Wizard Publications

Bob Osborn's Torrance Company Behind BMX Action, Freestylin', and GO (1976 to 1992)

A Legend Bike Co. company history · sourced from period mastheads in the oldschoolmags.com PDF archive, the 23mag.com magazine and book indexes, Mark Lewman's 2022 Slam City Skates interview, the USA BMX Hall of Fame, and the Legend Bike Co. chapters on the individual titles

At a glance

Founded 1976, by Bob Osborn, out of the family house on Arvada Street, Redondo Beach, California
Base Torrance, California — 3162 Kashiwa Street, later 3882 Del Amo Boulevard
Magazines Bicycle Motocross Action / BMX Action (1976–1989) · Freestylin' (1984–1989) · Action The Mag (1987) · Homeboy (1987 onward) · GO: The Rider's Manual (1989–1992)
Books Four, between 1982 and 1987
Also built The Pit test track · the BMX Action Trick Team · Club Homeboy

Almost everyone in this library passed through a building in Torrance, California. Not because they worked there. Because that is where the pictures were developed, the bike tests were written, the covers were chosen, and the decision was made about whose name the rest of the country would learn. For sixteen years Wizard Publications was the room where BMX decided what it looked like.

A firefighter, a mortgage, and a magazine

Bob Osborn came out of motocross promoting. He had watched the sport get organized, and when kids on twenty-inch bikes started copying it he could see the same shape forming. On September 14, 1974 he stood at the LA Coliseum and dropped the flag on the final of the Yamaha Bicycle Gold Cup series, with more than five thousand people in the stands watching bicycle racing for the first time. Two years later he decided the thing needed a magazine the way it needed a starting gate.

He raised roughly $30,000 to do it — sold his house, borrowed from his sister, took in a third investor — and set up a publishing company to hold it. He called it Wizard Publications. The first issue of Bicycle Motocross Action was dated December 1976: forty-eight pages, a dollar on the cover, a ten-thousand-copy first run, and Brian Lewis on the front, shot at Corona by Bob's daughter Windy. Bob was still pulling shifts as a firefighter to pay for it. His son R.L. was on the masthead from day one as a test rider.

By 1983 the masthead title had tightened to plain BMX Action, and the company had moved into a warehouse complex in Torrance — 3162 Kashiwa Street, the address that runs across the bottom of the Freestylin' mastheads through the mid-1980s. Later issues carry 3882 Del Amo Boulevard. Those two addresses are where most of what this library documents got written down.

The Pit

The thing that made BMX Action different from a fan magazine was a dirt yard in Torrance called the Pit. It was a test track, and it ran a test program. Frames, forks, cranks, bars, pads, tires — the Pit crew rode them until something broke, then printed what broke and what held. Donny Jones and the Emrich brothers were among the riders who did that work.

It changed the economics of the sport. A product that came out of the Pit looking good moved off shelves; one that didn't, didn't. Every BMX magazine that followed copied the format, including BMX Plus! and Super BMX. Wizard invented the idea that a magazine owed its readers a verdict.

The staff artist who invented a sport

In the summer of 1977 Bob hired a San Diego kid who had been mailing in cartoons on spec. That was Bob Haro, and he came on as staff artist. Haro and R.L. Osborn spent their lunch breaks in the parking lot working out tricks, with Bob photographing them. In the January/February 1979 issue BMX Action ran the first freestyle how-to ever printed, a rock walk, with Haro doing it.

What came out of those lunch breaks became the BMX Action Trick Team — a demo act carrying the magazine's name to races and shopping centers, and the thing that turned trick riding from a parking-lot habit into a sport with an audience. Haro left to found Haro. Mike Buff took his place beside R.L. A magazine spun off an industry.

1984 — Freestylin'

By 1984 freestyle had outgrown the back pages. That summer Wizard launched Freestylin', at first as a quarterly, and handed it to a twenty-one-year-old from Cheyenne, Wyoming named Andy Jenkins. Jenkins had won a giveaway in the magazine and written a thank-you note. Bob liked the way the note was written and hired the man who wrote it. That is the whole hiring policy in one story.

