About Me
Well, it looks like we made it to our tenth year anniversary, and brother, there was never a sign that we would, until like last week, ya’ know? So, I promised everyone on staff that when we reached this milestone I’d write a little article on the story of how this rag came to be. People still can’t believe it when I tell them, and maybe in print it’ll validate it somehow, so here goes.In 1996 a brother of mine was going to prison and sold me his little aftermarket shop. I was bouncing in a strip club then and my lifelong brother Lou, who also worked there, needed a place to crash for awhile. He was between chicks and we agreed that he’d run the shop for a few hours at night after I left for work in exchange for a pad that we set up in the back. This was a good deal and was going fine; the shop was running good and we were making some dough. Then Lou came back from a trip to Florida with a copy of Action Magazine, a regional biker pub and before we knew it we were selling ads for our own magazine.Now here’s the strange part, there was Lou, my chick at the time who was stripping her way through law school, and me, none of whom had any experience in sales, marketing, computer graphics, or publishing. To make things worse, she had the only high school diploma and was the only one that came close to having a handle on basic grammar, with out the insertion of frequent hillbonics at least, oh yeah, and we had no computer. OK, the first order of business was to secure a computer. We had about half the ads sold that we needed for that first issue and Lou started dating a chick that had a PC. We borrowed it and gave ad layout a shot. Our first attempts were horrible and we immediately decided to put off the first issue for one month. We knew these cats that were doing a local stripper mag and they gave us some quick , tips on desktop publishing. So there we were, a stripper and two bouncers doing ads on a borrowed computer trying to publish a magazine we had no idea how to assemble. It was, to say the least, a trial by fire. But, ten years later, we never missed an issue.As we printed our first, second ,and third issues, then our first, second, and third year of issues, we learned a little about the computer, picked up some righteous cats along the way, and somehow made it to the national news stand.None of this would have ever been possible without the good people in the motorcycle industry around Pittsburgh. You see, at first the magazine was free and only circulated there, so they were solely responsible for our survival. We thank each and every one of them for being patient and helping us make it to what our little local rag has grown into today."Wild Man" Callen - Editor In Chief
