The Voice of WE Rock, Tacoma White rings in the new year in Episode 301

This week, Big Rich sits down with WE Rock announcer, longtime off-road advocate and friend, Tacoma White. From small-town New York to Utah’s vast public lands, Tacoma shares how punk rock, skate culture, and a love of tinkering led him into four-wheel drives, land-use battles, and a front-row seat to competitive rock crawling.

A candid, funny, and passionate look at community, access, and honoring off-road history—one preserved rig and trail at a time.

Highlights: 

-            Land use advocacy: Utah Four Wheel Drive Association board/president, Tread Lightly Master Trainer, county/BLM collaboration, the constant fight for access 

-            WE Rock origin story: judging at Miller Motorsports Park to becoming the series’ voice; why the stock classes and family campfires define the sport’s magic 

-            Tacoma acquires the late Creighton King’s CJ7 competition rig—restoring it as a true early-2000s time capsule 

Tacoma was an integral part of the WE Rock family for years, he retired from announcing when Big Rich retired from WE Rock.

Transcript

[00:00:05.100] 

Welcome to Conversations with Big Rich. This is an interview-style podcast. Those interviewed are all involved in the off-road industry. Being involved, like all of my guests are, is a lifestyle, not just a job. I talk to past, present, and future legends, as well as business owners, employees, media, and land use warriors, men and women who have found their way into this exciting and addictive lifestyle we call off-road. We discuss their personal history, struggles, successes, and reboots. We dive into what drives them to stay active and off-road. We all hope to shed some light on how to find a path into this world that we live and love and call off-road.

[00:00:46.400] 

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[00:01:12.900] - Big Rich Klein

All right, my guest this week on Conversations with Big Rich is none other than the We Rock announcer, a guy that is into heavy metal, four-wheel drive, I would say, likes big vehicles. Although we're going talk about a recent purchase that he picked up and he's going to be putting together, which is a little bit smaller. And I would call him one of those guys that gets into all sorts of different things and has all sorts of different interests. But one of the things I always say about him is he loves to argue on the Internet. And I don't know if he does that much anymore, but boy, he used to. It was always fun to listen to. My guest is none other than Tacoma White. Tacoma, great to have you on.

[00:02:01.200] - Tacoma White

Well, it's good to be here, Rich.

[00:02:03.540] - Big Rich Klein

So let's start at the very beginning. All right. Where were you born and raised?

[00:02:10.940] - Tacoma White

I was born and raised in Hamilton, New York, which is where if you fold New York in half, it's just about in the center, about, I don't know, 20 miles south of the Thruway, I-90, if you've ever been through there? Right. And not a whole lot going on at Hamilton, but There's a college there, Broken Lizard got their start there from Super Troopers and Bier Fest. And I think that's really about all they are known for.

[00:02:44.160] - Big Rich Klein

That's all that the town is known for?

[00:02:46.700] - Tacoma White

I think so. It's just a quiet college town. Okay.

[00:02:51.400] - Big Rich Klein

So after this podcast, it's going to also be known as the hometown, Tacoma, white.

[00:02:57.400] - Tacoma White

Well, that was where I was born. My hometown was the Oneida, New York. It was about 15 miles north of there. And everybody knows Oneida Silverware. It's actually made in Sherrill, New York. Another small town that originally was known for hops production until Prohibition. And then they weren't really known for much else after that, but the Silverware factory was right there. So another small, quiet town, old Victorian New York town. A lot history there, but most of it's been plowed over and rebuilt with all the weather and snow there over the years.

[00:03:39.240] - Big Rich Klein

So what was it like? So you were born, was it because the hospital was in Hamilton?

[00:03:46.380] - Tacoma White

Yeah, my mom was pretty young when she had me, but she didn't want to have a C-section, and the hospital in Oneida was pretty notorious for a really high C-section rate. So she Took a half hour trip at 16 years old to have me in Hamilton instead.

[00:04:07.980] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:04:09.640] - Tacoma White

It was a pretty big deal to her, I guess. I would say. Thanks, Mom.

[00:04:14.060] - Big Rich Klein

At 16, yeah.

[00:04:15.900] - Tacoma White

Yeah.

[00:04:16.660] - Big Rich Klein

So she didn't want that bikini scar then?

[00:04:21.540] - Tacoma White

I guess not. I don't know what prompted that, but she did not want to have a C-section, so off she went.

[00:04:28.700] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:04:30.000] - Tacoma White

She asked her about that. I don't actually know the story of before I was born. What was it like that day? I never asked her about that. How did you get there? I don't know how she got there. She didn't have a car.

[00:04:42.700] - Big Rich Klein

So she was hitchhiking at nine months? No.

[00:04:47.060] - Tacoma White

I'm sure one of my aunts or one of her friends or something. I've never heard that story.

[00:04:53.780] - Big Rich Klein

Those early years, what was it like growing up with a real young mother?

[00:05:00.560] - Tacoma White

It was not bad. I just thought of her as my mom, but she was pretty active. We walked all around town. We lived right next to the school I ended up going to for a while. And then she met my step had when I was, I don't know, five or six, I guess. I remember a lot of my life before that, but it seems like there was a long time before she met him. It really wasn't. I mean, I was pretty young when they met, but it was pretty cool. We moved out to a house just south of town, out in the woods. It had a big cow pasture next to it, and there was a pond and across the street, across the road, really. And up in the hills, there were two feeter reservoirs for the Erie Canal. There's an upper and lower reservoir. And they went down this hill into town and out to the Erie Canal. The main street used to have a canal in it originally, like a tow path. I don't know if you know a tow path? Right. They'd run the horses down one side. Yeah, and pull the barges.

[00:06:05.060] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, get the barges up to the main.

[00:06:07.300] - Tacoma White

So it was really pretty good. My parents were young enough that we went and did a lot of stuff. As a family, we go out adventuring around all the state parks in New York and up into St. Lawrence and just hanging out. But at the house, after my mom got remarried when I was eight, and We just ran around in the woods. There was a bunch of kids all around us, I think something like 14 or 15 boys that were all within a couple of years of each other, like groups of brothers. And across the street from us, there was a group of three kids, the Brewsters. And one was older, one was younger, and then there was one that was a couple of years younger. And we just had a great time just running around in the woods, acting like crazy people, riding bikes all over. It's fantastic.

[00:07:02.060] - Big Rich Klein

And let me get the parent thing here situated in my mind. So your mom was single when she had you.

[00:07:13.920] - Tacoma White

Yeah.

[00:07:14.520] - Big Rich Klein

And then met your stepdad, but this was the first stepdad?

[00:07:21.040] - Tacoma White

I should rewind there. She was actually married and got divorced when I was, I think, two.

[00:07:28.960] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:07:30.420] - Tacoma White

And my biological dad, apparently, was pretty abusive to her. And so she left him, and he took off and moved to Arizona. And then my mom was single.

[00:07:42.540] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:07:43.040] - Tacoma White

And she got hooked up with my stepdad by her landlord. Her landlord's husband and my stepdad worked together. And so they got together and hit it off, I guess. And the rest is history. Okay, cool. But we had gone to California with a boyfriend of hers who lived in California for a little while, year, year and a half, something like that. So I've got some memories of living outside of Danuba, California.

[00:08:12.600] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, that's where Josh, the area that Josh lives in. Is it? Yeah.

[00:08:18.080] - Tacoma White

That's pretty funny. We lived in next to a big irrigation ditch, and there's a giant alfalfa field, and then some orange groves down the road from us. I remember a lot of that. Little snapshots these days. I'm getting older. And then we moved back. We moved across the country in a four-door '55 Chevy. Nice. And got a bunch of memories of that. My mom was dating this guy. He ran the speed shop in town. He had a junkyard. And I remember he had a big barn. Not really a barn. It was like a multi-stall lean-to that they would work on cars there in the mid '70s, late '70s. One of my earliest memories was the sound of a cammed small block in those cars. I remember pulling the chain hoist. We pulled the engine out of a '57 Nomad or a station wagon. But I remember it was a wagon. I was thinking it was a nomad, but it could have been a four. But early speed shop memories. I would get Hot Rod magazine and sit at the speed shop.

