He zoomed all over San Francisco, astonishing onlookers with his confident and acrobatic style of in-line skating.
Tim Cramer’s signature move was an untraditional split, with his front toe up and back toe down. It was a trick no one else had mastered quite like him. He was kind of a daredevil — once he even skated in a split down the California Street hill.
His recent untimely death, his friends say, cut short the artistry of a Bay Area original.
The 53-year-old San Francisco resident and prominent roller skater died after his motorcycle collided with a vehicle on June 18 near Crossover Drive and 25th Avenue off Golden Gate Park. A police statement said Cramer was transported to a local hospital with life-threatening injuries and died shortly after.
Beyond his talent and skills as a self-taught carpenter, Cramer was an instrumental part of San Francisco’s eccentric and fun-loving roller skating scene. He was close friends with and the right-hand man to the Rev. David Miles, the founder of the Church of 8 Wheels roller disco on Fillmore Street, who has been called the Godfather of Skate. Cramer was also a member of the California Outdoor Roller Sports Association.
The day after the crash, Miles and other loved ones gathered at the spot where their friend could often be seen on Sundays: the 6th Avenue enclave in Golden Gate Park. They bid adieu to him, in trademark roller disco fashion, skating to his honor and sharing stories.
Tim Cramer was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on April 23, 1967, to Thelma and Carl Cramer. His father was a military man who served 20 years in the Air Force. His sister, Michelle, was born when he was 7.
His mother had skated in her youth while growing up in San Francisco, and when Cramer was about 4, she put him skates.
When the family lived in upstate New York, Cramer got into ice skating during the winter months. His parents even built him an ice skating rink next to the garage, his mother, Thelma Cramer, said.
The family moved frequently to various Air Force bases, and Cramer attended high school in Bell View, Neb., after which he stopped skating, his mother said. It was only after he moved to the Bay Area, in 1987, that he really started to finesse his skating style.
Cramer’s daughter, Ashley McCoy, was born in 1993. She eventually moved back to Texas to live with her mother, Thelma Cramer said.
In the early 2000s, he met Miles and joined the inner crew of the city’s roller skating scene. They’d skate all over Golden Gate Park and on Friday nights would go all around the city.
His innate sense for tinkering and fixing broken anythings made him a frequent partner to Miles in a number of skating-related projects. He was in large part how the Church of 8 Wheels stayed running.
“If he gave you his word, it was his bond,” Miles said.
Like the time in 2010, when the roller crew went to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, a decades-long tradition they cultivated together.
Cramer was the crew’s builder. He always constructed their camp from scratch, including a huge stage structure that included a roller rink: the Black Rock Roller Disco.
That year, there was a huge storm that tore the whole thing down, leaving in ruins the skate floor they’d worked so hard to build.
But Cramer was unfazed. He and Miles took off for San Francisco to buy another wood floor and came back before the festival even began.
“That was Tim,” Miles said. “There was no one else who could have helped me like that, and that’s the way it’s always been.”
As a child, his father would bring home electronics and Cramer would spend the whole night taking them apart and putting them back together, his mother said.
“He was very smart, but he wouldn’t do the work in school to show them,” Thelma Cramer said. “He was determined not to let them know how smart he was.”
His mother said she was continually amazed by the projects he’d quietly tinker with at home, and she always wanted him to show his teachers — but his shyness always got in the way.
That early passion for building and practical problem-solving carried over into Cramer’s adult life - especially when he was making something for someone else, said his partner of 11 years, Cheryl Dunn.
Dunn, 52, remembers the way he taught her every step of reconstructing a 1900s-era Craftsmen home in Vallejo: taking it apart, stripping it, sanding it, staining it, making it beautiful.
It was like watching an artist in his element, she said. “He’d get off into his building and you couldn’t mess with him — couldn’t bug him, couldn’t call, couldn’t text him.”
Sometimes it seemed as though he knew how to do everything: solder, sew, tailor, bake, cook. “Sometimes, I’d ask him, ‘Is there anything you can’t do?’” Dunn said.
He had that certain look, too, Miles said: He always wore old, beat-up hats, the kind you’d have to hit against your leg to get the dust off.
“There are very few heroes in roller skating — you have your Barry Bonds, Steph Curry, all these guys are champions,” Miles said. “But in the roller skating world we don’t really have that. But if that was something we did push, he’d be one of them.”
He had a big influence on a lot of the skaters — many of whom felt like misfits and outcasts — who came to the 6th Avenue skating section in Golden Gate Park to try out a new hobby.
He had an easy manner, a booming voice and a penchant for the word “marvelous,” Dunn said.
In recent months Cramer had suffered a major setback: He was repairing his 33-foot sailboat, anchored in a cove along the Oakland estuary, in April when he was approached by a police sergeant and told he had one day to move the vessel. He said he left and returned an hour later, only to find police towing the boat, and later saw it crushed in a sweep, KTVU reported.
About a week later, however, an anonymous person gifted Cramer a 29-foot sailboat after reading about his story. Cramer had been living in his car and had lost most of his belongings when his boat was destroyed.
Miles wasn’t surprised to hear about the generosity — he felt it was exactly the energy Cramer put out into the world. “You don’t do that for anyone,” he said. “You do that for the people who deserve it.”
A few days before the accident, he and Cramer went out to Oakland to pick up a shipment of skates. The coronavirus epidemic had changed so much about their life — Burning Man had been canceled, and all their plans had been put on hold. They sat in the car together — laughing, reminiscing, hoping and wondering what the next weeks, months and years could look like.
It was hard to tell; there was so much uncertainty. But Miles said he would see him Friday for their weekly skate, and they said goodbye.
Cramer is survived by his partner, Cheryl Dunn of Daly City; mother, Thelma Cramer of Rome, N.Y.; sister and brother-in-law Michelle and Brett Batson of Westmoreland, N.Y.; daughter Ashley McCoy and son-in-law Bobby McCoy of Fort Polk, La.; niece Ellen N. Batson of Westmoreland, N.Y.; and grandson Frank McCoy.
Annie Vainshtein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: avainshtein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @annievain
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July 01, 2020 at 10:51PM
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Tim Cramer, influential member of SF's eccentric roller skating scene, dead at 53 - San Francisco Chronicle
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