The Pit

BMX Action's home dirt in Torrance, and the crew that came off it

Legend Bike Co · BMX heritage series

Which Pit The one in Torrance, California — the name is common, and this chapter is about this one

What it was An informal dirt riding spot. Mounds, jumps and turns in a lot

Where Torrance, close to BMX Action magazine's home base

Era Documented in use from the mid-1970s into the early 1980s

Operator Nobody. No gate, no sign-up, no sanction

Who rode it Donny Jones, the Emrich brothers, Scot Breithaupt, a young Bill Ryan

Today The exact lot is not pinned down in any public source we could reach

Most of the places in this series can be looked up. They had a name on a flyer, a sanction number, somebody who ran the gate on Saturday morning. The Pit had none of that. It was dirt in Torrance that kids rode because it was there, and it sat close enough to the offices of the most important magazine in the sport that the two things fed each other for years. There is no opening date to give you and no closing date either. What there is instead is a list of who was on it.

A Note on the Name

The Pit is not a rare name. Riders have hung it on dirt spots and quarry holes in a lot of towns, and freestyle picked it up later for other places entirely. This chapter is about one specific spot: the Pit in Torrance, California, the one the BMX Action crowd rode. Where other spots carried the name, this page makes no claim about them.

Why Torrance

To understand the Pit you have to understand what was up the street. Bob Osborn started BMX Action in December 1976, and his company, Wizard Publications, ran it out of an industrial building at 3162 Kashiwa Street in Torrance. That address turned into the center of gravity for the whole sport. BMX Action came out of there. Freestylin' came out of there. Riders drove across the country to walk through that door.

A magazine like that has to ride. Test bikes have to be beaten on before they get written up, and photographs have to be taken somewhere. So a magazine staffed by riders, in a town with dirt in walking distance, was always going to end up with a home spot. That is what the Pit was.

The Crew

The hardest date attached to the Pit comes out of the magazine's own book. BMX Freestylin', credited to Mike Buff, Bob Osborn, R.L. Osborn and Len Weed and published by Wizard in 1982, records that R.L. Osborn joined BMX Action's testing staff in 1977, alongside a rider named Ike Eisenacher and one listed as Donny "Building Leapin'" Jones. That is 1977, in print, from the people who were there.

Donny Jones is one of the names that comes up again and again in connection with the Pit. So do the Emrich brothers, including Robert Emrich, and so does Scot Breithaupt, the man who started BMX racing at the B.U.M.S. lot in Long Beach and went on to found SE Racing.

The account that ties them together is Bill Ryan's, and he gives it firsthand. He found the Pit at around seven years old, riding it because it was fun, before he knew BMX was a sport with a name and a structure. Then his mother brought home a copy of BMX Action. In his own words: the guys in the pages, Donny Jones, the Emrich brothers, Scot Breithaupt, he already knew them from riding the Pit with them. He was still on that dirt at twelve, in the spring of 1981.

Think about the ordinary version of that story. A kid buys a magazine and discovers heroes. The Torrance version is inverted. The kid already had the friends. The magazine just told him they were famous.

What the Place Was Physically

By every account of it, the Pit was a lot with dirt in it — mounds, jumps and turns, shaped by whoever showed up with a shovel and improved by whoever came next. No gate. No timing. No entry fee. No moto sheets, which is exactly why there is no paper trail. It was not competing with Entradero or Ascot a few miles away. It was the place you rode on the days those tracks were closed, which in practice meant most days.

That distinction matters for how this library treats it. A track is infrastructure. The Pit was a habit. Southern California BMX in the 1970s ran on both, and only one of them left records.

The Rest of the Torrance Story

The dirt was the seventies. By the mid-eighties the center of the Torrance scene had moved a hundred yards, onto asphalt. Steve Emig, who worked at Wizard from August to December 1986, has written a detailed firsthand account of what happened in the parking lot at 3162 Kashiwa Street: after-work sessions on the halfpipe the crew called the Tower of Love, with R.L. Osborn and Eddie Fiola, who ruled that ramp in 1986; flatland sessions with editors and touring riders and whichever local kids turned up; a tenth-anniversary party for BMX Action where he laid eyes on Bob Haro for the first time; and the morning Ron Wilkerson rode up on a motorcycle with a seventeen-year-old on the back and introduced him as Spike Jonze.

We are careful not to weld those two things into one. The Pit is dirt in the 1970s. The Kashiwa Street parking lot is asphalt in the 1980s. Whether they were adjacent, or a few blocks apart, is not documented in anything we could reach. What is clear is that Torrance held both, back to back, and that a small industrial pocket of one city fed the racing side and the freestyle side of BMX inside a single decade.

