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.