White Lightning — Rick Ankrom's North Hollywood BMX Brand
White Lightning
A Legend Bike Co. BMX history chapter · researched from bicycle-industry and museum archives
White Lightning is one of the thinnest paper trails in this library so far — not because the brand didn't matter, but because it shared a building, a city, and even a first name with a better-documented neighbor. Here's what the record actually supports, and where it runs out.
North Hollywood, and a name that wasn't a coincidence — mostly
White Lightning was a BMX brand out of North Hollywood, California, founded by Rick Ankrom. That's established on this site's own R&R Racing Products chapter, sourced to a period account written by bicycle-industry figure Howie Cohen: R&R and White Lightning shared the same North Hollywood facility — office, factory floor, and equipment — in the mid-to-late 1970s. R&R was run by a different Rick, Rick Varner, and his father. Two brands, one building, two Ricks, and nothing in the record suggesting the two companies were ever the same business under two names.
What survives
The clearest evidence of White Lightning's actual production is on BMXmuseum.com, which documents individual surviving bikes dated to 1976 and 1977 — period BMX frames built and sold at the time, running contemporary components (one surviving 1976 example is built up with a Redline fork). That puts White Lightning's active years squarely in BMX's first wave, alongside R&R and the handful of other North Hollywood and San Fernando Valley-area brands building bikes direct to dealers in that stretch.
What we don't know
- The exact years White Lightning started and stopped production. The earliest and latest dated surviving bikes found for this page are 1976 and 1977; the brand may well have run longer on either end.
- Team riders. No sponsored-rider record was found in the sources checked for this page — unlike R&R, which is remembered partly for launching Harry Leary and Jeff Kosmala, nothing similar surfaced for White Lightning.
- Model names and a production lineup. Surviving bikes are catalogued simply as "White Lightning" by year on BMXmuseum.com; no named models or a factory catalog were located.
- What became of Rick Ankrom's shop after the brand's last documented model year.
Related Legend Bike Co. chapters
The History of BMX (1970-1995) · R&R Racing Products
Sources
Legend Bike Co.'s own R&R Racing Products chapter, itself sourced to the Everything Bicycles / proteanpaper.com archive of Howie Cohen's first-person industry account — the primary source for Rick Ankrom as founder and the shared North Hollywood facility. BMXmuseum.com — individual "White Lightning" bike listings dated 1976 and 1977. oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were both searched directly for period White Lightning advertising, team rosters, or bike tests; bmxsociety.com's community forums include at least one active thread on a surviving 1976 White Lightning, but the thread's content could not be loaded through the tools available for this page, so nothing beyond what's cited above is drawn from it. No period magazine ad, test, or team listing for White Lightning was located through the search access available for this page.