Does a bike have a soul? I can’t make that argument, I don’t think I do either, actually. But we do invest a lot of emotion, pride and dare I say love in our bikes. We form emotional bonds to inanimate objects all the time. My favorite old dead car had to sit in the driveway for another year falling further into rusty disrepair before I had it towed away. On an American call-in radio show Car Talk, a caller asked if the engine was a car’s soul and if the car had a new engine put in, did the car lose that soul? This led to a discussion of where else its soul might be and I was more than amused to have them suggest the soul resides in the headliner of the interior.
My Merlin, with its recently discovered hairline crack can’t go into a dumpster when finally put down. It would be like throwing your dog’s corpse into a dumpster. Hopefully there is a market for alloyed titanium and it can be recycled, re-smelted, reborn as a (gasp) golf club. Or does it go over the mantle? Or out to stud? Or a desperate last ditch back alley surgery?*
Do pros bond with their bikes? They can’t, they are on new bikes every other week. There would be a lot of weeping at the service course if they did.
I’m not quite in the market for a replacement but I could be heading in that direction and it brings me to conundrum number two: what are you buying when you buy a new bike? In the old days if you lusted after a steel Colnago Master you ended up with a steel bike made in northern Italy. You were buying into an Italian artisan fantasy aided by the fact that the coolest professional you liked rode a Colnago. Many years ago a American friend did just that and found out the Colnagos shipped to the USA were made in a second Italian factory, more the apprentice shop. My friend’s Colnago’s rear dropouts were misaligned by almost a centimeter, rideable but not the Italian ideal. Ernesto was not working on his bike. Truth be told, all these bikes were made on some sort of assembly line made by underpaid possibly bored workers. What coming out of a factory isn’t?
Now if I want a Colnago, there is a very good chance it will be made in Taiwan on an assembly line by underpaid possibly bored workers. The same factory will also be knocking out Giants and Scotts. The good news is the rear dropouts won’t be out by a centimeter. They will be close to perfect. My point, if I have one, is the euro-fantasy part of this is gone.
If you need your frame to have a soul there is still hope. I’ve been lucky in that my last two bikes were made in shops I actually walked in, looked at the racks of tubes, spent a little time breathing the air in there. My steel bike was built in a one man shop, a standard 60 cm frame but built for me for $350, a sum at the time which was outrageous to the non-velominati. My Merlin was second hand but I went to the factory and spent some time there helping to restore its luster and put on new decals. If bikes had souls they would be imparted by the builders who put a lot of effort and some love into transforming some uncut tubes into something as fantastic as a frame. The soul might still be there in the small shops like Cyfac in France or Moots in the USA where the person who selects the tubing might be the same person as the one who joins the tubes and worries over that frame’s details. But they don’t have souls or spirits, do they? Native Americans believe inanimate objects do. If a rock does, if a stream does, maybe a bike does. Or more likely I’m full of it, a frame is just a hunk of carbon or metal and it’s all a matter of design, execution and price.
If your Colnago EPS is built in Italy it would be in this place. Does this add or subtract to the euro-fantasy?
*the little known bottom bracket-ectomy, where the old BB is milled out and a larger BB 30 is neatly welded in, voila, ridable bike!
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This is my soul sister! Built ~1986-87 by Peter Brotherton from a tube set I scored from my LBS. Tange No.1 Pro, Cinelli lugs, Columbus drop outs. Love rebuilding it and riding it. A tad small, but feels oh-so-good.
Learn't a few things from Peter during the progress of the build. Mainly recovery tips. I think Allan used a few of his tips.
Had a few falls with it. Has been painted red, then blue now orange and is in need of a new top tube. Suffered a fall from hook in garage and handle bars dented the TT.
My old work horse all 11 kg's of it! Columbus MAX It was built by Hillman Cycles and repainted by Paconi. I have a love/hate relationship with this one. My previous Paconi was stolen and I chose this one from the insurance pay out. Should've got the 853 next to it.
@BarracudaMany thanks Barracuda, she's getting there, just picked up the wheels yesterday so the build can get underway now.
This is a superb thread. Many super hot bikes, lots of good stories.
