The Best Investment I Ever Made Looked Like a Terrible Decision...

The first major investment I ever made was with money other people had given me, hoping I would spend it on a very different future.

Let me explain...

I graduated from Blue Earth Area High School in the Spring of 1994. School came pretty easily to me. I spent most semesters on the A Honor Roll, and I often tutored other students in science. Most people assumed I'd head off to college and eventually become an engineer, a scientist, or something along those lines. Looking back, I can kind of understand why they might have thought that.

But while I was doing well in school, something else had been happening.

I had fallen in love with BMX. I think most people saw it as a phase or just another hobby, but it had become much more than that.

During my junior year, I took an entrepreneurship class where we were supposed to write a business plan. Mine was for a mail-order BMX bike shop. Somewhere along the way, the assignment stopped being a class project and became a real business. By my senior year, I was taking an advanced entrepreneurship class for high school credit while continuing to grow the company. I was running ads in some of the major BMX magazines, printing catalogs, and shipping BMX parts to riders all over the world before I had even graduated.

This was long before the internet made online shopping normal. Someone would call or write asking for a catalog. I'd mail it to them, they'd fill out an order form, mail it back with a check, and I'd package up their parts and ship them wherever they happened to live. It seems like a lot of work now, but back then that's just how mail-order businesses worked.

By the time I graduated, BMX wasn't just something I enjoyed. It had already started shaping the direction of my life.

I still remember my graduation reception, it was held in “the Center”. Friends, family, neighbors, and teachers all stopped by to celebrate, and nearly every conversation eventually landed on the same question.

"So... where are you going to college?"

My answer never changed.

"I'm just going to ride my bike."

Most people smiled politely and said something like, "Well... that sounds interesting."

But, I could see the skepticism and disappointment in their eyes.

Every graduation card I opened represented more than a financial gift. Friends, family, teachers, and neighbors were investing in the future they imagined for me. Most assumed I'd head off to college, build a successful career, and make good use of the opportunities they believed were ahead of me. From their perspective, it probably looked like I was taking that investment and throwing it away.

My next move probably confirmed everyone's fears.

I recruited one of my friends with a pickup truck, and we drove to the local lumberyard. I spent every dollar of that graduation money on 2x4s, 2x6s, sheets of plywood, and a box of screws.

My plan?

Build a six-foot quarter pipe in the backyard of "The Center", right next door to my parents' house.

I can still remember unloading that pile of lumber onto the sidewalk in front of The Center. Before long, a couple of friends wandered over to see what I was building. Then another showed up. Pretty soon we were all working on the ramp together with tools I had borrowed from my dad. None of us had ever built a ramp before, and it showed.

If I'm being honest, it was a pretty terrible ramp. But it was a ramp, and that was enough.

That quarter pipe became our gathering place during the summer of 1994. We'd ride until it was too dark to see, sit around talking between runs, and just enjoy being together. Every time I managed to scrape together enough money for another trip to the lumberyard, I'd come home with another load of wood and build another ramp.

By the next summer, the quarter pipe had become a halfpipe. Then we added a spine. Then a bank. Then a hip. Before long, the backyard behind The Center had grown into a small ramp park.

That's when something happened that I never saw coming. At first it was just our group of friends. Before long, riders from neighboring towns started showing up. Then people began driving across Minnesota and up from Iowa. Eventually riders were making the trip from South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin too. This was years before public skateparks were common, especially in rural communities, yet somehow a backyard in the tiny town of Elmore, Minnesota had become a destination.

One of those riders was a guy named Frank Stewart. He had first learned about my bike shop through an advertisement in Ride BMX magazine and decided to make the trip from Iowa to ride the ramps. Neither of us knew it that day, but a lifelong friendship had just begun. Frank would eventually become one of the key riders in Chaos on Wheels, but that's a story for another time.

What I remember most isn't how far people drove to get there. It's that they kept coming back.

The ramps gave us a reason to get together, but after a while they weren't really the reason anymore. They were simply where friendships happened. We pushed each other to become better riders, but somewhere along the way we became people who encouraged one another through the rest of life too.

Looking back, I realized we weren't just building ramps anymore.

We were creating a place people wanted to be.

The only problem was that Minnesota doesn't care about your plans. Summers were short. Winters were long. Eventually I started dragging ramps inside The Center just so we could keep riding through the cold months. The ceilings were low, the space was tight, and it was never meant to be a skatepark.

Somewhere during that time, I found myself asking a question I couldn't shake.

"If a few poorly built ramps in a backyard could bring this many people together for a few months each year, what could happen if there was a place built for it year-round?"

It turns out I've spent the past three decades trying to figure out the answer to that question...

Thanks for reading!

Jeremiah Anderson

Rooted Founder

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