Birthplace: San Francisco.
Maurice, http://www.myspace.com/mauricemeyer, 2006: I was born and raised in San Francisco. Next to the youngest in a family of 8. I grew up poor as dirt. The house I grew up in had so many leaks I had to swap a bowl for a pan to cook some Campbell's soup. No joke. I could go on but no sob story here. You could do a lot worse that being poor in San Francisco. I loved growing up here and love living here now. It's like driving around in a post card. I'm a relatively new dad and I think I got really lucky with our little dude Isaac. I'm sure not aiming for 8 kids like mom and dad though. BMX is a big thing with me - the freestyle side mainly. I've been riding off and on since the mid-seventies when I was a grommet hanging out with my older brother Joe. Then skated for awhile tagging along with my other brother Ray. In the 80's, I got to be a part of the Golden Gate Park BMX Freestyle scene and was part of the BMX/Skate team thing Curb Dogs founded by Dave Vanderspek. I also had the great fortune of being sponsored by Skyway. Free stuff, pictures in the magazines, US and European tours but best of all I made some really great friends and got to be part of a great community. I still ride here and there and am having a great time with my boy who is catching the bug. When he says things like "ride my bike...big jumps...my ramp" it's the best. Another big phase that I've been going through is the home improvement phase. I took a year off work and turned my attic into two rooms, a bathroom with a deck off the back. Thanks to the help from my brother Joe and father-in-law Ken, I got to learn a ton of stuff about doing this kind of work. I work in computers but there are times I'd much rather be up on the roof with the sun out swinging a hammer. I've always liked to work with my hands. Dad is an artist and always taught us how to make things. I was 10 when I first saw Star Wars and for a long time building scratch built spaceship models and making little super-8 movies were my creative outlets.
Maurice: The Drob nickname came from childhood days growing up in a family of 8 kids who all teased each other. It has no meaning and just came from babbling name calling. The only reason it stuck is because I let on that it bugged me. Not that I don't like it now or anything though.
FIRST BMX.
Maurice: I rode BMX in the mid-seventies from around 1974 to 1977. One of my older brothers and a couple friends in the neighborhood had BMX bikes. At that point I got into skateboarding and went to some parks with my older brother. There was a kind of legend of a guy who jumped out of this snake run over this fence and onto a roof a few feet back - an unbelievable stunt at the time. Sometime in 1983, I met Hugo Gonzales in Golden Gate Park and heard how he and his buddies would jump that fence. My first BMX bike was a pieced together Schwinn Stingray. My parents didn't have money to buy us bikes or anything like that so I scrounged for a while and put it together.
Maurice, www.vintagebmx.com, january 2006: It's fuzzy but I started jumping stuff and learned to wheelie across the schoolyard on a scraped together Sting Ray morphed over time into a Mongoose with Ashtabula stuff and Femco "heavy duties". I grew up on the last residential block before the warehouses, train tracks and industrial stuff so I played there on my bike a lot and got into the occasional chase or bit of trouble. We used to pilf flares from the Greyhound busses in the bus yard... You learn so much from your older brothers!
My first freestyle trick was on the Mongoose in '75 or '76 and it was called a "Suicide Wheelie" - at least by the kids I knew. I was 9 or 10 at the time. It was a quick wheelie sitting down and a single barspin. I'm guessing it was our interpretation of someone who could wheelie and just let them spin like Pat Romano.
Got into skating for a while after that and re-discovered BMX in like 1982 when I saw my friend Marc Babus do a 360 rollout. Someone had left a Webco with coaster brake tuffs in my friend's garage so I started riding that around with Marc and other buddies who had some jumps in Golden Gate park. I was 14 or 15 thinking "I used to ride these when I was a kid". Ha.
I saw magazines here and there but didn't subscribe (poor) until Freestylin' came out. Most of what defined early freestyle for me was what people came to Golden Gate Park with on Sundays. My world was small then and I hadn't travelled anywhere. Parents didn't have cars. Riding was about meeting up at the park and hitting some tricks there then tearing off in a huge group - that grew - to the jumps and to Fisherman's Wharf. Freestyle was taking shape there already but the first issue of Freestylin' with coverage of our scene clinched the deal.
KUWAHARA.
Maurice, www.facebook.com, march 2013: Late '82/early '83. Before the forming of the Curb Dogs, Freestylin' magazine or getting on the Skyway team in 1984 myself and Marc Babus got a little co-sponsor deal from Kuwahara through the bike shop where we paid a little money for a frame & fork, jersey, hat, stickers, etc. 16 years old and I had no idea what was yet to come in BMX freestyle but my bike was tricked out!
Maurice met Dave Vanderspek in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.
Dave helped get me sponsored by Skyway at a time when I had just dropped out of school and had no idea what I wanted to be doing with my life.
Maurice: I kind of lucked out. Dave Vanderspek met John Raudman from Skyway (brother of the inventor of the Tuff Wheel and the material) at a race at the Cow Palace. Dave and I were screwing around outside in a jam circle and Dave got the guy's card. Not too long after that Bob Osborn came and took photos up at Golden Gate Park and gave us some great coverage in the first issue of Freestylin'. Dave had been talking to Skyway and based on his recommendation, the shots in that mag and the fact that we were in northern California which is closer to Skyway, we got picked up. I always felt like we were sort of the last generation where you could get that kind of deal without even having competed yet.
EUROPEAN TOUR.
1984 Skyway European Tour with Robert Peterson and Dave Vanderspek.
FREESTYLIN.
First issue of Freestylin' (summer 1984) was the first time Maurice appeared in a magazine. Double page spread photo.
The Freestylin' shoot was really cool because here was this Bob Osborn guy who we'd seen in the magazine and he was taking pictures of us unknown guys. When the magazine came out, I was really blown away. I learned later that that was really meant to be a Rick Allison shoot but Rick brought them to GG park because he was so into the scene there and wanted it captured in the magazine. What a cool guy.
Maurice: My best placing was a 2nd in 17 and over expert at the 1985 Venice Beach Contest. Dennis McCoy got first. I beat him in the first contest we rode in together and never again after that. It wasn't hard to spot Dennis' talent. Competition was never my thing anyway. I doubt I would have ever competed if Skyway hadn't sponsored me.
Freestylin' #13 may 1986 has an article about Maurice and his older brother.
Maurice: I was working up there I sucked so bad at sales that I had to do something else to keep busy. So, I designed some shirts and stuff. They needed a new look so I made the '87 jersey with Skyway split up. Then came the Eddie Roman street shirt as part of my push to get them to get into street more. I mean they had Eddie Roman and the Street Beat already.
Maurice left Skyway.
Maurice: I think it was like 1988 when I left the team. I sort of decided that I was just done with contests and it was getting pretty obvious to me that there were a lot of guys a lot hungrier for it than I was. So, I went to one AFA contest and just totally dorked my run. I think I rode to Chuck Barry's "My Ding-a-Ling". Skyway was really cool though and offered me a job up there at the factory as a salesman. I was kind of a flop as a salesman though. They had these mountain bikes that didn't have the new index shifting and I called a zillion shops around the US and that was the first thing they asked for. I barely sold any. I missed the city too so I only lasted 3 months before moving back to San Francisco. Ron Haro was up there with me at the time and we made the best of it. It's really nice up there but I'm a city boy full-on.
Go magazine had a repeated joke under a little pic of Maurice smiling, saying he wasn't at this or that event, but would've loved it.
Isaac Richardson Meyer. Born May 9th, 2004, 8:47 in the morning, 6 lbs 11 ounces, 19 1/2 inches .
