How'd I get here?... Simple...I never left! I just never adapted to the black spokes,wheels,hubs,post,bars,stem thing that took hold of the cycling world a while back. So when everyone else sort of moved on and got all sweaty for crap like FSR Stumpjumpers and Trek Fuels and Fisher Sugars, and Santa Cruz blahblahblah, and junk like that, I simply kept my old bikes going with massive stocks of stuff aquired though years working in shops. Eventually the bike geek that I bacame when the industry left me behind at some point came back into vogue and suddenly there were websites with thousands of pictures of parts that I either currently owned, or owned at one time, or knew somebody who owned, etc...and hundreds of people who felt about the old stuff the same way I did.
Important also, is that I never got all hot and sweaty for the Cunningham/Potts/Ritchey stuff and all the crap about who did or didn't invent the mountain bike. All that industry garbage just seems so contrived, and you never seem to hear Potts, or Cunningham or Ritchey tell stories about how they specifically were the beginning of some international movement (OK, so Fisher has probably hung that shingle on himself a few hundred times, but not the other fellas!) they just mostly tell stories about how their scene began and the cool vibe that they enjoyed during their early years on the trail. I'm not saying that those guys didn't have a primary role in the rise of the popularity of the sport, culminating in what I consider the true heyday of the industry in the late 80's and early 90s, or that they didn't come up with some bad-ass component designs, but really...Like they were the first people to ride/build a trail specific bike out of the best technology and materials available to them at the time?! Please! What does the Swiss military say about that?!
My MOM used to side her single speed military surplus cruiser, modified by my grandfather for her recreational use, on walking trails around Washington DC during WWII, years before Cunningham could walk! I'm not implying that Retrobike isn't into that stuff, but there is a distinct bias toward that California scene over at MTBR-VRC, whereas Retrobike is more in line with the era following on the heels.
Anyway, so I was glad that finally, here at Retrobike especially, there was a group of folks that recognized the merits of the post Cunningham et al, pre Cannondale Head Shok era! In all seriousness...the Mountainbike glory days for me is about 1988 until 1995-6. The Purchase of Klein by Trek was my darkest day, not for the love of Klein, but for the loathing of the corporatizing of the industry that the purchase represented... :cry: Shimano painted XT and XTR derailleurs and cranks and just about everything, rather than just finish the material correctly in the first place, Avid essentially unplugged the CNC mill and started pot-casting everything overseas, Cook Bros went back to machining coffee filters or whatever the hell Witmer is making money at these days, Every bike company turned its back on USA made steel and adopted basically the same Taiwan built Aluminum frame with 50 year old Schwinn bullet-style graphics as their flagship (and then didn't even have the decency to lower the price!), and I knew I was done. Retro or nothing. Deore DX, SDG and Altek for ever, thank you very much!
So I never got reintroduced to Retro, per se. Rather, you other interlopers just discovered me.
And now you're driving up the cost of my eBay auctions!
