“Back in the day, we would all just turn our little (Schwinn) Sting-Rays into bikes you could jump and ride wheelies on,” he said. “Go out until the street lights came on and then as we got a little older and a little later out, they started making BMX-specific things in the mid-’70s, and I just never quit.”

The story, Moliterno says, is much longer and more complicated than that. But as the years rolled on and the ’80s arrived, BMX boomed in popularity in the Quad-Cities.

“BMX is a weird little sport that goes up and down in popularity, but it was real big here on the race-side in the early ’80s, and then in the late ’80s it fell off a bit,” he said. “But freestyle, with all the trick riding, the street stunts and skatepark style started getting created and that really blew up.”

Word spread through the Quad-Cities that BMX was on the rise and one Rock Island businessman made it his mission to support it. Steve DePron owned Bike & Hike on 14th Avenue in Rock Island for 49 years before retiring in the summer of 2023.

“He was my launchpad and huge financial support in the beginning,” Moliterno said. “I didn’t know he was new to it because he’d always been just Steve.”

DePron was known for letting kids come up and get free air in their tires or order any parts they needed for their bikes. He even gave a young Moliterno a job in the shop and supported his BMX dreams by letting him wear the business name.

“He helped me get to where I went. I worked in there and he paid my way with different sponsoring,” he said. “I rode for his shop team, and I got bigger sponsorships through that.”

Moliterno’s hard work paid off and in the fall of 1982 he decided it was time to turn pro. The process, he said, was “kind of easy and kind of hard. If you think you’re ready to turn pro and you do, you’ll get smashed right away if you’re not ready. But its simple to do it. The qualifications are pretty simple.”

On the racing side, pros had to be at least 16 years old and competing at an expert level. Moliterno was 17 and excelling at the sport. The last step was to simply buy the pro membership.

On Nov. 7, 1982, Moliterno and a friend were in Cedar Rapids for a competition when his friend decided to make the purchase. Moliterno, too, handed over the $19 needed to cover his membership fee and his name was written in cursive on a slip of paper, certifying he was officially a BMX pro on the racing side of events.

“They make you carry it until you get your card,” he said with a laugh. “They just tore it off the bottom of a piece of paper.”

Going pro at 17 is young for BMX, he said, but he proved himself fairly quickly.

“I got first that day, too. I beat the dude I never thought I’d beat, and I go, ‘OK. Here I am,’ ” he said with a laugh. “Go to the race not expecting that and then you leave going, ‘OK I guess it was time.’ That was pretty cool.”

For every other category, prospective pros had to enter a class and if they were good enough, the pro-membership was the reward. While the road to becoming a BMX pro was fairly easy, it wasn’t always popular. But not for lack of support, he said.

“There was no anti, people just weren’t aware of it,” he said. “Within the BMX community being pro is the highest level you can get to, so within that (community) it was popular.”

It was not until BMX became known by the general population that people even knew there was such a thing as going pro, he said.

“It’s still not like football or baseball or basketball or any of the big sports,” he said.

But, like with athletes in other sports, Moliterno made a name for himself by pulling off stunts that seemed impossible to the average person.

“I was always doing stuff away from the track like jumping over stuff, off of buildings, doing all the craziness and that grew into a style called freestyle,” he said. “We were doing flat-ground tricks, ramp tricks and we’d go to shows by popular riders and I got noticed that way, was sent some goodies and next thing you know, I’m traveling the country.”

A poster for a 1986 Hutch Trick Team summer tour in Queens refers to him as “Rad Rick Moliterno. King of amazing aerial artistry.” 

While he was on the road perfecting his craft, BMX was growing back in the Quad-Cities. In 1989, Moliterno decided to capitalize on that and opened Rampage Skate Park on Kimmel Drive in Davenport.

The indoor park, which closed in 2005, was named the longest-running skate park in the world and featured three wooden half-pipes, several quarter pipes in a range of heights and a vertical wall. This all lead to rougher riding, he said, and the need for a bike that could withstand the wear and tear.

Being a leader in the BMX community, Moliterno knew he could solve this problem. But if he was going to do it, the bikes were going to be the best on the market and held to the standard of excellence — the inspiration behind the future company’s name.

