Gordon The Bike Guy

The building that used to be the Cap’s Bicycle store that was located at 420 East Columbia Street is undergoing some renovations. The new owners are fixing up the basement where the Cap’s Free Museum used to be. I took a wander through there the other day and noticed that the workers had uncovered my dad’s filing cabinet, not a filing cabinet in the usual sense, but a filing cabinet that my dad would use; the space between the floor joists. With a few ceiling tiles removed I could see some old bicycle catalogs and I could just imagine my dad smiling the day he put them there; thinking to himself I wonder who’ll find these. That was his way. Somewhere in a pub in England there is a picture hanging on wall of a thousand pictures with a Cap’s Bicycle Store bumper sticker stuck on the back of it. At least it was there when dad and I were sitting in the pub and he lost interest in our conversation and started counting. I naively asked what he was doing and he answered, “Seven across and four down, that should be it, now go turn that picture of those ducks around.” I did and there it was, the bumper sticker, planted there on a previous trip. That’s what this stack of catalogs that sit on my desk are like; something he put away to be found later.

They date from between 1967 and 1974 and offer up some interesting tidbits about what was happening in the bicycle biz at the time. The CCM catalog of 1967 proclaims in a letter from the president that there are over five million bicycles in Canada and that the bicycle was no longer just a child’s toy or a means of transportation but a vehicle to satisfy our desire to participate in more leisure activity. The president made the usual prediction of growing and being prosperous. I wonder if he had predicted the impending invasion of ten speed bicycles? In 1967 CCM offered 33 models of bicycles, sixteen were two or three speeds and only two were ten-speeds. Today customers in the store are concerned over where bicycles are made.Being patriotic we all like to support Canadian manufacturers like Devinci. During the early seventies though, Canadian builders were slow out of the blocks in the racing bike department. Customers of thirty five years ago craved imports. The leading brands of the day were the French Peugeot, Mercier, Gitane, Mirage or the Italian Coppi and Bottechia. The stack of ancient catalogs the archeological building renovators uncovered showed that the attack on the Canadian bicycle industry wasn’t just from over the Atlantic, but there was a force approaching from across the Pacific.

At the time we didn’t think much of Japanese built bikes in the bike shop. Good bikes came from Europe and had Campagnolo parts. The Japanese hadn’t figured out how to make bicycles for the North American market where the riders were taller and heavier. Times would change and the Japanese builders would have there turn at market dominance. In 1974  they just had funny names like Nishiki, Miyata, Panasonic, Fuji and my all time favourite, Kabuki. I liked Kabuki. They made an all stainless steel bike called the Submariner. It was a thing of beauty; heavy but nice to look at. If you have a working Kabuki, I’ll buy it from you. Kabuki was a trademark owned by Bridgestone. Bridgestone was another Japanese bicycle maker but they thought the Kabuki name sounded more Japanese. Bridgestone is an enormous multinational company; one of the largest tire companies in the world and a fairly small bicycle company, with its own factory in Japan. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, their U.S. bicycle division was run by Grant Petersen, a brilliant, talented and idiosyncratic designer. Petersen, a hard-core cyclist, marched to a “different drummer” than most of the industry. He introduced many innovations to the market, and also strongly resisted other trends and innovations that he didn’t approve of. Grant Petersen continues in the bicycle business with Rivendell Bicycle Works. Don’t worry yourself if at some point you have ridden a Japanese made bike because the 1988 Canadian Olympic Team road bikes made by Kuwahara.

The stack of catalogs is higher then this column can be long but there is a new invasion upon us and it is being led by the Dutch. This time the bikes don’t have to be made in the invading country because it’s an invasion of style. There are more and more Dutch styled bikes showing up in my shop. They are equipped with crazy accessories like fenders, baskets, kickstands and internalized three speed hubs. Maybe if the old CCM company was still around they would stand a chance today against this new invasion. My dad’s birthday was on August 1st and he would have been 89 years old. Thanks for the time capsule dad to keep my pedals turning.