White Bear Racing Products

A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

The Northern California Frame Brand Behind the T-Bone — 1987 to 1999

Here is a brand that bet the whole company on one rider, named the bike after him, and then watched him go to jail. Within months the lights were off. That is the short version of White Bear, and honestly it is most of what we can prove. The paper trail is thin — a handful of BMXmuseum.com galleries, some forum threads, one magazine test. So I will keep it honest and tell you what is solid and what isn't.

What White Bear actually was

White Bear Racing Products was a Northern California frame brand. It ran from roughly 1987 through 1999. The brand history at the top of the BMXmuseum.com White Bear gallery names three people who started it — Lonnie Means, a partner everybody just called "Bear," and factory rider Ronnie Anderson. The first frames got welded up in a shop in Merced, California. The thing collapsed once, then came back. When it came back, the base moved to the San Francisco area, and the money for that restart came from the parents of a junior factory rider.

The frame line

White Bear ran a five-frame race line, sized clear across the BMX classes:

  • Micro
  • Mini
  • Expert
  • Pro
  • Pro XXL

The Pro is the one anybody remembers. Once Shawn "Big" Texas signed with the factory team, they renamed it the T-Bone — his signature frame, matching fork, the whole deal. What made the T-Bone the T-Bone was a small extra stay welded in between the seat pillar and the gusset that sat between the chainstays. Little detail. It is the thing collectors point to.

It did not get built for long. Texas rode the White Bear factory team from May 1988 to March 1989. Then Texas went to jail, the frame got dropped, and the way the BMXmuseum.com brand notes put it, "within months White Bear went by the way side."

The factory team

  • Ronnie Anderson — co-founder and a factory pro. The BMXmuseum.com forum accounts put his sponsorship from November 1987 through mid-1988. He had a hand in a custom fork design for the brand too.
  • Richie Anderson — Ronnie's brother, factory rider in that same stretch.
  • Shawn "Big" Texas — factory pro from May 1988 to March 1989. His signature T-Bone Pro frame and fork is what the brand is known for, full stop.
  • Darwin Griffin — signed July 1988, turned pro on White Bear December 28, 1988 with his own signature Shredder frame and fork.

There was a White Bear factory team running in Australia over the same period, too.

The magazine record

The oldschoolmags.com tests-and-reviews index lists a White Bear Pro test in Super BMX from 1988. Now, Super BMX was a Challenge Publications title, and it ran from 1980 to 1988 — so that White Bear Pro test landed in one of the very last issues the magazine ever printed. Right at the end.

Who built the frames

The brand notes say Merced. Bill Ryan says Southern California, and he says it as an eyewitness — he watched White Bear frames being built at B&E, a Southern California fabrication shop that had come up out of the Bassett Headers business. That account is firsthand, given in 2026.

He also knows why the work ended up that far south. White Bear tried to have the frames built in Northern California, close to home, and the attempt ran into trouble: a problem with a welder, and forks coming out too long.

That kind of trouble was common enough in the contract-frame trade of the era, and it has a plain mechanical explanation. Shops in that business, B&E included, generally worked from adjustable fixtures rather than dedicated fixed ones — ordinary practice for a small shop serving a lot of customers and a lot of different geometries off a single setup. The fixture gets set for the job in front of it, then reset for the next job, and a reset is where dimensions can move. Ryan's account puts the long forks on the Northern California attempt, not on B&E.

B&E turns up elsewhere in this library. It sat in the middle of the S&M Bikes frame-production chain, between VDC and Pro-Fab, and it welded frames for Revcore as well. B&E has no chapter of its own here yet.

Where White Bear sits in the BMX picture

White Bear was a second-wave brand. By that I mean it came up in the late 1980s, after the first-wave names had already written the rulebook — SE Racing, Redline, JMC, Mongoose, Diamond Back, Torker, CW, Hutch, GT. All of that was already set.

What made White Bear stand out, in the window we can actually document, is where it came from. Merced, then the Bay Area. Northern California, at a time when pretty much every frame brand that mattered was packed into Southern California. On the map of who owned what and who rode for whom, White Bear was the odd one out, and that is part of what makes it worth remembering.

The production is a different line on that map, though, and the two lines do not have to agree. White Bear was a Northern California brand that tried to build Northern California frames, hit quality trouble doing it, and wound up having frames built in Southern California like nearly everybody else. The name stayed north. The team stayed north. The welding came south. That is a better story than a clean geographic outlier, and it is probably the story a lot of small brands could tell if anybody had written it down — the identity is where you live, the production is wherever somebody will hold the fixture for you.

What we still don't know

  • The exact month and year the brand was founded, and the exact date it wound down for good.
  • How the Merced shop and B&E fit together. Bill Ryan watched White Bear frames being built at B&E; the BMXmuseum.com brand notes put the first frames in Merced. Both can be true of different periods or different runs, and nothing in the record checked for this page settles which came first, whether they overlapped, or which frames each one built. Neither account is being treated here as cancelling the other.
  • Which Northern California shop took the attempt that produced the welder problem and the long forks, and what year that was.
  • Whether B&E built the T-Bone specifically, or only other frames in the line.
  • The full identity of the partner known as "Bear."
  • The name of the junior factory rider whose parents funded the restart.
  • The full White Bear Australia team roster.
  • The exact Super BMX issue that carried the 1988 White Bear Pro test.

Sources

BMXmuseum.com White Bear Racing Products brand gallery and brand-history. 1988 White Bear Pro entry. BMXmuseum.com forum threads on the White Bear T-Bone and Shawn Texas sponsorship. Wikipedia entries on Shawn Texas and Richie Anderson. oldschoolmags.com tests and reviews index. Steve Emig blog on the birth of the BMX nollie. SugarCayne Truth Shawn Texas T-Bone tribute frame. Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX — firsthand eyewitness account of White Bear frames being built at B&E in Southern California, and of the Northern California build attempt that ran into a welder problem and forks made too long, given 2026 (primary source); see his Legend Bike Co. page.

About this page

This is a chapter of the forthcoming BMXRacingHistory.com, hosted on Legend Bike Co. as a placeholder. See also: History of BMX, SE Racing, Darwin Griffin, S&M Bikes, Revcore, Voris Dixon Bikes (VDC), Brackens Bikes, all sanctions (ABA, NBL, USA BMX, IBMXF).