[00:09:28.580] - Big Rich Klein

And that was back in New Yeah.

[00:09:31.070] - Tacoma White

Then my mom married this other guy a few years after that, and we moved out of town and lived up in the woods there. Not really in the woods, but in a little valley with woods all around it.

[00:09:46.660] - Big Rich Klein

Now, I think I met- Yeah, you met my mom and my stepdad.

[00:09:51.390] - Tacoma White

Okay.

[00:09:51.900] - Big Rich Klein

You're right.

[00:09:52.460] - Tacoma White

You're not really my stepdad. He legally adopted us. But early on, My parents had two other kids, my younger brothers. I've got a younger brother. It's about a year and a half younger. And then the other two. So there was this little triangle. So there was my parents, my immediate younger brother, and then the two younger kids that are 10 and 14 years younger. It made a neat dynamic. But for us, we remember, or at least I do, that my mom wasn't married to this guy. But he is technically my legal father, and I don't think of him any other way. But I think of him as my dad. He was the guy who raised us. I just don't think anything else of it, but technically, I always call him my stepdad. I really shouldn't do that.

[00:10:44.740] - Big Rich Klein

That's okay.

[00:10:45.840] - Tacoma White

Yeah, he wasn't so much my stepdad. Right. But we just lived out in the woods and rebuilt an old farmhouse with a three-story barn and apple trees.

[00:10:58.060] - Big Rich Klein

No, this was the neighborhood, not with the Bruce With the Brewsters?

[00:11:00.940] - Tacoma White

Yeah, this was with the Brewsters.

[00:11:02.220] - Big Rich Klein

With the Brewsters, okay.

[00:11:03.280] - Tacoma White

Yeah. They lived across the road in an old house. Ours was the second oldest house, a little cluster of three or four houses there. And then just kids all around us, we'd all meet at my house because we had a big long, like a football field lawn. We had a football, we had the old basketball car, we had like a half court set up. And We all hung out our house. There was a bunch of trails that went away from my house, in the Brewster's house. Cool. It was pretty fun.

[00:11:39.200] - Big Rich Klein

And- Cheap. What was that? Cheap?

[00:11:42.200] - Tacoma White

I was going to say we had the two pump Bibi gun wars out there, too. Okay. Yeah. Old crossman pump guns.

[00:11:47.780] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[00:11:48.720] - Tacoma White

Two pumps only. Everybody's fighting all the time. It's always fist to cuffs. It's a good time.

[00:11:57.980] - Big Rich Klein

And what What do you remember of school? Were you a good student in those early years?

[00:12:06.860] - Tacoma White

I was a good pupil later on. In the early years, I tested out of all my grades. So my mom actually tried to have me tutored, but they didn't have anything available back then. But New York State had a pilot program that I was part of, and they would take us, a small group of 10 of us, 12 of us in the whole school district. They would pull people out and have them do these advanced projects. I remember spending a lot of time with the sixth grade students when I was real little. And then as they went on, they did away with that whole program eventually, I guess. But by the time we got to seventh or eighth grade, we were taking a couple of years ahead. So we had a weird school experience.

[00:13:06.720] - Big Rich Klein

So a gifted program.

[00:13:09.340] - Tacoma White

Yeah. And it was just so odd, though, because they hadn't quite figured out what they were doing with it yet, I don't think. So it wasn't like we had until probably junior high, they figured out what they wanted to do. But my elementary school, I remember just I would have normal class with my classmates, and then I would go to the and do independent study projects that were like, Hey, you want to read a Shakespeare graphic novel? It's like, I guess, sure. We had a ballistics program, I remember, at one point. Really? Yeah, you just smashed things into each other at different velocities. I was like, Why are we doing this? What is this for? Why do we have this program? It was odd, but fun. I mean, A close-knit community. I think I had the same principal at three different elementary schools. My last elementary school from third grade up was arranged around the library, all the classes. So third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grade were open classrooms around the main library. It just hung out. Yeah, it was nice. We had a park there. But once I got into junior high and high school, I really didn't like the structure.

[00:14:32.260] - Tacoma White

My parents were pretty strict. I had to have a B plus or better or I was grounded. And I was taking classes two or three grades ahead and also trying to, you finally get to junior high. It's a big deal. And I wasn't in class with any of the people my age. So it was interesting. It didn't sit well with me. So I just decided that if I didn't have to be there, I wouldn't be there. And that's something like a 95 test average and like a 68 course grade. And New York had a thing, too, where if you had a job, once I got a little older, they were required to let you leave for your job if you didn't have to be there for school. So by the credits, I was done in the middle of 10th grade, and I had a job to go to. I ran a movie theater, and we had this little battle with the administrators. They let me leave. So they would try to tell you, Oh, you're going to get in school suspension or detention or something, and say, Okay, I'm not going to show up for that because I was at work.

[00:15:40.100] - Tacoma White

And they said, Well, you have to. I said, Okay, well, the next thing we do is a school board hearing, right? So we could do that. And then you can tell them how you won't let me leave. And then they just say, Well, maybe you shouldn't be doing that. You can skip the tension this time and say, Okay, that sounds great. I won't see you later then. But it wasn't all bad. I had a lot of really good teachers. I managed to get either the teachers on the last year or two of their tenure. So they were just teaching. They didn't really care if you were offended or not. Or we had brand new teachers that were replacing those teachers. So we got a really good mix of educators that really would teach you something useful instead of trying to secure their position or maintain the status quo or anything. I liked it. I like school for what it was, but I learned an awful lot more from going to the library and reading books. I think compulsory education is a system that exists to perpetuate itself a lot more than it does to actually educate kids.

[00:16:50.160] - Tacoma White

But that's another topic.

[00:16:53.220] - Big Rich Klein

There's all sorts of things to talk about with the school system, that's for sure.

[00:16:59.080] - Tacoma White

Yeah, no doubt.

[00:17:01.000] - Big Rich Klein

So then once you got into high school, did you get involved with any activities besides work?

[00:17:15.440] - Tacoma White

Yeah, I got into punk rock, alternative music, back when it was actually still alternative. And I grew up in a little football and farm town, so it was a fun. But I like that rebellion Got into skateboarding. I was a BMX kid when we started out, and then around '86, '85, somewhere in there, got into skateboarding and hung out with a couple of other kids that I found. I was working at the movie theater. We had a really good curb in the front of it, and then getting into a couple of bands, messing around in people's garages, and not really doing anything with that. But music, I was doing a lot of artwork back then and started getting scholarships to go to school for that. That was cool. I sold some illustrations to the paper, and we had a like a historic house walk. I did some illustrations for some of the homeowners so they could sell prints of it, of their house, house drawing. Mostly I was just going to school and then hanging out with my friends doing hood rat stuff out in the streets, running my little suburban town. A lot of people I hang out with now, we all got similar stories.

[00:18:37.280] - Tacoma White

So the rock crawlers are all a rebellious bunch. There's a lot of people that were skateboarding in punk rock bands and riding BMX bikes when they were in their teens. But I was a pretty good kid, though. We weren't being too bad. I wasn't out getting arrested or getting high all the time or anything. We're straight-edge kids.

[00:19:02.460] - Big Rich Klein

That's where we differ. I've never been arrested.

[00:19:07.200] - Tacoma White

My goal is never to have a mug shot. Yeah, we got a hassle a lot by the cops. We didn't spend more than a couple hours in jail, and then we got let go.

[00:19:19.840] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, kick to the curb before your parents came and picked you up, that thing.

