McGoo, www.bmxfreestyler.com, november 2006 : My name is Harold McGruther, but everyone has called me McGoo since I was 12 years old. I raced BMX in my home state of Florida from February 1974 until October 1982. I was a mediocre midpack goon for most of my years on the track, but I had a gift of gab that sponsors found attractive. In 1979 I landed my first factory sponsorship from a legitimate California-based BMX company, Torker. The Johnson family owned Torker in the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, and Mrs. Doris Johnson was the person who gave me a job offer to work at Max (a subsidiary of Torker BMX) in 1982. At the time I was living with my best friends Greg and Bryan Esser in Pompano Beach, Florida, and working as the editor of Bicycles Today, the NBL’s official BMX newsletter. In December of 1982 I moved to California to work for Torker and Max and I never looked back. I have been working in the bike industry ever since.
McGoo, www.bmxfreestyler.com, november 2006 : My co-worker at Torker was a man named Rich Osborn (no relation to Bob Osborn.) Rich took a job at CW. In the spring of 1985 CW needed a freestyle program so I quit my job at BMX Plus! To get things going at CW. Mike Buff and Dizz Hicks were already on the CW payroll when I joined the company in may of 1985. I had one month to build a ramp, organize a team, buy a P.A., book a tour and go on the road. I added Ceppie Maes and Gary Pollack to the program the summer of 1985 and the four of us (Gary, Ceppie, Dizz and I) toured the country for the next two years.
McGoo left his position as team manager at CW to work for GT.
McGoo, 2003 : Sean Buckley at GT approached me and said he needed an in-house administrative assistant. I took the job. I really wanted to focus on advertising and product development, so they let me dabble in it a bit. I did the team thing with GT for two and a hal years. I managed to muscle into the product development side of the company for the '90 model line. I cut my teeth developing products domestically with GT.
McGoo, www.bmxfreestyler.com, november 2006 : I was lured away from CW in the fall of 1986 by a guy named Shawn Buckley at GT. Shawn was a workaholic kook that very few people liked, but working for him gave me a chance to diversify my skillset in the bike industry. Running the GT and Dyno freestyle teams from 1986 to 1989 was a part of my responsibilities at GT, but I also managed the pro BMX program, designed products and wrote copy for catalogs and advertising. My 3.5 years at GT were good ones, and I worked with a ton of great people, most notably Dave Voelker, Josh White, Eddie Fiola and Gary Ellis.
GT's garrulous freestyle team manager Harold "McGoo" McGruther married his lady, Rhonda Burns, a sales rep at GT, in early october.
McGoo, 2003 : The Mongoose offer came along, I knew it included going to Taiwan negociating deals on product devlopment. I took it and I was excited about it.
McGoo, www.bmxfreestyler.com, november 2006 : When I quit GT in 1989 to be the marketing and product manager for the BMX division at Mongoose, I hired Dennis McCoy and Fuzzy Hall. Believe it or not, working at Mongoose was probably the most rewarding time in my early career. My boss at Mongoose was an amazing teacher, and the many trips I took to Taiwan helped build the foundation for the career that I enjoy in the bike business today. If I hadn’t spent two years at Mongoose, I wouldn’t have come in contact with the people who helped me start and manage SNAFU BMX, Universal Motocross or my latest venture, Biltwell Inc. (a small chopper parts and accessories company.)
DMC is now riding for Mongoose. He negociated whith McGoo immediately following the AFA Masters Finals and is now their one-man team.
McGoo : I signed two riders my first month at Mongoose : Dennis McCoy and Tim "Fuzzy" Hall. Fuzzy still rides for months 15 years later.
McGoo, 2003 : The CEO of American Recreation Group, the parent company of Mongoose, instructed my boss, friend and mentor Bob Margevicius to fire me for "my devisive behavior." What I had done to earn that honor was to put a photograph of a black man dressed as a woman on the cover of the 1990 Mongoose BMX catalog. The photograph was given to me by Brad McDonald, then photographer of Go magazine. A copy of the same photograph hung in Mike Miranda's cubicle at Vision Streetwear.
McGoo, 2003 : With nowhere to go and nothing to do, I borrowed $5,000 from my grandmother and started Mental Jimmy's, a tiny mail-order company. the company was named after a friend of Mark Lewman's from Kalamazoo, Michigan. My ill-fated business plan with Mental Jimmy's was to sell kids what they needed for serious bike riding, not what they wanted. In other words, no purple brakes, titanium cranks, carbon fiber frames, etc. It was a hard sell, and in 1994 I sold the company to John Paul Rogers.
McGoo, 2003 : I founded Revolution Advertising, a design, marketing and creative services agency that caters to the bike industry. First client is Kinesis, a Taiwanese manufacturer of high-performance aluminum bicycle frames and forks.
September 2003, Harold is bidding on ebay to get a copy of the february 1992 issue of Plus!. Isn't it an exclusive information from 23mag ?
