40's, REAL, SPITFIRE, STEREO, THUNDER, FUN, THINK, BLACK LABEL, RACE,
STEREO SOUNDS CLOTHING, INDEPENDENT VENTURE, AVENUE, AND SUPERCUSH
18-31
WILD IN WYOMING
WORDS BY JUICE PHOTOS BY RICH JOHNSON
THE DELUXE STORE
1831 Market Street
San Francisco, CA
94103
1-800-275-3359
CHRIS PASTRAS
Cheyenne-home of the world's largest rodeo.
Just that sentence in itself conjures up images of
what Cheyenne is, or at least, what it would like
to be. Not very many people even know where
to find Cheyenne on a map. Cheyenne is a small
tumbleweed-ridden town in the southeastern
corner of the least-populated state in the nation,
Wyoming. Even though it is the capitol and the
state's biggest city, only a mere 50,008 people
live here. Wait, I take that back, a new family has
just moved in down the street, so now there are
50,012. With a lack of recreational things to do,
most young people in Cheyenne do drugs, start
little white boy gangs and have babies so that
they can live in a trailer with a rusty Ford pickup
parked in the driveway, sit on their lime green
velvet couches that they stole from the back of
Goodwill and sip on the last three Falstaffs that
were left over from breakfast.
But not all of our youth is like this, some of us
took up skating. You might not hear any famous
skaters' names coming out of this place, but
Top to bottom: Where else but in
America can we experience the
melodrama of two badly-permed
marshmallow women engaged
in a brawl over the last beer?
Like the little Dutch boy who
saved the town by putting his
finger in the dike, Steve Paul
tries in vain to save the local high
school. If this was Mike Vallely,
it would read vegetarian ollie to
50-50. But alas, it is only Dale
from the sticks jumping the box.
we've had our share of local guys to yell a big
loud "Yeah!" to, which rarely happens anymore.
Before we had our skatepark built in 1989, wel
had skate gangs. Shut up, I know it sounds
stupid, but if you skated in the '80s, you had a
skate gang too. You know you did too, don't
you? The two major gangs in Cheyenne were
The Fugitives, a bunch of high school beer
drinkers, and Team C, the straight-edge gang.
None of them are straight-edge anymore, but
the times they are a-changing. The Fugitives
consisted of Jimmy Cooper, Roger Bensley,
Justin Cooper, Tim Butterfield, Derek Nelson
and a couple others, whose names I forgot. The
Fugitives were more into skating ramp than
street, doing late night beer skate sessions at
the Bensley's mini-ramp hidden in their garage.
or the vert ramp in the backyard with no deck.
These guys had balls the size of the women
around here, and our women do have big nuts.
The guys in Team C were more of the street-
oriented type. They started up when street first
started becoming more popular due to the fact
that they didn't have any ramps to skate except
for Fort Skate, forty miles away in Fort Collins,
Colorado. The members of Team C included
Juice, Rich Johnson, Chris Baird, Leonard Earn-
shaw, Steve Paul, John Paul, Jeff Lavato, Paul
Butner, Dale Ryden and Matt Kauhn.
Around this time, homemade 'zines started
coming into the local scene. The Fugitives had
their 'zine made by Justin Cooper, so I started a
zine entitled PSB. I made one mostly comprised
of porno pictures ripped out of the Hustlers in
my dad's closet. Rich Johnson liked this idea sol
much he decided to make my second issue with
out even asking my permission. I got mad and
threatened to sue his size 23 waist pants off him.
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