The once-ubiquitous mini bike, wheeled lust object of ten-year-olds across America, celebrated at Joe’s Mini Bike Reunion

Joe’s Mini Bike Reunion 2019 featured 200 really small, really fun-looking minibikes!

For many of us of a certain age, an age before helmet laws, personal injury attorneys and when all we had to do was “be home before 10:00 p.m.,” the ten-year-old aspirational vehicle was a minibike. There they were, staring at us from the classified ad section of Popular Screwdriver magazine, promising equal parts horsepower and freedom for less than $100. Some, the rich kids, got one. Then the rest of us had to glower in defeat while snob Johnny Noosebaum cruised the neighborhood like he was some sort of freaking Marlon Brando in The Wild One or something. Or maybe we started hanging out with Johnny, hoping to score a ride on it ourselves. It was like the Mercedes S-Class of the local neighborhood’s kid population.

For all those guys, either those who actually got a minibike, or those who wanted one (two categories that just about cover the entire population of the Earth at the time), there is Joe’s Minibike Reunion. Joe in this case is Joe Sebergandio, former events organizer and publisher at Petersen Publications who now has his own ad agency. As such, his story is neatly encapsulated on the JMBR Facebook page. He tells the story pretty well, too.

“I have been nuts over minibikes since I first got my hands on one as a young kid living in upstate New York,” he says/writes. “(My first mini bike was) an early 70′s Bozo with a 3.5 Clinton engine. Riding that minibike gave my first true sense of freedom and independence, not to mention the immediate attention and envy of all the other kids at our apartment complex.”

The Sebergandios didn’t have a garage, so Joe’s mom let him keep the mini bike inside the apartment, “…parked right in the front living room reeking of gas, oil and blood from my daily delinquent travels,” Joe remembers.

“With a few basic hand tools, a slew of friends both old and plenty of new ones lined up 10-deep to help work on it just for a chance to take it for a spin, and some scars I still am proud to carry from that rigid frame death trap, that minibike gave me some of the best times of my early years.”

It wasn’t just transportation.

“My Bozo gave me instant street cred,” Sebergandio said. “It caused my first trip to the hospital for stitches and my earliest experiences dodging the local cops! It finally got us kicked out of the apartment and when the moving truck dumped us off at out new place my Bozo never made it off the truck. After hours of ranting and searching, my Mom informed me that she sold it to the driver of the moving van and that she didn’t have any plans on getting evicted from the new place. Life sucked as I knew it and I vowed to someday, one day, get another!”

After a successful career in publishing followed by founding his own ad agency, Sebergandio now has over a dozen mini bikes, and many more friends in the mini bike world. Last Saturday about 200 of the little scoot-utes showed up in Crescenta Valley Community Regional Park, just off the 210 freeway a half hour north of Los Angeles. There were some stock Honda Trail 70s, 90s and Mini Trails, but most of the bikes were customized jobs. Some were choppered, many had wheelie bars attached in optimistic hopes of raising the front wheel off the ground. One Honda Grom was gold-plated.

But it’s not all hilarity. Manufacturers would do well to pay attention to this market. According to motorcycle performance parts and racing company Yoshimura R&D sales manager Tim Welch, who was there for the Reunion, the number-one-selling motorcycle in the country is the diminutive Honda Monkey; number-two seller is the Honda Grom. The two make up about 40,000 sales per year if you include the also-small Kawasaki Z125, Welch said, quoting Motorcycle Industry Council specifications.

The Reunion traces its roots back to another event put on by “Mini Bike Paul” Weiner.

“We used to ride our mini bikes to Bob’s Big Boy,” said Paul. “We said, ‘Gee, why don’t we have a Fun Day?”

So they started Paul’s Fun Fest. They had 500 bikes by 2012, Weiner remembers. Sebergandio gave Weiner and another mini biker named Guardrail Dave awards. Music played, there were hot dogs, a wheel dyno measured output of the bikes (a Honda Mini Trail hit 4 whp!). It was a great day, but mini bikes were more than that.

“It taught me the basic foundations of mechanics,” said Sebergandio. “Like, if the brakes didn’t work, the bike wouldn’t stop and you’d die.”

Apparently, Sebergandio’s brakes always worked.

Start searching swap meets and Craigslist now to be ready for next year’s Reunion.

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