Frank - just curious, how do you define/determine when it's time to swap chains/cassettes? I know there are many different methods & this is kind of a personal decision for most folks...
I use Veloce chains on my two Campa-equipped road bikes, Record on the Tommasini. No issues or noise for me and I just wait for sales, then buy a bunch at once.
This bike had a soul. It now does not.
I like the idea that a bike has soul that is passed to the rider, that is then passed back to the bike. I've had bikes that I've loved, but no bike with real soul like my first road bike.
Despite following pro cycling for years, it took a bad back injury to make me consider taking up the sport. My gymnastic career was over, but the idea began to take hold after surgery and in physical therapy. I was riding the therapy bike before I was walking, and before I knew it, I had purchased a bike that I had no guarantee I could ride. I bought a Cervelo Soloist mostly because the engineer in me went a bit giddy over the aero frame. It sat in my bedroom and was the last thing I saw at night, and the first thing I saw in the morning. When I finally got to ride it a few months later, I knew I was in love. Sure, it hurt like hell, but it felt awesome to be defying fate. With continued therapy, the pain became manageable and I felt normal again. And it was all because of the bike.
I've had other bikes come and go since then, but I will never sell that Cervelo. No other bike has had such a hold on me. I still ride it, proudly even. Some make disparaging remarks, but I hardly notice. Yes, they are just tools for us to use, but I feel for the poor bastard that hasn't made that kind of connection with their machine. When the sad day comes to retire my glorious steed, you can bet it will be properly mounted on a plinth in tribute to obstinacy.
I think a bikes soul takes time to grow. I like the idea that you have to do at least as many km as dollars you paid for it and that the soul passes from rider to bike and back again
It does not really have soul though, until it is moulded perfectly to you, the rider, and feels perfectly normal to you, but horribly alien to anyone else. I've had my Bianchi Mono-Q for over a year now, and it's growing more soul all the time. I'm not rough on gear, so even though it gets ridden in all weather, it is still rather pristine to look at, except for the Celeste bar tape. Conversely, I've got a cheap Electra Beach Cruiser that was born with soul. Currently, I'm n=5, and it's hard to tell which I love more, the Bianchi or the Electra. The most recent acquisition, a Cervelo P3, is distinctly lacking in soul at present. I'm working on that. Not sure if it will ever have any though. It's too weird. Maybe when it gets it's proper aero wheels and I ride it on the road more.
If a bike has a soul its only because we gave it one, I have a Fuji tourer which was all things to me for many years then I had a custom made steel Europa made and now my love has transferred to that. I really only ride the Europa in the dry and the the Fuji in the rain but now the passion has gone! The Fuji is one fat heifer and I hate to ride it, too heavy. Now I'm trying to scrape together more $'s to get the nice people at Europa cycles to make me another nice light bike that can accommodate mudguards.
As far as a soul goes now my sexy red bike( the Europa ) now has the soul and the Fuji is a collection of parts only to be ridden when no alternative presents.
So.... I am doing research into this very idea of Bicycle and Soul.
The real research now is to find... the most FAMOUS unknown Bicycle.
ROSEBUD.
Rosebud... the mysterious utterance in Citizen Kane was the last word of a dying man, the secret to his sorrow and known only to him. We come to find it was the name of his childhood sled, ultimately thrown into a furnace with a casual disregard, the name Rosebud in flames burning into our memory the movie's final scene.
Citizen Kane seen by many as the greatest film ever made
Rosebud: one of Film's Great Dying lines
Rosebud: one of Film's Great Quotes
Rosebud: one Cinema's Great Secrets
Seventy years later people still ask, What was Rosebud?
Rosebud resonates with a truth all of us can understand, traveling through the innocent purity of childhood to finally face the fire and smoke of mortality and death. The final symbolic burning of Rosebud in the furnace of Kane's castle represents the Kane himself, his final memories and innocence ending before our eyes.
Of course everyone has an opinion, and Rosebud seems to have generated quite a few over the years.
My first experience with Citizen Kane was watching it with my father on our black-and-white TV one night in the late 60"²s when I was 12. In his late fifties he had actually seen Kane on its 1941 first run, sharing that with me.