[00:19:25.380] - Tacoma White

Yeah, my friend and I got busted. We got a ticket for trespassing on a city street That was one of the favorites for our local cops. They didn't like skateboarders, so there was only a couple of us. They'd grab you up and give you a ticket. Got to go to the court for this ticket, and they'd always dismiss it. At one point, the judge said, If you keep arresting these kids and giving them tickets, making them come to court, I'm going to assign them a public defender because you can't trespass on a city street. There's no law against what they're doing. Leave them alone. But they would drive us across town and let us So you had to get all the way home. Yeah, of course, we would read up on things. My grandfather was a judge, and he thought it was funny that we were doing this. They can't do that. It's this law and that law. But we just tell them, Hey, F. U. Cop. Thanks, Krupke. We appreciate you giving us the ride. Thanks to that federal kidnapping. Seeing court prick. Yeah, but hope I don't see you. A lot of fun with the cops.

[00:20:33.240] - Tacoma White

It was pretty mellow overall. I mean, I think at one point they just gave up and just let us do whatever if they saw us out. We were always just causing some trouble. Groups of five or 10 kids running around at night. We weren't really doing anything. Farrel? Kind of, yeah. We raced mopeds around, I remember, one summer. Decided to just race mopeds around town, which are technically in New York illegal to do that. No helmet, No license, no permit, nothing. But probably shouldn't be jumping them out of the curb cuts and the sidewalks. They just looked the other way. They got other things to do, I guess. Pretty typical suburban, a bedroom community for Syracuse, New York, and Utica on the other side, but just nice little place to live, but about it.

[00:21:28.540] - Big Rich Klein

After After high school, what was the next step? Did you continue working with the movie theater all through high school, or did that continue?

[00:21:42.120] - Tacoma White

I quit at one point because the guy that ran that was a little bit of a... We have a lot of words for him there. He, I think, was into dudes, maybe. But I wasn't not into him at all. I like women, but he was just petty. And I eventually just left one day. I said, It's enough of this. I can sell drawings or something instead of... You didn't need any money back then in in the in the late '80s. I think I was working for like 100 bucks a week or something. Not even sometimes. And that was like you could live your life on that. But I had gotten these scholarships and the summer after high school, I I decided I wanted to move to New York. I wanted to be an illustrator. That was the big thing I was going to illustrate. I wanted to maybe go to see New York City. A couple of friends of mine had moved down there and I thought that'd be fun. But I got down there and was working at a Barnes & Noble, and they had four or five of them, and they weren't a big chain everywhere.

[00:22:51.740] - Tacoma White

And they sold a lot of textbooks to the schools in the tri-state area there. I got a job in phone room. So people would call and reserve books, and we'd go pull the books and have them waiting for them. They'd come get them. And that was a lot of fun living in New York. But I realized after a few weeks that I thought, what is something weird about this? And this was, again, this was like '91. New York was still sketchy. It's not... New York's really gentrified now. It's all nice and clean, but it was still sketchy back then. I was living in the East Village, and I thought, I couldn't figure out what was going on. I thought, no one's bumped into me. There's no incidental contact at all. If you don't realize how many times you bump into other people or touch a finger or something when somebody's giving you a change or something like that. When they don't do that, you realize pretty quickly I haven't had any contact with another human being this whole time. I thought I didn't really want to live there. It wasn't that great. It was just a lot of...

[00:23:59.350] - Tacoma White

It was real busy and not really my thing. So I moved back home and started working at a Pizza Hut and save up some money to go to school. And then I went to school for a while and met my future ex-wife and decided I didn't really want to illustrate anything. So I got into painting instead. I thought I should paint more. And that's the theme of my life, I should paint more.

[00:24:29.340] - Big Rich Klein

But I've heard you say that before.

[00:24:32.820] - Tacoma White

Yeah, and it's still true. I mean, I should paint more, but we'll talk about that later. But the school I went to had a pretty good collection in the basement. If you were a student there, you could make arrangements to go in the basement with a guard and look at paintings. You can make an appointment and work it out with the registrar and all that. I did that a lot. I was always down in that basement with a pair of white gloves and a guard and looking at paintings out of their collection. Then I thought, that was right when computer graphics were taking over and illustration was changing. It was phasing out of one thing into another. I realized that I should probably... I didn't really want to go to school for illustration. I wanted to just paint, and I didn't need to keep going to school and spending money and working so hard to pay for everything. I left and thought I thought maybe I'll go back to school for business or something. But we moved to... I had met a friend of mine had moved from Utah out to New York. And when I was in high school, another He was pretty good at drawing, so we hung out a lot.

[00:25:49.380] - Tacoma White

He had lived in Salt Lake, and I had always wanted to move out West, so I thought maybe Utah would be good. So we moved to Utah, and that was a It was a great decision.

[00:26:00.570] - Big Rich Klein

And by then, you were already married?

[00:26:03.300] - Tacoma White

No, I was not married. When I met my ex-wife, she was from Long Island, and we were talking about, What are you going to do when you get out of here? So I'm moving out West. My parents didn't believe me. Nobody thought I was really going to do it, but we did. We moved out West. We lived in Vegas for a little while, and a whole bunch of our friends were supposed to move out with us. Nobody did. And so we went back to New York for a couple of years after that and lived in Rochester. That was a lot of fun because everybody was in their 20s in Rochester at the time. And that's when I was working in a restaurant and we all went out to go rock climbing at this rock climbing gym. And I ended up, I loved it so much. I got a membership and went there every day, pretty much. Ended up teaching rock climbing. And then when we'd saved up enough money to move out and get deposits and live a little bit, we moved to Utah in '97 and got married that summer. Then bought a house a couple of years later in Towilla, moved about 40 miles west of Salt Lake.

[00:27:16.660] - Tacoma White

I remember I bought a Jeep Cherokee, an '81 Jeep Cherokee, with some of the money we got for our honeymoon. The rest, that was the transformation there because there was no rock crawling in New York. I wasn't an off-roader in New York. I was, if anything, into maybe drag racing with some of my uncles, dirt track racing. But it wasn't really my thing at all. I was into mountain biking.

[00:27:45.280] - Big Rich Klein

What was the first vehicle that you drove, and how old were you when you got your license? First license.

[00:27:52.170] - Tacoma White

The first vehicle I drove, the first vehicle I can remember driving was Man. A tractor. My cousins and my grandfather had a big old farm. It was an old farm property, but he rented the fields out. But we had a barn there With the old lawnmower that all the cousins would drive. And I had a couple of older cousins, and we take the deck off that and they made it into a little vehicle for the cousins to drive around this little town. It wasn't really a town. It's like a crossroads, really. Vernon Center, New York. Do you ever want to look that up? But we drove that in the fields. That's the very first vehicle I drove. The first car I drove was probably one of my uncle's friends. He had a lot of parties up in the Heights in Oneida, and a lot of drinking in the '80s, but this one guy had a kit car. It was an M-G kit car with a Pinto engine, probably.

[00:28:59.600] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:29:00.000] - Tacoma White

And that's the first car I remember driving on the street. And then after that, I don't know.

[00:29:06.980] - Big Rich Klein

Did you get your license at 16?

[00:29:10.500] - Tacoma White

No, I was a criminal for a while. I always went around with a friend of mine. His dad had a body shop. He always had a car, so I just go with him. We were always going the same places anyway. And then I lived in the city. And then when I went to school, I was living across the street from the school. So I was driving all this time, driving my girlfriend's car, other people's cars, if they were too drunk. But I think I got a license when I was probably 20. And I had been driving for a while illegally. That was a minor scumbag for a while. It's like, you're living in the city, it doesn't matter. New York was a... Until I got out of there, there was a low criminality for being in an urban environment. But it's not anything big, but lots of people were driving with no licenses. Lots of people were buying. They had fake IDs, they're buying beer underage, they're low level drug dealers selling weed to their buddies and stuff. Anyway, I moved to New York or moved to Utah legally and with a license, got married, did everything right, started a little business, doing pressurewashing for Blockbuster video.

[00:30:34.020] - Tacoma White

We had a good time. Okay.

[00:30:38.840] - Big Rich Klein

So you pressurewasher, you'd go around to the Blockbusters and wash your curbs and stuff?

