In 1982 my father got a wild hair and moved my family to Phoenix, AZ for exactly one year. To this day I have no idea why? We left in the middle of August 1982 and returned to Oil City, Pa one year later in the middle of August? At that time my friends and BMX were my life. Well I left my friends behind but took my bike which made me a whole new batch of Arizona friends. Back then you just rode your bike there was no " I'm a racer, I'm a freestyler. Well what happened when I was there was the Freestyle side of things took off & that's what we did.
Right around Christmas 82 I talked Mom & Dad into helping me out with another type of BMX bike, A freestyle bike. After making them crazy, delivering papers and whatever else I could do I ended up with the bike pictured below. My mom drove me to Bicycle Harbor, a very good shop in chandler AZ and there I purchased the holy grail of frames, a Haro Freestyler, I need a frame & fork. No Forks(which sucked because those Haro froks had Badd ASS dropouts), so the next best things at the time was a set of Bottema skate park forks, Beefy as hell, high drop outs, I'll take them. Looking back the coolest thing about that set up is/was that the serial number on my Haro frame was 0005. A year later(back in PA) it was cracked all the way around the headtube gusset and the local shop took it as a trade in on a new Redline RL20II.
However the forks made their way around the local BMX scene mostly in trade for other bits and parts.
In 1989 I was working for GT Bicycles as the freestyle Team manager ( I had made it) and on a Christmas trip home to PA I was hanging out in a bar with P. Scott Fornof a good friend and old BMXer and some how he mentioned he still had the Bottema forks, I probably trade the next beer for them, a couple of weeks later they showed up on my desk at GT. I took them out to the warehouse and Asked Gary Turner, Do you have anything going to chrome today and I showed them to him, he basically said yeah whatever throw them on the rack. he wasn't impressed? They came back looking pretty good but I didn't know what to do with them.
I had met Scott Towne a few times and those times we had fun. He had recently moved it all back to MI and he was the only guy I knew that had a passion for the older bikes, parts, whatever. I got his info from Lew and sent them to him and he was stoked, mission accomplished/appreciation. I think he bent them or something? Either way in 2002(I think) Scott and his wife helped us out with the X Games downhill event and I asked him about the forks, He forgot I had sent them to him? We laughed, Blah, Blah, Blah,. Yesterday we touch base for the first time in a while and he writes "Bottema forks forever(and still feeling like a dope for forgetting you hooked me up with those).
Well Scott I had forgotten that you forgot.
Good to hear from you & your Honda Rocks!