The staff record shows how tight that circle was. Bob Haro is reported to have come north from San Diego in the fall of 1977 to take a staff artist job at BMX Action, and Mike Buff, a Torrance local, joined the magazine's test team in 1979. The BMX Action Trick Team, which R.L. Osborn ran for its whole life, put on its first show at the ABA Winternationals in February 1980; Haro left the pairing in early 1981 and Buff took his place. Every one of those men was working out of the same Torrance building the Pit sat near.

Where the record runs thin

Almost everything a track file usually carries is missing here, and that is the nature of the subject. The Pit's exact location is not documented in any public source we could reach — no cross streets, no parcel, no address. When riders first started using it is not documented; when they stopped is not documented. Nobody ran it, so there is no operator to name and no sanction to record. What stands on the site today is unknown for the same reason. Whether the Pit was walking distance from 3162 Kashiwa Street or a drive across town is not documented, and this page does not assume. Bob Haro's fall 1977 arrival at BMX Action and Mike Buff's 1979 addition to the test team come from secondary rider profiles rather than period print, and accounts differ on whether the Osborn and Haro freestyle pairing formed in 1978 or 1979; the February 1980 first show is the firmer date. Ike Eisenacher, listed in the same 1977 testing-staff line as Donny Jones, has no chapter here yet and almost no public record at all. Two archives that would likely settle several of these points could not be read during this research: bmxsociety.com was unreachable throughout, and bmxmuseum.com blocks automated access.

Rode the Pit? Know the cross streets? Got a photo of those mounds, or a name we are missing? Legend Bike Co wants to hear from you — this is exactly the kind of page that only gets better when the people who were there fill it in.

Timeline

  • December 1976Bob Osborn starts BMX Action. Wizard Publications runs it out of 3162 Kashiwa Street in Torrance, which becomes the sport's center of gravity.
  • 1977BMX Freestylin' records R.L. Osborn joining the BMX Action testing staff alongside Ike Eisenacher and Donny "Building Leapin'" Jones.
  • Mid-1970sBill Ryan, around seven years old, starts riding the Pit — before he knows BMX is an organized sport.
  • Fall 1977Bob Haro is reported to have moved up from San Diego to take a staff artist job at BMX Action in Torrance.
  • 1979Mike Buff, a Torrance local, joins the BMX Action test team.
  • February 1980The BMX Action Trick Team performs its first show at the ABA Winternationals.
  • Spring 1981Bill Ryan, twelve years old, is still riding the Pit and getting to know Scot Breithaupt, the Emrich brothers and Donny Jones.
  • 1986The center of the Torrance scene has moved to the Kashiwa Street parking lot and its halfpipe, per Steve Emig's firsthand account of working at Wizard that year.
  • September 1989BMX Action publishes its final issue after nearly thirteen years.

Where the Pit fits in the bigger story

The South Bay's other dirt: Entradero, Ascot, The Orange Y, and the wider survey in The Tracks That Built BMX. The riders on it: Donny Jones, Robert Emrich, Scot Breithaupt, Bill Ryan. The Torrance building up the road: BMX Action, Freestylin', Wizard Publications, Bob Osborn, R.L. Osborn, Mike Buff, Bob Haro, Spike Jonze. What grew out of that circle: SE Racing, Haro, Supercross BMX. The full arc lives in our History of BMX series.

Sources

Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX — firsthand account of riding the Pit in Torrance from around age seven and again at twelve in the spring of 1981, and of already knowing Donny Jones, the Emrich brothers and Scot Breithaupt from that dirt before he saw them in the magazine. Published on his own Legend Bike Co pages and repeated consistently across this library. 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. Steve Emig, "3162 Kashiwa Street in Torrance, California" (June 2018) — firsthand account by a Wizard Publications employee of August to December 1986, confirming the Kashiwa Street address as Wizard's longtime home and describing the parking-lot sessions, the Tower of Love halfpipe, Eddie Fiola, R.L. Osborn, the BMX Action tenth-anniversary party, Bob Haro, and the Ron Wilkerson and Spike Jonze introduction. oldschoolmags.com BMX Action Trick Team history — the team's formation, the February 1980 first show at the ABA Winternationals, and the Haro to Buff change in early 1981. Mike Carruth, A Partial History of the Sport of BMX Racing (BMXNews.com, updated January 2019) — the December 1976 founding of Bicycle Motocross Action and its final issue in September 1989. Secondary rider profiles for Bob Haro's fall 1977 move to BMX Action and Mike Buff's 1979 addition to the test team, flagged as reported on this page. Not reachable during research: bmxsociety.com was down throughout, and bmxmuseum.com blocks automated access, so their Southern California track-history and BMX Action-era threads could not be read directly.