed equally here. And the Supercross BMX chapter has Ryan already running Power Plus when Supercross began in 1989, which sets a ceiling: Power Plus opened in or before 1989, so La Palma closed in or before 1989. Legend Bike Co. sets out all three and picks none. A dated advertisement, a business license, or a phone-book listing would settle it in an afternoon — and would settle the Power Plus opening date two weeks along with it.
  • The shop's address. Not confirmed. The shop name matches the north Orange County city of La Palma, but we have not verified the storefront location and are not going to assume it.
  • The ownership split. Co-ownership with Henry is firmly established. The actual structure — the percentages, who put in what, whether there was a formal partnership — is not.
  • Any other BMX involvement. Whether Schaeffer had a stake in any other shop, brand or team is unknown.
  • Sources we could not reach. bmxsociety.com, which carries the deepest community discussion of Southern California shop history, was unreachable throughout this research. bmxmuseum.com blocks the access methods available here. Between them they may hold shop advertisements or forum recollections that would fill in several lines above.

Timeline

  • 1959 Turnell Lee Anderson, later known in BMX as Tuni Henry, is born. Schaeffer's own birth year is not on record.
  • 1981 Henry turns pro.
  • 1982 Henry takes the NBA number one Pro Cruiser title.
  • Undated La Palma Cycle Center shuts down, and Bill Ryan opens Power Plus Cycles in Stanton two weeks later (Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026). Ryan recalls the year as 1986 and says he may have been off on the year, so no year is fixed here.
  • 1987–1989 La Palma Cycle Center, co-owned by Turnell Henry and Richard Schaeffer, is dated to this window by BlackCycling — a source shown to be wrong on the shop's ownership, so the range is recorded rather than relied on. Bill Ryan works there as an employee, alongside Tommy Brackens, Kevin Hull and Sean McKinney. Schaeffer also serves as Henry's coach and manager.
  • 1988 Henry wins the ABA Porsche Series.
  • 1989 Henry goes to work for KHS as service manager. Supercross BMX also begins that year, out of Power Plus Cycles, which sets a ceiling on how late Power Plus can have opened and therefore on how late La Palma can have closed.
  • 2026 Bill Ryan states the ownership of the shop firsthand and on the record, correcting the published account, confirms firsthand that the shop shut down, and gives the two-week gap to Power Plus Cycles while withdrawing confidence in the year.

Sources

Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX and co-founder of Legend Bike Co., firsthand, 2026 — the spine of this page. Ryan's own statement is the authority for the ownership of La Palma Cycle Center: that the store was always Turnell Henry's and Richard Schaeffer's, that Ryan himself was a worker there and never a partner, and that he worked alongside Tommy Brackens, Turnell Henry, Kevin Hull and Sean McKinney. Ryan is also the source for Schaeffer being a certified public accountant who additionally served as Henry's coach and manager. Bill Ryan, firsthand, September 2026 — that La Palma Cycle Center shut down and that Power Plus Cycles opened two weeks later, which is the firm point; that the year is his recollection of 1986, which he says he may have been off on, rather than an established date; and reconfirming the La Palma ownership. No closing date or cause was given for La Palma, and none is invented here. Legend Bike Co., "Turnell 'Tuni' Henry" and "The Bike Shops That Made BMX" — this library's existing chapters, which carry the same account and are the reason it is stated the same way here. BlackCycling.com, "Hall Of Fame Racer and BMX Industry Icon Turnell Henry" — cited for the 1987 to 1989 dating of the shop and for Henry's racing record, and cited specifically as the origin of the ownership error: it names Bill Ryan as Henry's co-owner, which Ryan has corrected firsthand. Because that error sits in the same sentence as the dates, its 1987 to 1989 range is treated here as a weak source rather than an equal one, and it is recorded rather than relied on. Mohave Daily News and Cruiser Revolution — Henry's later career, used here only as surrounding context. The National BMX Hall of Fame and USA BMX records, oldschoolmags.com, 23mag.com and general newspaper archive searches returned no biographical record of Richard Schaeffer; the several public figures named Richard Schaeffer or Richard Schaefer who do appear in search results are unrelated to BMX and are not used here. bmxsociety.com was unreachable throughout this research and bmxmuseum.com blocks server-side access; neither is cited, and both are flagged as open follow-ups.

If you knew him

If you shopped at La Palma Cycle Center, raced out of it, or knew Richard Schaeffer, we would like to hear from you. A single shop advertisement, a team flyer or a photograph of the storefront would move several lines out of the box above and into the body of this page. That is exactly the kind of correction this library is built to take.

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