[00:30:47.580] - Tacoma White

Yeah, we would clean their awnings and their signs and the sidewalks and get paid a couple hundred bucks per store. And I did all the blockbusters It was in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia. We had the Carolinas for a while. That's where I started out, doing North and South Carolina. It was a small company. My friend's dad had started it and needed some people. He said, well, if you start a little company and this is how you do it and get this insurance, buy a truck, whatever, you can make this, this is what I'll pay you to do this. And I thought about it and I thought, okay, and I'll have six months off at least, as I had a ton of time off. I was painting quite a bit back then. And it was all right. I drove all over the East Coast and did a bunch of work all the time. And then I would go home. As soon as I got done with that work, I could leave and go back home. That's what that would pay for my year. We did that for 10 years.

[00:31:51.540] - Big Rich Klein

So you were like a franchisee?

[00:31:54.240] - Tacoma White

Yeah. I had the largest work route of the people in the company, and made a ton of money doing that. It was great. But I was gone a lot. That wasn't so great.

[00:32:08.520] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[00:32:09.560] - Tacoma White

And then we bought a house, and that wasn't Too bad.

[00:32:17.640] - Big Rich Klein

So you were doing the pressure washing. You were living in Utah, but you'd go east? Or was it before you came to Utah?

[00:32:24.800] - Tacoma White

Yeah. This was after. I started it after we moved to Utah.

[00:32:29.540] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:32:30.000] - Tacoma White

And I would go out for maybe a month and a half, two months at a time, twice a year. And the rest of the time I could be home. So we'd go out in the spring. And as soon as we could start, we would start, usually March first or so. And then I would come back and be home all summer, be home all winter, and go back to New York with the family for a month at a time or something. And just do whatever. But mostly I did that. I had a choice between that. I was gone to some interviews for a design company I was going to work for, and I had to decide between the freedom of that pressure-washing opportunity or nine to five every day. And I thought I should probably take the freedom. And I think it was the right choice to make then. I think I married the wrong person. That was the problem with that arrangement. But another similar story. A lot of people married the wrong person for the first time. But I had a lot of time home that was paid for. And that was great if you're trying to get started selling pictures.

[00:33:54.480] - Tacoma White

But eventually that became a problem. My ex-wife did not like that I was painting so much. She didn't really like anything. It didn't matter what I was doing. But that was a lot of drag on getting things going, I'll put it that way Right.

[00:34:17.440] - Big Rich Klein

So the Cherokee that you bought, an '81, that's a full size?

[00:34:22.980] - Tacoma White

Yeah, it was a full size Cherokee Chief with a six-cylinder engine. Oh, wow. And a 258. And I bought that, and I didn't really know anything at all about four-wheel drive vehicles because nobody really used them in New York except to plow snow. Everything's private there. And it's a little different now, but nobody did that when I was a kid. So I originally got that because when we moved to Utah, I'd gotten a book called Some Dreams Die. No, that was one of the books I got. There was another book about ghost towns, and a lot of them were around in the west desert and out in Touilla County. And we had gone out there. When I moved out, I had a van And I took that van up into the hills and realized, I should probably get a four-wheel drive vehicle. That's why we bought this Cherokee. And so I started learning how to work on them, what I wanted in a four-wheel drive vehicle, how do you use these things off road, where do you go? And I rebuilt a 360 for it, bought a 360 out of a Wagoneer from a junkyard and had it all machined out and built it in our We were living in an apartment in the avenues in Salt Lake and built that in the garage over about a month and put that in there and drove that for a while.

[00:35:57.220] - Tacoma White

And that was the start me owning way too many clapped out old Jeeps and Chevis and Land Cruisers. That was the first one, the puke yellow Cherokee.

[00:36:13.260] - Big Rich Klein

The whole idea of clapped out vehicles, was that because that was what you could afford or was it what you were attracted to?

[00:36:23.620] - Tacoma White

A combination of both. I don't really, even now, I don't like spending money on vehicles because all of them have issues and all of them wear out. And I like tinkering with them. I was pretty broke when we moved out there as a young kid. I was 22 with no really any money. And you could buy Cherokeys and Blazers back then in the late '90s for... I think the most I had paid for one of them was like three grand. And I think I bought that first Cherokee for maybe 1,500 bucks and put maybe another thousand into it, a rebuilt engine. And I liked the older stuff, too, because it was simpler, but it was also familiar. I was really into hot rods when I was a little kid, and you were always seeing Ram chargers and Blazers and Broncos and Cherokees and Wagoneers and stuff. But I just thought they were cool. I thought they were real simple. I like their... They're all metal, pretty rugged. They have a certain look to them that I liked, but really, they all work the same. The Chevies were my choice because they were super cheap. Everything interchanges on a Chevy.

[00:37:42.960] - Tacoma White

So you can get parts anywhere. Jeeps, not so much because they're AMC oddball-specific stuff. But I was a FSJ guy for a long time. I was pretty reluctant to give up the Jeeps, the full-size ones. Right. But no, they were easy to work on, and they got me where I wanted to go for not a lot of money. And I'd rather spend it on gas back then. And we took a lot of trips all over Utah, driving down Forest Service roads and dirt roads out in the middle of nowhere. Blm property. Pony Express Trail was one of my early long trips that I took. That still is a pretty long trip out to the desert. Where would you pick it up Back then, I would pick it up outside of Lehigh, west of Lehigh, when there was nothing out there. You'd go around towards Five Mile Pass, and there's the Faust cut off. They went to Faust, Utah, and then down through around Vernon, and then just west through all the passes around Dougway, out to Fish Springs, Calio, and Ibapa, and all that. And it was It was a great trail. We went up through all of the hills, some of them out in the Tintinx and the Oakers and the Stansberries and out near the edge of the deep creeks, way out West.

[00:39:16.880] - Tacoma White

Didn't really go down too much. I was mostly sticking around Northern Utah back then.

[00:39:21.620] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:39:22.180] - Tacoma White

So up into Heber and Price and Helper, starvation all around the reservoirs. I remember taking a trip to Vernon one time, that was about '99, 2000. That was a pretty neat area up there in the Ashley's and the foothills of the Uwinas.

[00:39:43.320] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[00:39:44.640] - Tacoma White

Some really nice stuff. Utah is a beautiful state. I thought that was a good pick. A lot of variety. And at that point, Moab was still a mountain biking destination. I hadn't gone four wheeling down there yet. I'd driven a four wheel drive to get to the mountain bike trails, but I had no idea that like, Hell's Revenge. I had ridden the Slick Rock Trail on a mountain bike several times, but I had never done Hell's Revenge. I'd see the Jeeps, and I thought, Yeah, it's not really into that so much. I wasn't a rock Crawler. I'm still not a rock Crawler. I was a trail guy.

[00:40:26.300] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, I'm more of a trail guy.

[00:40:29.360] - Tacoma White

Yeah.

[00:40:30.280] - Big Rich Klein

I mean, I like doing trails. I don't need to just go play on obstacles, which seems weird with how I made my life over the last 25 years.

[00:40:46.780] - Tacoma White

Right.

[00:40:47.840] - Big Rich Klein

But I'm more of a scenic trail guy.

[00:40:51.140] - Tacoma White

I had a young family that's a lot more, quote unquote, fun a group of people. You can take more people with you. You don't have to have as much driving skills to do that. Especially if you live in a state like Utah that's got tons of old mining roads and trails that aren't going to be that difficult to drive on. And they all go somewhere really, really cool. I mean, some of the greatest scenery I ever saw was out in in Vernal with my buddy Spence. We were working on geology. You doing mud logging and drilling prognostication for oil rigs. And we would drive around in a crew cab pickup to stock up on these beautiful trails all over the place. Just find a road that looked like it might go somewhere neat. And there's some amazing stuff around there that you can get to in pretty much any vehicle. The rock crawling, I think, is really cool. And obviously, I spent a lot of my life, especially in the last bit of it, around rock crawling. And it's amazing, but it's not really that attractive to me. It would be fun.

