The continuing conversation with Maynard Hershon

Maynard: So many things you just said resonate with me. We never imagined that rides would start and end in parking lots. Why would we have wanted to arrive at the ride start in a car? What, so we could get home 10 minutes after the ride ended? 

Drive and leave immediately and never have a chance to hang out with your friends? I have to think that our friends were more important to us then. Our cycling friends were our best friends.

I worked for three bike shops on the sales floor and behind parts counters. I worked for my friend Tom Petrie, who represents several cool Euro parts suppliers, in his office in El Cerrito, California. 

I worked for Mavic, Shimano and SRAM at dozens of national and international level bike races. I wrote columns for Winning Magazine, VeloNews, the Bicycle Paper and the Rivendell Reader.

I wrote catalogs for Serotta Racing Cycles, Fuji Cycles, LeMond Racing Cycles and now Formigli USA.

I never HAD a resume. What we had were friends. You could say our circle of friends was almost like family. Someone you knew also knew someone in almost any cycling hotbed in the US. 

We didn't need no stinkin' resumes.

Earle: No stinkin' resumes? With first names as uncommon as Maynard and Earle, we seldom needed last names. Earle is a little more common than Maynard, so I sometimes would get, "Oh, you're THAT Earle." 

Maynard: It's funny when you say it that way, Oh! You're THAT Earle, but it's true! I wonder if we knew how perishable out little world was, Earle... Sigh....

Earle: In a way, that world still exists. That close circle of friends is still out there. It's just that for most of us, cycling is no longer the center of our lives. We get together just a few times a year. Or we keep in touch via the Internet. 

When I went to San Francisco State to finish my degree, I had to find work more lucrative than a bicycle shop job, at least for part-time hours. I also widened my circle to include a lot of people who had never been serious cyclists. 

In those days, at the dawn of the personal computer era, it was easy to lose track of people. I had to go out of my way to stay in touch with even a few people.

Meeting again was sometimes a happy accident. In Boise, Idaho, I'd been away from the bike business for most of a decade when I went to the start of the HP Women's Challenge. Wandering around as a fat man with no credentials, it still took me just a little time to connect with old friends. 

You were there doing motorcycle duty. Brian Greiger, now living just a few miles down the road from me, was a hired gun for a European team that could not afford to bring a mechanic. Mike Neel was managing the Saeco-Timex Women's team. Our conversations picked up right where they had left off years before.

The same thing happened last summer when I went to High Point, North Carolina, for the National Criterium Championship. I walked into a nearly empty hotel bar and started talking to one of the two other patrons. He was Bill Humphreys, who I had not spoken with in something like 35 years. Within minutes, we were laughing and exchanging John Allis stories.

The Internet has made it easier to maintain at least some contact. You and I have not been face to face in more than a decade, but here we are, talking as if we had a steady stream of beer pitchers and all the time in the world.

More conversation with Maynard

Maynard: I lived in Marin County from '75 until '84, so I watched the mountain bike revolution happen. And I sure knew Charlie Kelly, as did anyone who rode a bike in Marin in those days.

Thinking about Charlie makes me think about Phil Brown, another cyclist, rock 'n' roll roadie and later a sound engineer. He and Doug White, who makes some wonderful bike parts today, built road frames called Brown and White. 

Phil was just here in Denver with his old friend Paul Stubblebine, another cyclist and sound engineer. Paul and Phil tell great stories of working with music business folks back when. 

You ask, "Who was the smartest personal manager, Phil?" Or, "Paul, who was the greatest waste of talent?" The stories just roll out of those guys.

Guys like these, Charlie and Phil and Paul, would be great guys to know even if we hadn't met them through cycling. But cycling introduced us to SO many super people, men and women....

I'm afraid that the social aspects of cycling, the opportunities to get to know people, are not so frequent today. People drive to the rides and take their bikes out of their cars.

They look at their phones when the rides break. They're so connected that they have to get somewhere right after the ride ends. No hanging out for coffee. No getting to know their own Charlies, Phils and Pauls.

Earle: Especially in the early season, rides could be at a "conversational" pace, meaning nobody was working so hard you could not talk to the person next to you. 

Rides also ended at a destination, not a parking lot. In Berkeley, rides began or ended at Peet's Coffee, either the Northside location or Domingo Avenue, at the start of the Tunnel Road climb. The conversations continued there, sometimes for hours.