In November 1991 the doors to the Standard Byke Company opened in Davenport. Four years later, Moliterno started Goodtimes Superstore, the retail part of the business, in the same building.

“None of the companies were doing anything to make the bikes better so it was a need we tried to fill on our own,” he said. “We did; it influenced everything and somehow we’re still here.”

Moliterno is modest about his beginnings, but being a BMX legend with a famous skate park, he attracted the attention of BMX magazines and their staff writers. Competitions drew in competitors from all over, and the lore about what was rolling in Davenport grew.

“I was in all the magazines monthly so I was well known. It was big news in the (BMX) community that we started the company so all eyes were upon us,” he said. “And then we happened to deliver, somehow. We stuck it out through all the hard times, and here we are.”

What sets the Standard bikes apart is not only how they are made, but why and who makes them. The bikes were built with durability in mind and by a man who knows everything there is to know about BMX. 

“In the beginning the whole goal was to make them so they wouldn’t break. That was successful, so then we attacked all the high-end needs and all the different aspects of riding,” he said. “There’s different ways to ride the bikes and those require different types of frames and set ups, so we addressed all those specific needs within it and make excellent bike models.”

Even though BMX swings in popularity, Standard has stayed consistent with orders. That’s good, Moliterno said, considering how small his staff is.

“We don’t grow or shrink much. We stay about the same because of what we are,” he said. “We are limited on how many we can make because there’s only three of us.”

Moliterno and his employees work in the back of his new shop along Illinois Route 84 North in East Moline, where the company moved in 2019, a year after Moliterno was inducted into the BMX Hall of Fame.

The walls in the front part of the red building are lined with rows of bike frames. Off to the side racks of T-shirts, jackets, hats, stickers — anything a Standard Byke fan would need. A door close to the front desk leads to where Moliterno and his team make it all happen.

The workspace is big, with a loft wrapping around most of the room. Frames previously made by Standard are fastened to the loft railing; gifts from customers who wanted Moliterno to have the bikes they bought from him years prior. Beneath it are massive ramps where Moliterno and the crew ride after work.

Behind the ramps and wrapping around the outer walls of the building, machinery lines the walls where the team builds the bikes by hand. Each bike is made individually, almost part by part. The first step is to create the front end, then the rear using 430 steel, or what Moliterno refers to as a “magical material.”

The durable metal is what sets the bikes apart from others on the market, he said, and accomplishes his goal of selling the best bike on the market. 

“People come to us to this day because they want the best ones that are made,” he said.

Once the parts are complete the team assembles them in a process Moliterno describes as being similar to a “hot rod shop” where instead of turning out hundreds at a time, the trio make a smaller, more manageable amount, considering each bike is different.

“There’s so many different types of bikes to ride within BMX and a lot of it is dictated by wheel size, person size and usage like racing or off-track,” he said.

For an average BMX bike, assembly can take as little as 45 minutes. Custom bikes, he said, can take up to 15 hours. Post-assembly, the bike moves down to a tent at the end of the workshop where Jaret Schwarz, owner of Schwarz Powder Coating, does the paint.

Schwarz has been in business for himself since he was 19 years old and has worked out of the Standard workshop since it was in Davenport. In addition to the bikes, his business does powder coating for a variety of items such as car rims and motorcycles.

Once the bike is painted a gel coating is applied to make it shine. The bike then goes into a large oven where the gel cures. Once its out, the rest of the details are done: lines are cleaned, brakes are added and a custom plate with a serial number is applied to the back.

All of these steps are fairly new to the company, Moliterno said. For the first 16 years of Standard’s existence the bikes were manufactured in Wisconsin until he decided he wanted to bring operations in-house.

Moliterno hired the best workers he could find to manufacture the bikes and eventually learned how to use the machinery himself. This, he said, was never the goal when he started. He just wanted to solve a problem.

“I still think it’s funny that we’re still here,” he said of his company. “It was started to fill a need, and I just figured, ‘Well maybe it’ll be around two or three years.’ We’ve been around 33 years.”

With his small but mighty team, Moliterno and the crew crank out about 500 bikes a year on average. Once the bikes are done, Standard ships them out both nationally and internationally.