[00:42:15.360] - Big Rich Klein

Understood. So how did you get involved with the Utah Fourwheel Drive Association?

[00:42:26.880] - Tacoma White

So Utah Fourwheel Drive Association. When I I moved out to Touilla, Utah. I was driving around all these trails, and you start to see some that were... New York is all private property where I grew up, and you just really couldn't go a lot of places. It was gated off or somebody owned it. And one of the things I loved about Utah was that it was open. And by the time I lived out in Touilla, I had gone and I had taken a couple of painting trips down south. We went down south of Escalani from from Boulder over to St. George for a couple of weeks, and we kept running into closed gates. I would say, please close the gate behind you. So we ran into a couple of ranchers that were running cattle or whatever. And it was always a real pleasant like, yes, you can come through here, just make sure you close the gate, which I thought that's pretty equitable. We can roam around. I didn't really know the deal with public land in the West. But in Twilla, there was some trail system that was up for closure with Kennecot, I think.

[00:43:40.820] - Tacoma White

And at that point, I was on a great website It was rocky mountainextreme. Com. It was rme4by4. Com right now. That's a great forum back when forums were still a thing. I was on pirate 4by4 as well. But RME was like a local, Wasatch front-centered forum. And they had a land use section where they said, oh, we're going to be out in Toila for this meeting that I was already going to be going to to talk about these trails, like a city council meeting or county, must have been a county board meeting. And so I met Kurt Williams from Cruiser Outfitters, and a guy named Jason Goates came out with him. And I remember we went there, maybe Steve Jackson was there, too. A couple of people from the Utah Four Wheel Drive Association, I think Kurt was the President then. And so we went out there, and I like to argue with people. And so we had some discussion about these trails. And afterwards, I was talking with Kurt and Jason about the Utah Four Wheel Drive Association. I'd never really heard of them. And so I said, I should come to a meeting, whatever.

[00:44:58.720] - Tacoma White

They had meetings every week or every month. I went to a couple of those meetings and got involved and was a board member for a while. And then back then, my main focus was to argue with people about why they weren't joining this land use fight because people that are from the East Coast know full well that access is pretty tough. And a lot of people in the West just take it for because it's always been like that. And it's a real different dynamic between the East and West Coast, as I'm sure you're well aware of traversing the country. And you see, it's not only... I mean, the landscape's different, too. The mindset's different, but it's also the physical reality of ownership in the East is way different than it is in the West. And I just thought we should preserve this. And it really, still to this day, graded on me how few people are willing to spend under $100 a year to be involved with land use groups. Give the people that want to do this very difficult fight. Give them the money. Let them do it if they want to do it.

[00:46:13.690] - Tacoma White

Let them speak for you if they're willing to do so. If you don't want to be involved every day, I get it. People have got kids, they got soccer practice, they've got overtime, they got all this stuff to do. But there are people that are willing to spend their time making making those arguments on your behalf. And for the Utah Fourwheel Drive Association, it was $10 a year. At that point, they had just gotten the lift laws in Utah changed, not directly, but they were pretty instrumental in doing that, making a reasonable lift law chains that made some sense to modify your vehicle without it being a felony. So I just threw my hat in the ring with those guys. I thought this is... It was pretty easy. I had a young daughter at the time, but I was home. I had time to spend on that, on these issues, so I did. And then a few years later, I got voted in as president for a minute. And it was people were dwindling down. I was getting frustrated with it. I gave that up in a bit of a fit. I was just mad.

[00:47:21.380] - Tacoma White

I was tired of people not following through with things. So I thought, well, and that comes and goes. It's a hard fight. Utah has got a lot of people that grew up there and have taken the stuff for granted. But they also have a lot of people moving in from California and other places. I mean, I moved there, so I can't. People shouldn't move in. But when people move in and buy Jeeps with no real awareness of what's going on, and then they don't really care about what's going on. They just want to go out in the trails and, oh, well, they closed them. Oh, well. It's really hard to reach those people. And it's tough to stay in that fight when you don't see a lot of success or get a lot of help. My hat is off to everybody that's out there doing that every single day. Blue Ribbon, I think, does a great job, and they've got my support, a million %. But I put in about 10 years of arguing with people on a pretty close level, mostly at the county level in Touilla. In Touilla County, it was great. I mean, I thought the BLM field agents that were out there, the county trails guys that were out there, all are pro-access, which makes it really easy to work with them.

[00:48:46.380] - Tacoma White

We got a big win for Utah with the... I did a Tread Lightly Master Trainer course with a couple of the BLM field agents, one of whom was dead set against motorized access to anything in Utah. But after that course, it turned into more of a debate class than anything else. She had changed her mind and was willing to entertain the argument from motorized advocates, which was huge to turn somebody like that.

[00:49:18.900] - Big Rich Klein

Absolutely.

[00:49:20.600] - Tacoma White

It wasn't anything that I did, I don't think. I think she was an intelligent woman and could see we're not on opposite sides of this. There's so much rhetoric with land use, as everybody knows. It's listening. Suwa has a ton of money. The Southern Utah Wilderness Association paints this is like you're destroying all this habitat. And they get a lot of money from back east where people don't know. But that's terrible. You're killing the spotted owl or something. That's not the reality on the ground. But to convince people, it's way easier for people that to write a check than it is to think about anything. You don't have to consider it. And when it's a terrible thing, destroying the land, it's a pretty easy sell for those guys. So I spent a lot of time trying to argue for Just for access and say, these trails already exist. We're not trying to crisscross the Earth with roads. In fact, I argued to close a bunch of trails. It didn't go anywhere or they were redundant. I said, get rid of them. It doesn't pose a threat to access. I guess. But there are a lot of people that can't walk or ride a horse or mountain bike out into the wilderness.

[00:50:37.380] - Tacoma White

I was pretty passionate about that for a long time, and I still am, but I'm getting old.

[00:50:46.840] - Big Rich Klein

I have to give it a lot of credit to those people that do that for year upon year, upon year, upon year. We have a number that have been recognized in the Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame that have done it. It's been their life's work. It's amazing to be able to carry that passion like that, beating your head against the wall for that long.

[00:51:18.200] - Tacoma White

It really is. I'm not that good at... I'm getting better at it. I'm not that politic. When it comes to things I'm passionate about, I am the wrong guy to smooth things over a lot of times. I wanted to argue, and I think that that's a necessary approach, but I don't think I was as effective as some of the people that are a little bit better at meeting people in the middle with things. I remember at one point, I said, I put up a post on army, and I said, 600 people are doing your job. And it was a post about we had 600 people in the Utah Fourwheel Drive Association. It was like an all time low. And I said, look, He didn't like that, right? He didn't like reading that. It was like, this is how many people are doing the job. You guys can do better. If every single person that bought a Jeep spent 10 bucks on it, we could change all this stuff. We could keep all this access open everywhere. It'd be ridiculous how easy that would be to make your voice heard. And if you want to do it, put your name on the list and we'll send that to the people that care.

[00:52:39.780] - Tacoma White

The government needs to... They run on numbers and data. They don't care about your story. And I was expecting that to go spur everybody to be like, well, damn it. I'll show you. And here's my money. Here's my 10 bucks. I said, you spend more than that on Red Bull every week. Just give me the 10 bucks for the year. I got a lot of people say, Well, I clean trails. I do this. I said, Well, nobody cares about that because I can't prove it. The government sees these trails. They don't see anybody doing any trail work, so they figure it must be they don't care about it. When I send in a thing from a trail run, when there's 40 man hours a year, nobody cares. I need like 4,000 man hours. That'd be great. I need you to write 15 letters to these people instead of the four that we're going to send out from... There's a few people that were always active that would send letters. And you know how that goes. I mean, everybody who's listening to this knows land use is tough. It's really hard. And it's important, but a lot of people just don't want to do it.

