PICTURE ABOVE: The ceiling was high as hell at Ramp Club. Once we figured out how to get up there, Red decided to paint an “SJ Ramp Club” logo on the roof. One wrong step and he would have fallen through to be saved in the Zero hour by a mattress I would have slid under him from inside, because that would help. Actually he most likely would have died, there would have just been less of a mess to clean up.

The small amount of verb age above does not provide a complete accurate account of what it took to make this happen. So please allow me to expand on the life and times of the ‘biggest little ramp in San Jose.’ This phrase was actually coined in the skateboarding community.

The details of this story could be pages long. But Chris McMahon got the jist of it. The RAMP CLUB was closed because Brian Jackson sold our space and our ramps to one of the body shops next store.  In the 6 years of the park being located at 230 Umbarger Road, it was sandwiched in a warehouse between two body shops that competed against each other. The park was taking some prime space in their eyes. So I remember showing up one Sunday and there was a sign in the window saying something like, “due to unexpected circumstances, the San Jose Ramp Club had to close unexpectedly.” I grabbed that letter and have lost it since. None of the key holders were told of this. It royally sucked and drove a stake through the hearts of a lot of people, some to this day are still wondering just why it had to go down that way. One could make the argument that the last Vert wall in there belonged to Matt “Captain Sack or Lumpy” Mardesich since he was the one who stepped up with a credit card and slapped it down at Home Depot for the wood. If I remember he was led to believe that he would be reimbersed some way, and of course like many other shake downs there, he never was. But it was Matt, me, Cam and RED that threw the last Vert wall up and it was what champions are made of. As time went on communication between the park members got worse. Like a dysfunctional family stationed at a little park in San Jose that honed talent such as Cam Birdwell, Joey & Jimmy Garcia, Ryan Nyquist, Chad Kagy, Rob Darden, Chris “Butthead” Bryant, Allen Cooke, Colin McKay and Ryan “Pukeboy” Oconnell just to name a few, merely scratching the surface.

Brian Jackson Disclaimer: IF NOT FOR BRIAN JACKSON, THERE WOULD HAVE NEVER BEEN A SAN JOSE RAMP CLUB. Regardless of how it ended, how much bad blood was spilled, if not for Beej, we would have never had the experience and challenge of riding what will forever be one of the greatest indoor skate parks of ALL TIME. Not a lot of flat bottom, and steep as hell. Brian just wanted a place to ride since every where he built jumps, they always got torn down. He had built a bunch of ramps in his driveway at his parent’s house. Went away for a bit. Then when he came back, his dad had gotten rid of all the ramps. Beej was heart broken and it was his father Doug Jackson that went out of his way to make things right which just so happened to include a tiny warehouse space off Umbarger Road in East San Jose. So even after it all went down, I am still thankful and have a great respect for Brian Jackson regardless of things today. I mean before everything started going bad, mainly before meth-addicted-Red moved into the park and lived underneath the big deck on the vert ramp, things were very much a roots feel in that park. We had Christmas parties there, they were unreal. But one of the greatest parties up there with Butthead’s B-day which is in Backtrail, and any contest that went down there, by far was the Welcome home party for Joey Garcia after he returned from serving everyone up in Rhode Island with a GOLD MEDAL. Still one of the most talked about things ever amongst the SJRC Alumni. I happened to watch Joey ride live on ‘Telemundo’ underneath the deck of the Vert Ramp at the park with Red. We started partying that night. When Joey came back to the park, there was a sign that hung above the roll up door that said, “The San Jose Ramp Club, Home of X-Games Dirt Jumping Gold Medalist Joey Garcia.” A glorious site to see. Everyone who was around at the time was there that night. Red was already living at the park and was super pissed because fire extinguishers were being set off in the park, and the PARK OWNER himself, Mr. Jackson was lighting bottle rockets off inside the park laughing his ass off, while Red was worried about possible fires, but the fire extinguishers should have covered that. Joey beat everyone with no whips, or flips, just original runs that were smooth as hell.

A perfect example of Beej in the early days of the park. He slept on a couch while living at the park. Depending on who showed up first on any given day, before you rode you had to mop up a ton of water that pooled up at the bottom of the box jump landing. Why was there water pooled up on the floor when it hadn’t rained for months you ask? Because Beej used to microwave a bowl of water to heat it obviously, and then he would pour it into a plastic Ziploc bag with holes in it which hung out from the wall. This was the first shower at the San Jose Ramp Club. Guy had more heart than most. Lived like a cave man all for the love of the park.

Did I mention the pro skaters that session-ed that place? These sessions didn’t start until the early morning hours any day during the week. They would show up at the earliest around 1AM on a Tuesday morning with combustibles and beer. The lights would come on, stereo cranked up, and we would shred til sunrise. Names like Salmon Agga, Doug Shoemaker, Caswell Berry, Steve Cabalero (once in a while), Mike Crabtree, Chet Thomas, Rich Cooley, Mark Leal, Chris Hamilton, Dave Nelson, Dwayne Peters, WES, Jason Brown, Crazie Eddie and the late great Tim Brauch (America’s most blunted, R.I.P. Tim).
 
