Journey of The White Bear #12: My start as a zine publisher

This is my favorite little video clip about zines, it captures the basic idea being weird, being into something outside the mainstream, and self-publishing a little booklet, which is was zines are.

Life Lesson:  There's a great power in self-publishing something

In late August of 1985, I packed up my monstrous, shit brown, 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo from Boise, Idaho to San Jose, California.  My car broke down an hour after I started, so the trip ended up taking two days.  I pulled up to my family's new apartment in San Jose, California the second afternoon.  It was a big move, but I'd been moving my whole life, so I was used to that part. 

I soon found a job working at a local Pizza Hut, and I went to the huge San Jose swap meet and bought an ancient, manual, Royal typewriter for $15.  My plan was to publish a zine about BMX freestyle as a way to meet the riders of the San Francisco Bay Area.  In those early years of BMX freestyle, NorCal was had a great scene.  But I had no idea where the riders actually were, and it was a huge area.  I got the idea for doing a zine from Andy Jenkins, the editor of FREESTYLIN' magazine, who wrote an article about zines.  He was a fan of skateboard zines, and he tossed the idea out to us kids in the BMX world. 

I took the bait, but I was entirely selfish at first.  I just wanted a reason to meet the pro riders, and good amateurs, in the Bay Area.  I pulled out my freestyle photos from Idaho, and from a contest in Venice Beach I went to that summer.  I had absolutely no idea what a zine was supposed to look like, and no idea how to make one.  I filled up three pages, front and back, with photos and stories typed on the typewriter.  I made copies at a local copy shop, stapled each one in the upper left-hand corner, and drove around to local bikes shops that sold BMX bikes in the San Jose area, and gave them a few. 

A few days later, I got a call from a guy named John Vasquez, a San Jose freestyler who worked at one of the bikes shops I gave zines to.  He invited me over to ride the quarterpipe his friends had.  After meeting him, I started learning about the Bay Area freestyle scene.  I tracked down Skyway pro Robert Peterson, who I'd met at the Venice Beach contest.  He held a ramp jam once a month at the bike shop he worked at, and invited me to show up and session with them.  Within a couple of months, thanks initially to my zine, I met all the main riders in the Bay Area, and wound up riding with them and interviewing many of them for my zine. 

I sent copies of each zine to the individual editors and assistant editors of the BMX magazines.  It just seemed like the right thing to do.  Much to my surprise, my zine was reviewed as the best BMX zine in the country in the July 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN,' and I wound up working there a while, which launched me into the BMX/freestyle industry.  The biggest, life-changing event of my life happened because I self-published a rather lame, but really enthusiastic, zine.  I've published zines ever since, more than 40 of them, over the last 32 years.

Today everyone is a self-publisher with social media, online photo sharing, and blogs.  But there's still something entirely different about handing someone a little book that you hand made yourself.  It's not online for the world, your mom, and the police to read.  It's just for the person you give it to and whomever they share it with.  Zines nearly always get read by multiple people.  Zines, by their very nature, are collector's items.  So even in this world of instant publishing to the world, zines are still being published, read, collected, and cherished.  Now you know.