[00:53:50.600] - Tacoma White

We got to keep fighting for that, though, because it's pay to play sucks. Off-road parks are great, but they're not as good as natural terrain. You know and the Sand Mountain down there and Sand Hollow, and Hurricane Washington. That's a great example. I mean, that place has been open access forever. It's gotten really popular now, and they're building houses right up to the edge of it. And we'll see how long that can keep going. Like right now, everybody's for it. Right now, it's still open access, but that can change. It's not always going to be that way just because it has always been that way.

[00:54:30.000] - Big Rich Klein

Correct.

[00:54:31.140] - Tacoma White

I think a lot of people are comfortable not really thinking about that as much as they should, in my opinion. And that said, don't get mad, stand high of people. You guys are all awesome and pretty active. But there's a lot of people that come there or are nearby that may not realize how fragile that relationship is or can be. So stay vigilant. Stay frost, boys.

[00:54:58.400] - Big Rich Klein

So how did How did we meet?

[00:55:06.980] - Tacoma White

Well, we met back in the day when I had a couple of vehicles and I had gone to one rock crawl. I've been to two rock craws. One was Super Crawl at RMR with Walker Evans was still competing there. I thought, Well, the rock crawling is pretty cool. And then I had gone to the very first old school rock that Craig Stump put on down in Delta, because I thought that was neat. It's introduction to rock crawling is how it was built back then. And I thought that was really cool. So I'd gone there and and judged a rock crawling event. And you guys came to the Miller Motorsports Park, which is now the Utah Motorsports campus. It was a big track that Larry Miller built, and it had a rock crawling course. And as I recall, you guys had greatly expanded that rock crawling course with our boy Andrew Paulson's help. Made that quite a bit better. And I could almost see that park from my lawn. It was my local track. It was a great track, and the rock crawling course was really cool, too. So I remember I went over. I think you'd probably put something up on RME.

[00:56:24.620] - Tacoma White

And I thought, Oh, a rock crawling thing right here. That'll be really cool. I got the magazines. I saw a lot of rock crawling there. I thought, That'll be neat. So I went over there, and I remember it was me and Tracy Shulky, a very nice lady from Ogden. And I think that was all you had for the judges training the night before.

[00:56:45.780] - Big Rich Klein

Typical.

[00:56:46.280] - Tacoma White

I don't remember there being anybody else there. There might have been. And if you're hearing this and you were there, I apologize for not remembering you. But I remember Tracy was there. And I remember talking to you afterwards. I'd never met you. And we met and we did the whole thing, watched the video with Dustin Webster. And I said, is this all the people you have? And I remember you saying, yeah, if you know anybody that wants to do this, call them. And so I did. I called a bunch of people and I got all the other judges for the next morning's event. And that was probably, I don't know. It had to be 2010. It was the year you guys had the finals in in Toila.

[00:57:30.000] - Big Rich Klein

Right. I think that's about right.

[00:57:33.520] - Tacoma White

I think it was 2010. It might have been 2009. I don't remember. But at any rate, I got all these judges to come out, and we had a good time. And then you're off to the races. Then the next one we did was the finals, I think. And then you guys were still going back and forth out of Blackfoot at the time. I was working for my My friend's print shop, and we were doing your flyers, so you would pick them up. And my wife at the time was working for Jet Blue. And I said, I remember telling you that if you had an event anywhere within a couple of hours of a Jet Blue airport, I could go there. Because, again, judges are hard to find. It's hard to find people to do the dirty work, right? Yeah. I said, I can fly there for free, and I'll come out wherever. And you're like, oh, cool. But then you had asked me to announce when you came by and asked me, hey, how would you feel about announcing? And I remember saying, I am not an announcement. Like, Tech Tim was your announcement, Tim Lund, and he was great at it.

[00:58:48.540] - Tacoma White

And I think he was, was he working for ARB then or you just stopped working for ARB? One or the other.

[00:58:53.720] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, I think he was still working there.

[00:58:56.060] - Tacoma White

Yeah. There was something his new job was going to keep him from being able to announce. And you needed somebody for Tucson that year for the season opener. And I remember just thinking, man, I mean, I guess I'll do it. And so we drove down to Tucson, me and Mike Johansson, and had a hell of a time getting there. We had to take a detour for about 50 miles through the desert. And it was crazy. We got there, and we were staying at that old... The motor sports park there with the go kart track. Right. So, yeah, I went and did my first announcing there, and I was terrible at it. And it was a good time, though. I didn't know how to do that. I still say I don't know how to do that. But I said, if you need somebody that can talk all day, I'll do it. So that's pretty much what I did. I just had a running commentary all day long about what was happening on these different courses and what they were trying to do. And over the years, I guess people liked that. I mean, I got people said, oh, it was great.

[01:00:07.560] - Tacoma White

I learned so much, which still feels real weird to me. I'm not like a hype guy. I'm not an announcement. I don't have an announcement voice. Sunday, Sunday. But enough people liked what I was doing, and you got to have somebody doing that. So off we went and the rest is history because I was doing the BFE races we had during EJS. I would go announced the BFE race, and then in 2014, you guys needed a full-time guy. I was asked to do that. The 2014 season was the full season. So we did that till 2021. And that was it. I had to step aside.

[01:00:53.300] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[01:00:54.460] - Tacoma White

And then I moved to Tennessee.

[01:00:58.020] - Big Rich Klein

Right. And so what are you doing now?

[01:01:03.220] - Tacoma White

Right now, I'm working for a big auction company, Richie Brothers, and they were kind enough when I moved to let me make a job where I'm a floating yard guy, just go around and set up auctions. It looks like now I'm just mostly, probably only going to be working in Salt Lake. They've gotten really busy. And then we bought a little house. I got remarried to a gal I met after my divorce and building a studio in my shop here to paint in and just working on that for right now. Family man all day.

[01:01:50.500] - Big Rich Klein

Any grand plans or things that you want to do in the future?

[01:01:57.020] - Tacoma White

My grand plans? Well, for most of them, I'd love to. We're getting going on this. I've got a printing press here. I've got some stuff. We can do some things here. I've got two teenage stepdaughters or twins, and we're about to start teaching them how to make prints. So that's what we're going to be doing there. Probably be doing some graphics soon enough and painting. But you got to pay the bills first. So my divorce was really expensive and moving across the country is not very cheap either. So we're recovering from that for a minute, from the move. The divorce was a long time ago. After that, I'm trying to... I've got to finish up my Jeep. It needs a couple of things. I'm really, really, really not working on that at all. And then you alluded it earlier, I have bought a historic relic from the early days of rock crawling. I bought Creighton King's Jeep, the late Creighton King. Mr. Maxis. Mr. Maxis, yeah. Creighton was one of the Utah guys I was lucky enough to meet. Back in the day, we didn't go over this. When I was running around with all my trucks, I went to an off-road shop at random.

[01:03:20.040] - Tacoma White

I went to two of them. One of them was Factory tubular that was sponsoring Bart Jacobs, I think, at the time, and a bunch of other people. And then the other one was Rock Logic. They were like the maxus rock stars. I think just about all of them were there at that shop, either working there or sponsored by the shop. So Carl Whitmore was there, Bryce Sujimodo, Von Wheret. What's his name? Caleb Call. Kyle Listo was there doing some stuff in the shop. There was a bunch of people. Braden Kemp was there. They were all running Maxx tires, and that's when I met Creighton through them. Then, of course, when I got involved with We Rock, they were and still are a big sponsor. Creighton was at every one that he could get to. And just a great guy. That's laughing because the first announcing thing we did in Tucson, I remember me and Jesse Haynes and Creighton arguing about Justin Bieber. He was adamant that I go watch this Justin Bieber documentary. And I was like, What are you talking about? I'm not going to watch a Justin Bieber documentary.

[01:04:42.500] - Big Rich Klein

Like, quit it.