He was a different man in the 40"²s living a wild and carefree life as a trumpet player in a Big Band. The man I knew cared not for wealth and fame but for the welfare of others and peace of a quiet family life. Rosebud became to me the symbol of my father, peaceful, centered and thoughtful. Things I wish for yet find elusive to this day.
As the years passed I had viewed Citizen Kane as any other great film. However I was unaware of the truth of Rosebud's origin. In one of my Psychology classes I remember a professor quoting Orson Welles, who explained the idea behind the word "Rosebud."
"It's a gimmick, really, a rather tawdry device, a dollar-book Freudian gag."
Then in 1989 Gore Vidal, of whom I am a big fan, blew the lid off Rosebud forever with an outlandish claim! Rosebud was a nickname Randolph Hearst used for his mistress' clitoris! According to Vidal the "real" Screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz had found out about this and threw it in as a joke.
When I told my dad that story he laughed his head off. I had a new hero: Herman Mankiewicz.
Rosebud being a clitoris was fine with me and I was happy to leave it at that. Until 2007 and I needed a cool name for a Bicycle Shop.
A bicycle was one of the most prized possessions to a boy growing up in the sunny Santa Clara Valley in the 1960"²s. Before the "Silicon Valley" there was "The Valley of Heart's Delight" and it was by bicycle that is was best explored: Stevens Creek Dam, Blackberry Farm, Saratoga Springs, Villa Montalvo, Mt. Eden, and other names a 10 year old boy would be proud to say he had traveled to via bicycle. To Charles Foster Kane, Rosebud may have been a sled; to me Rosebud was my bicycle. So grew the idea for the name of my bicycle shop: Citizen Chain.
Citizen Chain
The naming of a bicycle shop can be as daunting a task as the decision to open one. With a name that referenced memories of the happy times of both my youth and my father, I felt I was halfway there. I bought the Internet domain name and began on the second more difficult endeavor of opening an actual shop.
"Rosebud is a Bicycle!" Darryll said as a matter of fact. No hello. No howdy-do.
I protested figuring he had finally gotten my wordplay. "Yes it is my bicycle." I said.
Shaking his head, Darryll proceeded to tell me about his New York trip. About being at a talk by David Byrne "” yes that Davis Byrne "” where he shared the pain of the recent theft of his bicycle. It was here that Mr. Byrne shared a little known secret that Rosebud was in fact based on a stolen bicycle, owned by a young Herman Mankiewicz. My mind began to spin. No way.
I began to type, searching Google. With Darryll looking over my shoulder my first Google search's lead only to the basic sites, or my own new site. Then on my third entry I added the name of Mankiewicz and Wilkes-Barre to Rosebud and bicycle.
There it was. One article originally published on May, 1, 1991 titled "Listen Up, Cinema Sleuths: Rosebud Was Really A Bike" by Joe Butkiewicz, a writer for the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader. His reference was MANK: The Wit, World and Life of Herman Mankiewicz the Richard Meryman biography about Mankiewicz.
As the story goes, Rosebud was a bicycle given to Herman Mankiewicz for Christmas, just after his tenth birthday. Soon afterward, Herman's bicycle, Rosebud, was stolen from the front of the public library as he studied. Blaming Herman's irresponsibility for the loss, his parents refused to replace the bike. Rosebud was never returned, but Herman's loss evolved into the immortal Rosebud of Citizen Kane.
The unfortunate loss of David Byrne's bike led me to what? The little known fact that Rosebud was a bike is one thing. What else is there?
I am determined to find the truth. Herman and Rosebud, what was it about this bike and its loss that drove a wedge between a father and son. What happened to Herman's bike?
I discussed the history of Rosebud with Herman's son Frank Mankiewicz, during a telephone conversation in August of 2011. A charming man, I soon hope to interview in person, gave me the words I now view as my call to action.
Rosebud was a bike... The truth needs to be told, and will be. I promise.
Solving "The Greatest Bicycle Theft of All Time" may be a more difficult endeavor.
Stay tuned.
Dallas Adams
dallas@citizenchain.com
Wow, that's quite a story!
@Dallas Adams Fascinating...I eagerly await the next installment!