Freestylin' did not read like a trade journal. It read like the people making it — punk records, running jokes, photos shot at two in the morning behind the warehouse. Mark Lewman arrived from Kalamazoo, Michigan after a month of unsolicited letters. Craig Barrette, known to everyone as gOrk, was already there. Then came a small kid with spiky hair from Rockville BMX in Maryland, Adam Spiegel, who everyone called Spike, and after him a Rockville rider turned art student named Jeff Tremaine, hired as art director.

Freestylin' also ran skateboarding, which nobody else on the bike side would touch. Lewman interviewed Christian Hosoi for the August 1986 issue. Wizard put on a bike-and-skate jam on the halfpipe in its own parking lot the same year. That crossover is the seed of everything the Wizard crew did afterward.

The zine on the Xerox machine

Working late one night, Lewman used the office copier to make a zine for readers who wrote in. On the back he mocked up a fake advertisement for a fan club, a joke lifted from the Devo fan club, calling it Club Homeboy. Bob found the spread on a table the next morning. Instead of firing anybody he asked why they weren't doing it for real.

Club Homeboy became a genuine fan club with tens of thousands of members, run in part by Megan Baltimore, whose sister was married to R.L. Osborn and who would later co-found Girl Skateboards. Out of the club came Homeboy, a tabloid-sized magazine covering bikes, skating, music, and whatever else the staff found interesting, with Kevin Wilkins brought out from Lincoln, Nebraska to edit it. Lewman's own account is that it lasted six issues before the advertising failed to materialize — the skate industry didn't buy in, and freestyle had splintered into too many competing titles for a niche tabloid to survive. He has called it the right idea at the wrong time.

A fifth title, Action The Mag, launched in the spring of 1987. It is the least documented thing Wizard ever produced and almost nothing about its run survives online.

The books

Wizard published four books, and they are the reason a lot of early technique is documented at all.

• BMX Freestylin' (1982) — 160 pages by Len Weed, built around R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff, with a foreword by Bob Osborn. Ground tricks through pipe tricks, and the first real instruction manual freestyle ever had.
• The Complete Book of BMX (1984) — 248 pages under Bob Osborn's name, covering racing and freestyle both: holeshots, gearing, sponsorship, ramp building, and a chapter simply titled the real history of BMX.
• Freestyling (1987) — written and compiled by Don Toshach, photographed by Windy Osborn, with text help from Lewman. Eighty-two pages, and the edition that reached general bookstores through Perigee Books in New York.
• Freestylin' II (1987) — text and editorial coordination by gOrk and Lewman, photography by Windy Osborn, Todd Anderson on the cover, and fifty-three how-tos across ground, street, small ramp, and aerials.

A fifth book people often file with these, Freestylin' Generation F, is a 2008 retrospective assembled long after the company stopped publishing. It is about the Wizard years rather than from them, and it should not be cited as a Wizard imprint.

1989 — two magazines become one

By the back half of the decade the boom was over. Tracks were quieter, shops were nervous, and two magazines were splitting one shrinking pile of advertising. That is a losing math problem and everyone in the building knew it.

BMX Action ran its last issue in September 1989, just short of thirteen straight years. In November 1989 the two titles came out as one: GO: The Rider's Manual, racing in the front, freestyle in the back, a hundred pages, Tim Hall on the cover shot by Spike Jonze. The first three issues still carried both old logos so a kid at the newsstand would know what he was holding. The clean GO logo took over in February 1990.

How it ended

GO ran to March 1992, with Brian Lopes on the last cover. A little over two years. The merger was supposed to fix the advertising problem by running one magazine instead of two, but freestyle had fractured into a dozen competing titles and the bike industry never came back with the money. When the ad money goes, the magazine goes.

What happened to the company itself after that is the part the record does not settle. There is no documented sale, no reported buyer, and no announced date. The honest version is that Wizard's last title folded in March 1992 and the company stopped publishing. Anyone who tells you it was sold to a named buyer in a named year should be asked for the paperwork.