A day off work was a day to hang around with your bike friends. A ride might last a few hours, but nobody was in a hurry to part company.

Some of this can be attributed to the small world we lived in. Before Greg and Lance, before the Ironman, the world of high-end bikes was small. Small enough for no more than one or two degrees of separation from virtually everybody who mattered.

A personal example: When the economy dipped in 1981 and the Bicycle Exchange might have to lay somebody off, I was also ready to leave Cambridge. Rich Olken, the owner of the BiEx, and Mike Zane, one of the founders of Kryptonite Locks, each told me that I would probably get along with Peter Rich of Velo Sport in Berkeley. 

So I called the store, talked to the manager, who was from the planet known as Southern California, and he said, "Yeah, we need somebody, can you send a resume?"

I said I would, but also suggested that the manager check with other friends in the business. I got a call the next day. Somebody from Velo Sport had made a few calls and I had passed muster. More important than a resume was the recommendation of friends in the business.

The bike world is a lot bigger than that now. The small world we lived in hangs on in small pockets, but we get together for rides only a couple of times a year instead of a couple of times a week.

Continuing the conversation

Picking up where the conversation ended on my last post:

Maynard: As Earle suggests, there's not all that much to say about bicycles. I know that the online and paper bicycle publications fill their pages with content about stuff issue after issue.

But -- it's just stuff. Stuff won't guarantee a great ride. It won't climb the hill for you or set a new PB on your usual loop. 

Actual skill, fitness or genius isn't for sale. REI doesn't offer them. You have to have them or earn them.

What can be sold is stuff. Selling it means convincing you that using that stuff is the equivalent of possessing skill, class or genius, qualities that can't be sold.

Earle: There have been a few publications that were not ‘stuff’ driven. The best of these was Fat Tire Flyer, the first ever mountain bike magazine, edited by the incomparable Charlie Kelly. Here is everything you need to know about ‘stuff’ and complete bicycles, for that matter: http://www.sonic.net/~ckelly/Seekay/bike_review.htm

SeeKay was there when mountain biking took off, and one of the inaugural inductees into the Mountain Biking Hall of fame. But he never got so caught up in himself that he forgot that it was just stuff, and the ride was the most important thing.  He was also a first-class rock ‘n’ roll roadie and a decent guitar player with an eclectic repertoire.  I met SeeKay through bicycles, but we had much more to talk about.

Charlie is just one example of the great people I have met through bicycles.

Finally, some new content

I have been away from this blog for far too long. I'm sure anybody who tried to follow it has given up hope. Well, please come back. I have new content and will update the blog far more regularly.

On my regular Website, I started an electronic conversation with Maynard Hershon, an old friend and talented writer. I am going to continue that conversation here, picking up where we left off:

This is a continuation of an electronic dialog between Maynard Hershon and me.

Earle: In our last installment, we talked a lot about classy riding and riders and how much has been lost from the days of our youth. What we left out was the personalities involved. At one time or another, Maynard and I have both written pieces for Grant Peterson’s Rivenell Reader.

In the late 1980’s, I was finishing a degree in magazine journalism and was looking for writing outlets. I had met Grant, knew he had the Reader, so called him and asked what I could do for him. He suggested that I interview Jobst Brandt.

I jumped at the chance. Jobst was widely known as highly opinionated, and less known for being right far more often than wrong, even when he contradicted conventional wisdom. I had met him a couple of times, and the world of high-end bicycles being as small as it was then, he readily agreed to have me meet him for lunch and then spend the afternoon with him in Palo Alto.

We spent the time in a wide-ranging conversation about his annual ride in the Alps, his friendships with titans of the Italian bicycle business and more. When we talked about mindfulness on the road, he showed me the buckets of tools he had picked up on various rides. We talked about ice riding, his relationship to the Palo Alto Bicycle catalog and the Avocet brand, and much much more.

I really liked the three-page piece I wrote for Grant. It was a glimpse into the world of international cycling at the highest level.

Grant, however, was disappointed. We had not discussed five-speed freewheels versus six or even seven; never mentioned indexed shifting versus non and barely touched on bald tires versus tires with tread.

In short, we had talked about bicycling, not bicycles. To be continued ...