PATH: ERIK ZO

0 Comment

Oh, how the years go by . . .
In 1976, when I was 11 years-old, I was given a 24” wheeled sew-up clad Frejus track bike. I had been racing on the road for 4 years starting with a 20” sew-up wheeled Legnano, next moving on to a Coppi with the same sized wheels. The road bike I was riding when I got the Ferjus was a 24” wheeled Coppi loaned to me by the Murphy Family. John W. Murphy, the head of the family, ran a bicycle importing company down on Shipley St. in SOMA. It’s where his three daughters and I played while the adults worked. Yeah… I grew up in a bike shop. John also started the bicycle coalition . . . and well, that led to The Golden Gate Bridge being open on the west side to bicycles and Golden Gate Park being closed on Sundays to cars. I also remember how the day after I got the Frejus, an old git came in on an orange Cinelli track bike clad with fenders and panniers. Out of his bags, he pulled out a stack of records and a bunch of cogs secured with a Binda toestrap, and said, “ Hey kid, now that you have a fixed gear, you need these”. The toe strap had inch pitch cogs on it from six teeth to eleven and half by eighth cogs from thirteen to twenty-four teeth. The records— Louis Cottrell trio (I played clarinet as a child!) Stan Getz at Le Hot Club, and Django Reinhardt, as well as a smattering of big band and Dixieland—all discs, any “Jazzman” would approve of. At this point, the track bike was a natural progression in my racing. Because my parents had to keep our shop open on weekends, some customers on the shop team “The Golden Gate Wheelman” would take me with them to the races; the track bike allowed me to ride in events on the banks at Hellyer Park in San Jose. Fast forward thirty-five years or so . . . I am riding down Market street heading towards Fifth Street and 3 teens or maybe even preteens roll by, swaying at the bottom of each stroke to reach their pedals from their seats that are on their top tubes. As the light turns yellow the oldest one yells, “MASH IT!” — I realize they are all on fixes— and they sprint through the intersection leaving me at the crosswalk. Red light. I was remembering how back in 1985 the only fixed gear rider I met the whole year was a P.I. who had moved from New York. Then, Berlin 1993, and it’s the first Cycle Messenger Championships. There are 5 messengers who brought track bikes, the internet still did not have a web browser and maybe 50 out of 500 of those messengers knew what the internet was or even had an address there (clarify). And of course, before you could say “myspace”, all that had changed. Within a few years, the Messenger World Championships had put the fixed wheel under messengers from every city that partook; and that placed the “Fixie” in the eye of the youth in urban areas. It’s a short stretch from there to plot the number of members in the myspace fixed gear army group against the production numbers of bicycles with rear facing dropouts. What I am saying is that the fixed gear meme may be the first global youth trend to grow with the power of the internet. It gave the youth a look at the freedom and exhilaration of a vehicle anyone can understand… and they couldn’t resist. Ten years pass in no time at all, but, it’s amazing what can be accomplished in such a short amount of time. MASH the movie, led to a team, shop, and projects, but most importantly, a community is part of that whole mix. MASH is the old man with the pile of records and the strap of cogs. MASH is this book..and so many more stories yet to be written.
EZ