Reply To: General Bicycles 1988-1989 by Brett

[bmiddaugh]

Early 1988. My main ramp rider Tom Nieradka had began to pretty much disappear from the NJ freestyle scene due to his own personal reasons. This left me without a ramp rider. Someone had recommended Jeff Mayer to me and I asked him to do some shows with my then 3 year old freestyle team High Voltage. It wasn’t to long after this that the Lynches, the people who ran the NY AFA needed someone to bring ramps to thier contests. Since they saw that I was a reliable guy with a portable ramp setup they wanted me to help out. Through them I got the whole team sponsored by General through Harry Myers. As I mentioned above, I knew Harry was heavily into BMX racing in the early 80’s so I figured he was pretty into the bike thing.
I was right, he set the whole team up with all the parts we needed, (even though they were at first those not as well made Osborn replica and Blood bikes), painted our ramps with General Bicycles presents High Voltage Trick Team and set us up with some uniforms, as well as paying our entry fees at contests.
At this point my team consisted of Jeff Mayer, Adam Stack, Bob Ryer and Chris Hartway, a real young kid who would eventuallly grow up to look exactly like Mark Eaton. We started doing more shows through General Bikes dealers and eventually went as far as Ohio with my Ford Ranger Ramp Rig. For me, things were really looking great as I finally had a “big” sponsor for my team which I believed would bring enough notoriety that I could spread the BMX word more and possibly sponsor more kids…
At this time Roger Sullivan had just been picked up full factory General and was scheduled to go on tour with the “B” team, Phil Finkle, Mark Roldan, and Brandon Morgan. It was also around this time that Jeff had the 2-Hip ramp at his house where Roger and him used to practice quite often with some appearances by Sabre Schnitzter…Many things would change in my life because of that ramp…but more on that in the next post.