bustednuckles

If you grew up in the 70’s this will look familiar.

I will add my story after the video.

It appears that young Terry and I both admired famous stunt man Evel Knievel.

Back in the early 70’s, my Dad went through a spell of racing motorcycles. He had a Yamaha 250 Enduro that he stripped down and raced on the local dirt tracks around the Portland Oregon/ South West Washington area.

Because he was middling good at it, that meant that he would crash the thing once in a while and have to replace parts on it. Things like handlebars and clutch levers.

In 1971, I was 11 years old and my Dad had recently remarried to a woman with 2 boys. That meant me and my brother plus those 2 made 4 boys in the house. They had 2 male cousins that were around quite a bit so that made 6 of us. By that tender age, I was already tearing things apart to see how they worked and I had basically built, as far as I know, the worlds first BMX bike.

Remember, this was in 1971, over 50 years ago.

I took the Banana seat off and put an old Schwynn single seat on it, took the chain guard off, put a knobby back tire on the front and the back and spent a great deal of trial and error making an old set of my dads reject motorcycle handle bars fit on it.

The closest picture I could find was this but the handlebars were a lot wider.

Between the 6 of us, we got into all kinds of trouble. We were always playing ball out in the street and one day I came up with the idea of painting a 100 foot football field with 5 and 10 yard lines painted on both sides of the road out in front of the house. Eventually we added 3 bases and street hockey goals too.

Because I was such a fan of old Evel Knievel, we built a plywood ramp and set it out at the end of this measured out field and we started seeing who could jump the farthest on our bikes.

We did this for quite a while. We lived just off Killingsworth avenue on 48th street, 2 houses off of Killingsworth, which was 4 lanes wide.

One day I got a real long run at the plywood ramp and jumped a measured 32 feet on my home made BMX bike.

Back then, that was a long ways, on the pavement,

Everybody lined up and tried to beat me, My younger brothers gave it a hell of a try but one’s bike took a hard left on impact and he hit a small pear tree head on and actually wound up stuck in the forked trunk when he landed, my other brother’s bike literally broke in half and he ate an asphalt sandwich.

Fucked him up pretty good and when Mom found out how he got so tore up our fun was over for a while.

Meanwhile, there was this old woman who lived across the street who had had her front lawn replanted and was always bitching like hell when one of our balls or hockey pucks would land in her yard and we would run up and get it. This happened quite often. She finally got pissed off enough that she called the city and demanded that they come out and remove all the lines we had painted for our foot ball field.

The joke was on her.

Whoever the guys were that came out to do that either thought we had come up with something cool or they decided that the old bitch needed a good lesson. When we came home from school, all the lines we had painted had been sand blasted off. In the exact places where the lines were.

Now they were permanently etched into the street.

My hat is off to those guys to this day.

So anyway, the kid in the video absolutely reminded me of me, now fifty odd years later and some of the shit we did to entertain ourselves.

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