[01:04:44.340] - Tacoma White

He's talented. His family is really behind him. It's a good story. You should watch it. I was like, Absolutely not. You're crazy. But Creighton was one of those guys that you had an opinion about Creighton if you knew him, good or bad. And in my experience, and I don't speak for everybody else, but my experience was always that Creighton would argue with you about whatever. And then if he felt like he had offended you, he was very quick to call you up or get in touch with you and let you know that he wasn't trying to be a dick or anything. He just had a viewpoint, and he would always apologize if he thought he had wronged you, which I found respectable. But I mean, I liked Creighton anyway. I thought he was a good guy. I liked hanging out with him. I thought he was a pretty devout Norman and just a good guy to know. So he passed away, as we all know, in his plane. He was a pilot for these little race planes and passed away working on one of them. He was testing some stuff and crashed and was unfortunately killed.

[01:05:58.530] - Tacoma White

But He had a Jeep that he used to compete in in the early days. He competed in U-Rock and maybe Cal Rocks, too. But he had his Jeep sitting there. He hadn't really worked on it. It was sitting in his backyard. He was really sure what to do about it. It came up for sale, and I looked at it and I thought, no, no, no, I don't need any more projects. I got rid of everything except this one Jeep I have. And I thought, that's enough of a time capsule. It hasn't really been touched too much. And the price is right. I should just get that and preserve it. And as I started thinking about it, I sent a message to his wife and said, it was the anniversary of his death. And I said, let's not talk about this right now, but next week, when you're ready, give me a call, get in touch. But I'd like to get this and keep it in the family and just keep this deep in the rock crawling family. We came to an agreement and I grabbed it, and it's currently sitting outside this shop right now waiting for a few things.

[01:07:09.120] - Tacoma White

I got to get it inside and start working on it. But I'm just going to finish it the way Creighton had it and just leave it as an unmolested time capsule. It's got some funky mid 2000s rock crawling tech. A lot of people There's enough people into rock crawling right now that might not remember how funky some of the stuff people did back in the day was. The start of rock crawling was beat up Jeeps with, remember Buggy Spring? Oh, yeah. And like Three-quarter elliptical. Three-quarter elliptical, yeah. Revolver shackles and all this stuff. So this Jeep has got some of that funky stuff on there, and I'm going to try and keep as much of it as I can. And one of the things I'm super stoked about because it's so goofy right now. Everybody was trying to do stuff. Nobody knew what really worked. There weren't 58 buggy companies. There were no buggy companies. You remember that? Nobody had buggies because they didn't exist. Time and time again, people talk about Tiny, that original skinny little rock buggy. But that really was ushering in a new era of tube chassis. But prior to that, and we talked about Curry a little bit with the fire ant, it was another one, that was probably as far as you could go in that direction with a bodied, buggyed out Jeep-based vehicle.

[01:08:44.020] - Tacoma White

Because after that, what do you need the body for? It's in the way. Anyway, this is a CJ7. It has these goofy to modern eyes, but it has a A little dropout link. So when you flex it all the way out in the back, it's like a pivot point, and the whole spring drops off the frame. And I cannot wait to get this thing running just to see how much rear steering that thing gives you, because the axel is going to turn and pivot. See how many U joints I snap on the ramp. But it's got a few things like that. It's got line locks on each wheel, one for each wheel, but they're not hooked up to anything right now. I know he competed with this thing, and it's had some evolution over the years, but I just want to finish it as it is, get it cleaned up, and just leave it just like he left it, and just run it around and let everybody that remembers him, remember him, and let everybody that didn't know him see what he was about and talk about it. I've got some plans that I'm not going to I can't disclose yet for some of the interior that'll be reminiscent for Creighton.

[01:10:06.220] - Tacoma White

Cool. He was a good guy, and I think we're losing a lot of history with Rock Crawling. So these podcasts, I think, are great. A lot of motor sports in general is not very good at keeping history. And so there ends up being this archeological dig for old pictures and people that were there. And this is contemporary So this Jeep is un molested.

[01:10:32.840] - Big Rich Klein

It's amazing because none of us realized that we were making any history. It was just something that we did.

[01:10:41.320] - Tacoma White

Oh, for sure. I mean, it's ridiculous. I've talked to so many people are like, Can you believe we're doing this still? Can you believe how this is turning out? It's crazy. Trail Hero this year was the 10th anniversary. And I just remember a couple of years ago standing up on the hill looking out at the Vendor Show, and there's people all over. We could look at all the people camping and me and Little Rich. I just remember thinking, Man, can you believe this is really big? This is crazy. This year, it's even crazier. It's like that was wild. We made it 10 years. It's a huge thing now. And with rock crawling, it's the same thing. There's a whole industry that sprang up out of a bunch of rednecks trying to get up into the woods or up into the hills. King of the Hammers is massive. I hadn't been to King of the Hammers since 2013, I think. I went back to see some Australian friends that were over. It had been 10 years. It was 2023 I went back and just looked at how much bigger that had gotten. People were buying property around King of the Hammers.

[01:11:54.060] - Tacoma White

It's nuts. It is pretty wild to first wave rock crawling is a wild time to be alive and think of how far it's come from clapped out Broncos and Jeeps to... Who's that making those? They're like $250,000 turnkey buggies that you can finance now. Oh, man, GSG, maybe. Why? Why can't I remember this? They're out in Hurricane. Anyway, they've got really nice buggies that you can finance. Turnkey buggies. You You couldn't do that five years ago. Definitely not 10 years ago.

[01:12:33.140] - Big Rich Klein

It's Greg doing those.

[01:12:35.320] - Tacoma White

Yeah, Greg and Sasquage. It's great to be able to do that. You can buy stuff now. Jesse Haynes was doing junkyard Hummer portal axles, and he figured out how to make those work really well and do what they wanted to do. And now he's making his own. There's an opportunity to do a thing like that and have it not be a complete financial disaster. You can have a company that sells products for rock crawling, and not just one, but there's hundreds of companies that have sprung up all over the country, all over the world. You think of Giggle pin making super high speed winches. And why would you need that? Who would buy those? The five people in the world that would buy those, right? Not so. There's many, many people that need that product. It's crazy. I love it. I mean, I think it's great. But talk about the American dream. You can do what you want and get paid to do it, bring your friends with you. That's pretty cool. And that's the other thing, too. So this Jeep, I'm talking about, I just want to preserve it, get it cleaned up, finished, and ready to go.

[01:13:50.860] - Tacoma White

And then just, I'm not going to cut it up. We're not going to modernize it. We're not going to do anything. I want it to be what it is. We've got another Jeep that we can cut up and do stuff We've got an off-road Rock Crawling Hall of Fame now. That's pretty cool. That's going to preserve even more of the history of this crazy sport that we're all into. I'm pretty excited about that. Eventually, I suppose that'll have a building. Eventually, it'll need exhibits. What will be in there? It's tantalizing, to say the least.

[01:14:24.920] - Big Rich Klein

Well, and the problem is that nobody preserved those early cars. Yeah. Everybody... I mean, Creighton's might be the one that is probably the best preserved out of that original wave of, pre 2004 or '05.

[01:14:47.380] - Tacoma White

Yeah, there's not a lot left. They all got modernized, and cut up, and stretched, and linked. Yeah.

[01:14:53.500] - Big Rich Klein

Or like, Tiny, we were talking about Tiny, went to Mexico, and now has a Subaru motor and rear steer. And I've been trying to get that back for five or six years, longer than that, actually. I've been trying to get that back for probably eight or nine years. And it probably will never happen.

[01:15:14.000] - Tacoma White

Probably not. Which is too bad. I was pretty excited about that All Pro Toyota that your son bought. I asked about that recently. It's still kicking around and going to be dealt with respectfully. Good. Respectfully. So I'm excited about that. And I think more people should do that. We should keep a hold of these milestone cars or an example of something without cutting them up.

[01:15:44.870] - Big Rich Klein

I did procure for the Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame, Jason Bunch's first-generation Moon Buggy.

[01:15:54.180] - Tacoma White

Oh, nice.

