The Photo

In 1972, I was 14 years old. The Buchanan family had recently moved into a home in Pacific Palisades, CA, on a street appropriately named Friends.

The kid next door, Scott Johnson, was the same age as I. Once we discovered a shared love of motocross, with dreams of one day being champions, we were inseparable.

We were your typical long-haired, T-shirt-and-jeans-wearing teens, wild BMX racers (well before the term was invented). Every day after school, we raced classmates on our Schwinn Sting-Rays on vacant lots and mountain trails, pretending the bicycles were Husqvarnas and Maicos.

We got more air than I’m sure the designers would have ever thought possible on the docile contraptions. We spared our parent’s unnecessary concern simply by not letting them know what we were up to.