WHATCHATHINKIN'

July 1995. The first issue of Backroads hits the hands of riders attending that year’s Ramapo 500 Road Tour. A whopping 16 pages of black and white newsprint which would grow, be colorized and inspire adventure and travel for the next 30 years. Homeric!

There are other events that may have caught your attention in 1995: The Oklahoma City bombing, the end of the Bosnian War and the O.J. Simpson trial. On a better note, it was a pivotal year for the internet, with the release of Microsoft Windows 95 and services like Amazon and eBay emerging. Backroads was not ‘hooked in’ as yet, so our connection to clients was still the fax machine.

As this labor of love might be akin to a wedding anniversary, the 30th is celebrated with pearls. And like a pearl, we took a grain of sand which, over time, developed into what Brian and I like to think is a lovely pearl of a magazine. We have been asked several times how Backroads came to be, so I will give a brief version (consulting with my more knowledgeable historian), a prequel as it were, of the birth of the magazine which you hold in your hands.

The year was 1991. Shira and Brian, a newly married couple, living in Englewood, NJ, along with Brian’s long-time friend Marty, decided to start their own riding club. Flyers were posted in motorcycle shops and a meeting was set in January. Little by little, riders began joining in the rides which started at the State Line Lookout on the Palisades Interstate Parkway. Marty started an official newsletter, The Sport Touring News, the first coming out in April of 1991.

Years went by, the club – Sport Touring Motorcycle Club or STMC – grew, friendships made, adventures had and the newsletter developed. November 1992 saw the newsletter name change to Backroads. May 1994: Dave Wilson, a talented club member who worked at MTV, took the design helm which put the newsletter to the next level – designing the logo and reformatting the layout. June 1995: Dave moved to Arizona and the newsletter production was taken on by Shira and Brian. Shira happened to be working at National Speed Sport News, a racing publication run by Chris Economaki, helping with their layout design. About the same time, Brian thought that it would be a great idea to make Backroads a commercial venture. One month later, July 1995, the first issue was handed out at the Ramapo 500 Road Tour and the rest, well, you can read later on in this issue.

It certainly has been a wild and wonderful ride. To say that Brian and I have been blessed to have met so many wonderful people, ride to so many amazing places around the globe, see so much of our own beautiful country and truly do what we love for these past 30 years overwhelms me. The changes that we’ve seen - in our industry, technology, the world – makes me shake my head. Thinking back to doing the first Backroads layout, after office hours at Speed Sport, with cut and paste boards being shot onto film and brought to our local printer while today everything is digital – from the pictures taken, the stories written, the layout done and the files sent, through the internet (remember that coming into play in 1995?) to our not-so-local printer. Where Brian and I once picked up the magazines, packaged the ones to be mailed in USPS boxes and did the deliveries ourselves, each of us going in different directions to drop them at shops and restaurants, we now might not see the current issue before they arrive in the shops or your mailbox, and are already on to the next issue’s production.

Growing up, the path which I took had never entered my mind. While traveling and wanderlust were always in my heart, as was a certain artistic bent, putting these things together and adding into the mix doing it on two wheels has exceeded my wildest imagination. There are times that I have dreams where I’ll wake up – in my dream – with some former boss telling me to get back to work, stop goofing off and riding around the world on that motorcycle. Then I will wake up, look around, and realize that this is my life, and what a wonderful life it is and has been.

Thank you all for this opportunity, I cherish every moment of these past 30 ye