The people, on the other hand, are extremely well documented. The Wizard crew scattered into Homeboy, then Dirt, then Grand Royal, Girl Skateboards, Big Brother, and Hollywood. Andy Jenkins became Girl's first creative director. Spike Jonze went from a kid who wouldn't put his camera down to directing Beastie Boys videos and feature films. Mark Lewman edited Grand Royal. Jeff Tremaine went to Big Brother and built Jackass. It is a startling record for a bicycle magazine's night shift.

What Wizard actually decided

Bob Osborn's one rule was that the magazine belonged to people who lived the thing rather than to trained journalists. That is why the pages read the way they do, and it is also why the company kept producing people who went on to invent whole categories.

Follow the consequences and they run through most of this library. Stu Thomsen, Greg Hill, and Mike Miranda were made national names on Wizard covers. Eddie Fiola, Mike Dominguez, Martin Aparijo, Brian Blyther, and Mat Hoffman became household names in freestyle because Freestylin' put them there. When Joe Johnson landed the first tailwhip air in 1988, the trick became real to the rest of the country when Freestylin' printed the photograph. That was the machine: it did not just report the sport, it certified it.

Not to be confused with

Wizard Publications has nothing to do with Wizard Number Plates, Dave Marietti's number-plate company. Two separate businesses, one shared word.

Where the record runs thin

• The end of the company. No sale, buyer, or closing date is documented in the sources checked here. GO's last issue is March 1992; what happened to the corporate entity after that is unrecorded.
• Circulation. No audited circulation figures for any Wizard title turned up. They were national newsstand magazines; the numbers are not published.
• Action The Mag. A spring 1987 launch is the only firm fact available. Issue count and end date are unknown.
• Homeboy's issue count. Mark Lewman says six issues. At least one collector account says seven. The exact run is unsettled.
• Freestylin's final issue date. The title ran from summer 1984 through 1989 and was folded into GO in November 1989, but the precise last cover date is not confirmed here.
• Full staff list. Mastheads shifted constantly across sixteen years. The names here are the documented core, not the whole payroll.

Where Wizard Publications fits in the bigger story

The titles: BMX Action · Freestylin' · GO: The Rider's Manual · Club Homeboy

The people: Bob Osborn · Windy Osborn · R.L. Osborn · Bob Haro · Andy Jenkins · Mark Lewman · Spike Jonze · Craig "gOrk" Barrette · Don Toshach · Len Weed · Mike Buff · Dean Bradley · Chris Moeller · James Cassimus

The rival mastheads: Bicycle Motocross News · BMX Plus! · Super BMX · Total BMX · Action Now · American BMXer · Bicycles Today / BMX Today

The bigger arc: The History of BMX · The BMX Family Tree · The BMX History Library

Sources

oldschoolmags.com — PDF archive of BMX Action, Freestylin', and GO, including the period mastheads giving Wizard Publications, Inc. at 3162 Kashiwa Street, Torrance CA 90505 and later 3882 Del Amo Blvd. #603, Torrance CA 90503, and the ISSN and monthly frequency for GO. 23mag.com — issue-by-issue indexes for BMX Action, Freestylin', and GO, and the BMX Books 1980–1989 index carrying the Wizard book credits for BMX Freestylin' (1982), The Complete Book of BMX (1984), Freestyling (1987) and Freestylin' II (1987). Anthony Pappalardo's February 2022 interview with Mark Lewman for the Slam City Skates blog — first-hand account of the hiring of Andy Jenkins, Lewman, Spike Jonze and Jeff Tremaine, the founding of Club Homeboy and Homeboy, the merger into GO, and the Torrance offices. USA BMX Hall of Fame — Bob Osborn, Industry, 1988. Wikipedia, Freestyle BMX — Bob Haro's 1977 hire as staff artist and the January/February 1979 rock walk how-to. Don Toshach, Freestyling (Perigee Books, New York, 1987). Legend Bike Co.'s own chapters on Bob Osborn, BMX Action, Freestylin', and GO. bmxsociety.com was checked and did not return usable content at the time of research.