And back to the kid who bought the ramps for a few grand without anyone knowing except for Beej. Once the ramps were ripped out of the park, literally. They were moved to a warehouse in Sacramento. With in months, this kid was not able to pay the rent for where the ramps were being kept. I heard the guy was never going to open a skate park, but was really planning to use the ramps as a cover to perform illegal activities but that has never been confirmed. Doesn’t matter now. The ramps were being stored in a building that was owned by a Limousine Rental company. Eventually the owners could give a shit about the ramps and they threw them outside. There building was in the same complex as the original Solid bikes factory before they moved to the place they are at now. I think the ramps were outside for a little bit, at least a winter. They were not stored with care, they were on an incline, in the dirt, sun baked and water logged. Aaron Huff told me they were outside, right about the same time I was trying to open another Ramp Club in Morgan Hill which fell through afterwards. I had been in contact with ‘Campos Senior’ (Tony Campos’s dad, Tony was just a little shit at the time) because he was helping me with getting ramps in the park. I took what little money I had, rented a flat bed truck with him and in 2003ish we drove to Solid to reclaim S.J.’s shit. Keep in mind, this is the only mini ramp that was born a Vert Ramp, has over 500 freeway miles on it, and has reached speeds in excess of 80MPH! I!! cannot tell you what a great feeling it was driving there to get that stuff. I thought that here is a new beginning. So when we got there, there just so happened to be about 8 other guys there at Solid randomly so we asked them for help and we took a look at what was left. Not much, it was heartbreaking to see how bad everything was. My favorite ramp in the park was reduced to just one single tranny template. When you looked towards the back wall of the park, it was in the far left corner to the left of the vert wall. It was 7.6feet tall and was cut using an eliptical tranny. Nate Wessel would understand. Basically it started out mellow, and ended up vert getting quicker through the tranny, it was gone and done, they took it out with a forklift. The mini ramp and 1/3 of the Vert wall tranny (which is rotting in the hot Gilroy, CA sun) was all that was good. We used the landing of the box jump to push the 4 sections of the mini on to the truck. The spine you ask? What spine. The “Jo Mama 8.5 foot quarter pipe” went somewhere else and probly since has been reduced to termite food, or fire wood. So we drove back to SJ with the mini and part of the vert wall. I put the mini in the building I acquired in Morgan Hill. A week before I was planning to hold a “Were Open” jam to the residents of Morgan Hill, word leaked out to the Fire Department. They showed up before to check the place out, not really to bust me. But it just so happened they took one look at a couple things and as nice as they could put it, they told me I could not open this park to the public. I had already set up skate park insurance on the building which I thought would be the hardest hurtle. I was wrong. There were not enough parking spaces, the fire sprinkler system was too old and not even to code, there were not enough exits, found out that the building used to be a site for manufacturing DDT which is a cancer causing pesticide, and to top the friggin list off, the landlord did not even own the building. So when I told the landlord that he needed to fix these things, he basically told me tough. The company at the time was called ‘MANGANO & ASSOCIATES’. In total at this point they had about $10,000 of our money (money that came from my family, and money that was raised from a lot of people that donated to the cause) that I could not get back from this asshole Mike Mangano. So I took what little money I had left and found a lawyer in Morgan Hill to help me out and advise on what my rights were. What it came down to was that he told me, I understand the loss of this money, however it is not quite enough for us to really go after without wasting more money. Basically he was saying it was gone and to learn from this.  I still had to pay him his fees as well. But what he was able to accomplish was to put Mangano out of business for good, so he could not do this to other people. Not to mention the fire storm I was left with to explain. It was at this point where I had to empty this warehouse now. The first phone call I made was to Oscar Gonzalez and basically asked him if he wanted a mini ramp. The first mini ramp that I, Butthead, Cam Birdwell, Ryan Nyquist, Kurt “Crowbar” Yeager, Kai Shroeder, Craig Hoffman ever rode was originally in Scar’s back yard. But the yard had been rampless for years by the time I called Scar. He said “let me call you back”. He called back with in the hour, and showed up with some buddies and a trailer and took the ramp home to San Jose. When the ramp arrived at Scar’s house, the sections were still too wide to fit between his fence and the side of the house. We ended up bringing the ramp sections through his neighbor’s back yard and lifting each one up over th fence into Scar’s side. A flat bottom was quickly framed up, and that ramp went into its new home. So this ramp was built in San Jose, then it moved to Sacramento, then to Morgan Hill, and then back to San Jose. What ramp gets around like that? Every one who donated, sign a disclaimer form which saved me in the end, even though some people did not care and wanted their money back anyways which left me basically broke, and failed in some people’s eyes. It was a mess, but today that mini thrives in San Jose. It is a constant work in process. As soon as one sections fixed, something else comes up. Its like another great Nor Cal landmark, the Golden Gate Bridge. When they paint that bridge and go from the South to North side, they start over and begin painting back towards the Southern end, and thus the cycle continues. Like dust in the wind, and so are the days of our lives. The sessions alone that have gone down in that back yard are priceless, not to mention the partying. That backyard has been center stage for some of the biggest human debauchles and Nor Cal mishaps in history. Good and bad, but the good far out weigh the bad. So many dudes have come from out of town and ridden that famous ramp. Everything has been done on it except a 900, and double flair, double flair whip, front flip, you get it. Now its the only mini ramp in the West with a full bar attached to it. It brought a group of guys back together and ignited a fire in a lot of us to keep riding. There are over 100 lbs of screws in that ramp since we put it back up and close to a mile of wood including ply that has cycled through it. So if your ever in town, hit up Oscar, or hit me up (so I can call Scar) and come ride ‘the biggest little ramp in San Jose.’

Riding while smiling,
Squirrel