[01:15:55.160] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. And, Craig Allen had gotten that Jason Bunch and ran it at Grand Nationals. And then it was sat and we got it. He donated it to the to Ormhoff, and I've got it right now. And We're looking for a place to put it, to display it. But it's eventually, I mean, I don't... There's not a lot of those left around that are still... I mean, that's still the original buggy. The only thing it changed was the seat cover. Yeah. I mean, it still has the original good years on it.

[01:16:37.640] - Tacoma White

I think it'd be cool to get the fire ant, would be a good one to get. And I think we need to find one of those Campbell buggies with the Volkswagen engines in them.

[01:16:47.480] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[01:16:48.380] - Tacoma White

That'd be cool. And there's a couple of little game changers that would be neat if somebody would just hang on to them for a while.

[01:16:55.960] - Big Rich Klein

I know Tracy has the matrix still, but That's even later. That's 2006, 2007, 2008, somewhere in there.

[01:17:06.050] - Tacoma White

Yeah, yeah. They have seven for sure. Because I remember seeing that and thinking, That's cool. A magazine car. They're building all these buggies. But what a trip. If you'd have told me in 2010, I just went over for something to do because it was in my... I'm not going to miss a cool motor sports event right there, but I don't care about rock crawling. That's neat, but it's not my thing. If you'd have told me that, No, you're going to announce for a bunch of time and you're going to be involved in these events, and it's going to be really neat. You're going to get involved with these movies. It's like, What are you talking about? No, I'm not. I'm going to go home and go mountain biking or something. I don't do this. But here we are. There's a ton of people. I ran into somebody that had gone to Donner I was telling you, I was on a flight with a We Rock sweatshirt on, and somebody recognized it. And we got talking. They were a spectator in Donner in California. And they remember me being there with We Rock announcing some... One of the events, I learned a bunch of stuff.

[01:18:20.150] - Tacoma White

It was really good. I thought, What am I doing? What planet am I on right now? I'm in an airport in the middle of the country. I don't live here. I ran into somebody that also is not from here that met me in a rock crawl in the mountain somewhere. That's wild. I mean, it's crazy times.

[01:18:41.000] - Big Rich Klein

So one time I was in Fredericksburg, Texas, and I was filling up propane tanks. I was at this propane shop in the south end of Fredericksburg. And I'm in the Cherokee, and I got these propane tanks for the my truck and everything. I'm filling up five of them. And this guy pulls up with this Toyota, a young guy with a Toyota, what I'm talking about. I'm not going to call it clapped out, but it was clapped out. If you're listening to this, it was a great car, but it's still a Toyota.

[01:19:22.660] - Tacoma White

There's nothing wrong with beaters.

[01:19:24.330] - Big Rich Klein

Right, exactly. I mean, that's what my Cherokee is now. So the guy comes up and he starts talking to me. And he goes, Hey, you're big rich, right? And I'm like, Yeah. And he goes, Well, and he's just talking away. And he goes, Okay, well, I got to go in and get my tanks, make arrangements. So he goes into the office, this old guy that's filling my tanks, looking at me, and he goes, Should I know you? I'm like, No, no, no, no, no, not at all.

[01:19:57.360] - Tacoma White

Yeah, it's weird. It's I remember when that first nationals that I went to, you've been looking at magazines and seeing things. You can build stuff in your garage if you're so inclined and you have the mechanical aptitude. But you don't really have access to people. They're famous, they're big names. But that first rock haul, I remember just thinking how crazy rock crawling was so accessible to families. You walk around people, they're hanging out, watching the runs with you. And there wasn't really any barrier to entry there. It's pretty easy going.

[01:20:40.280] - Big Rich Klein

The competitors stood there and watched with the spectators.

[01:20:44.720] - Tacoma White

Yeah, they're just hanging out. Everybody's there just chilling. And then if you're rock crawling, obviously, it's out in the middle of nowhere at these event sites. Everybody's just hanging out around the campfire. And that camaraderie is really pretty nice. It's not like that with mountain biking so much. Mountain biking pros don't all hang out and chill by the campfire with the spectators. You don't do that in drag racing.

[01:21:15.120] - Big Rich Klein

No, no other motor sports really does that.

[01:21:17.880] - Tacoma White

No other motor sport. Again, when I was announcing, I got to see the best rock crawling in the world and some really crazy drivers. I mean, they were really, really good. And watching Tracy Jordan and Jessie duking it out. It was great. It was great. Watching Dave Wong and Justin Kyleman and all these Arizona guys. It was fantastic. But I always wanted, and I never got to, really. I always wanted to go watch the stock guys, the stock class, because watching a guy in a clapped out '85 Toyota on his third Axel that he rebuilt the night before, half drunk around the campfire, watching that guy compete and pull something off, for that dude, that's awesome. That was so cool. It wasn't just another day at the office. That was like, he got a 22 on course three. That's so bitchy. Right. It almost got boring watching all the awesome people do awesome things because that's what they're doing. They're awesome. It's a difference from watching Superman jump over something and some high school track kid. It's like, it's... But again, there's not a bad time to be had, in my opinion, at a rock crawling event.

[01:22:37.520] - Tacoma White

No matter what class or level of driving you're seeing, somebody's doing something really cool. Having the time of their life doing it, ideally. The whole trail hero thing has been great watching people of all skill levels getting to be out on the trail and rub shoulders with people that are better drivers of them or worse drivers of them or less experienced, whatever. Everybody gets to learn at the same event.

[01:23:06.720] - Big Rich Klein

The new enthusiast to business owner.

[01:23:10.600] - Tacoma White

Right. It's great. Just having that ease of access to people that you can go talk to them. They're not going to be like, I don't have time for this kid. Get out of here. Hey, how did you do that? What's the technique? How do you get up there? And watch everybody, the drivers at rock crawling events, talk to each other after the fact about how did they get through this gate or what were they thinking? It's been really interesting and a lot of fun to watch. I get why rock crawling is so popular, even if I'm not personally that interested in doing it myself. I'd rather go on a couple of days out in the hills and go camping.

[01:24:00.000] - Big Rich Klein

All right. No, I get it.

[01:24:02.320] - Tacoma White

It's pretty rad all around.

[01:24:04.920] - Big Rich Klein

Tacoma, I want to say thank you.

[01:24:07.980] - Tacoma White

You are welcome.

[01:24:09.580] - Big Rich Klein

When I asked you to do this, said, No, I'm not ready. You've said that for a while. And finally, you said, Okay, well, let's do it. And you go, I don't know if I'm going to be able to talk for an hour. We could continue to talk for a couple more hours. Probably so. I think we've told your story.

[01:24:31.240] - Tacoma White

Well, all right. For everybody listening, blame Rich. But, yeah, it's been fun. It's looking forward to every other event that I get to in the next little bit. And hopefully, now that I'm freed up a little bit, things will work towards that a little easier.

[01:24:51.740] - Big Rich Klein

Well, cool. I hope to come across you doing some trail rides someday. I'd I love to go trail riding with you. So we'll have to make that happen when you get one of the rigs trailworthy. And we'll go out and turn up some dirt.

[01:25:13.080] - Tacoma White

Sounds good to me. All right.

[01:25:15.340] - Big Rich Klein

All right. You take care, Tacoma. And it was my pleasure. Thank you.

[01:25:20.820] - Tacoma White

All right. We'll talk to you later.

[01:25:22.340] - Big Rich Klein

All right. Take care. Bye. Yeah.

[01:25:24.820] - Tacoma White

Bye.

[01:25:26.160] - Big Rich Klein

Well, that's another episode of Conversations with Big Rich. I'd like to Thank you all for listening. If you could do us a favor and leave us a review on any podcast service that you happen to be listening on, or send us an email or a text message or a Facebook message, and let me know any ideas that you have or if there's anybody that you have that you would think would be a great guest, please forward the contact information to me so that we can try to get them on. And always remember, live life to the fullest. Enjoying life is a must. Follow your dreams live life with all the gusto you can. Thank you.