The End Of A Legend: R.I.P. Jack Taylor

Last week, I wrote a post about a Jack Taylor "Rough Stuff" bicycle designed in the 1950s and built, apparently, during the 1970s.

Jack Taylor (l) with brothers Ken and Norman

Well, the man whose name that bike bore died on Sunday.  Jack Taylor, who started building bicycles as a teenager in 1936.  At the time, he raced in the then-vibrant club racing scene in his native England.  According to legend (who started it, I don't know), he admired some high-end equipment but couldn't afford it.  So he set out to making it himself.

In the beginning, his friends Lance Bell and Jack Hood helped him.  At the end of the war, in 1945, his brothers Ken and Norman joined him to form Jack  Taylor Cycles.  Interestingly, Norman would come to be the actual frame-builder and Ken would build wheels, assemble the bikes and box them for shipping.  On each of those boxes--many of which went to the USA--Ken wrote, "Have a nice ride".  If I were a collector, I'd probably want one of those boxes almost as much as I'd want one of their bikes!

Jack, however, was the one who ensured you could tell a Jack Taylor--whether a racing, touring or "rough stuff" bike, or a tandem--from any other.  He's the one who gave the bikes their beautiful paint finishes and the box pinstriping that became his "signature", if you will.

That Jack Taylor stood out in a time and country with so many first-rate bike builders is a testament to, not only his (and his brothers') workmanship, but the ride and designs of their bikes.  They used geometries and configurations (such as curved seat tubes) that were previously all but unknown.  Among those configurations is the "Rough Stuff" frame I showed in my earlier post:  It has most of the major design elements of a modern mountain bike (high bottom bracket, sloping top tube, smaller-than-700C wheels) but was designed two decades before Gary Fisher, Joe Breeze, Keith Bontrager and the mountain-bike pioneers started barreling down Marin County fire trails on old Schwinn balloon-tired bombers.

Perhaps the most interesting Jack Taylor bikes--and the ones for which he is most renowned--are his touring bikes and tandems.  Those bikes are also the reason why JT was often called "the most French" of English bike builders.  The features that made them so well-suited to their purposes were adapted from constructeurs like Rene Herse, Alex Singer and Goeland:  frame geometries, integrated racks and fenders, oversized headsets and down tubes and brazed-on cantilever brakes, which hadn't been used much in England before JT started using them.

Many Taylor bikes (of all kinds) were also built without lugs in a technique called "filet brazing" or "bronze welding" which made the frames look as if they were sculpted from one piece of metal and polished.  (My  old Land Shark was constructed that way.)  Jack admitted that, as much as it made some of his bikes look as if they were built by one of the constructeurs, he did it because lugs and some other materials were scarce during the years just after the war.  However, even after he had an easier time finding the lugs he liked, he continued to make many of his bikes without them. Sometimes customers preferred them that way. But, more important, it allowed for greater flexibility in design:  an especially important point when building tandems.

Just about all Jack Taylors were built from Reynolds 531 tubing.  Jack developed a close relationship with the company.  For one thing, it guaranteed his supply.  But more important, it meant that Reynolds would make variations on their tubing--such as the curved and oversized tubes--to suit Taylors' unique designs.  In fact, Reynolds made some configurations of their tubing for Jack Taylor an no one else.

Jack retired in 1990, but Norman--who died six years ago at the age of 84--continued to build frames for another decade or so.  They had the same build quality as the older bikes, but because the paint and finish work was outsourced, they did not have the unique, distinctive beauty of the earlier bikes.

So goes another legend of the cycling world.  You can read another tribute (possibly better than mine) on a favorite blog of mine:  The Retrogrouch.

Afghan Cycles: Women In Solidarity

Recently, a colleague at work told me, almost sheepishly, that she doesn't ride bicycles.

I reassured her that I know plenty of people who don't ride, so she needn't be embarrassed.  She was anyway:  "I never learned how," she explained.

Nothing new there, either.  I've known others who never acquired one of the few skills one never loses.  One such person of my acquaintance grew up in a large, traffic-knotted city where even children didn't ride bikes.  Others simply didn't have a bicycle, or access to one.  The reason my co-worker gave, though, was one I'd never considered:  She grew up in a milieu in which females didn't ride bikes because the males considered it "too provocative".  In fact, women didn't participate in sports at all and a "good woman", as she says, "didn't move her body without a man telling her to".

So it was very gratifying for me to come across a website that documents the Afghan Women's Cycling Team.

Kudos to Shannon Galpin, founder of the non-profit Mountain2Mountain, which has done much to support the team and women's rights in general. Ms. Galpin met the women while working in Afghanistan.  She also just happens to be the first person (not just the first woman) to mountain bike in Afghanistan and the first person to cross the Panjshir Valley on a bicycle.

Here is a video that highlights her work with the team and on her upcoming documentary, Afghan Cycles:

 

Liv Beyond - Shannon Galpin as Liv Ambassador from LET MEDIA on Vimeo.

Election Day: My Endorsements Are At The End Of This Post

Today is Election Day here in the US.  I am not going to make any endorsements, but I think that if you've been reading this blog (or my other), you have a pretty good idea of who I would--and wouldn't vote for.

It's interesting, though, to see how bicycling has become, as it were, a campaign issue in some places.  In San Francisco, the Bicycle Coalition has a pretty detailed list of positions and endorsements on its website.  From what I've been reading, cycling and progressive mass transportation policies are very much on the minds of large numbers of voters in the City By The Bay.  I haven't been there in a while, but I can't say I'm surprised to read about such developments.

I've never been to Austin but, from what I know about it, I'm not surprised that cycling safety is also an important issue there on this election day.  Pedestrian safety is also a priority. I don't see much about mass transportation:  I can only guess that there isn't much of it--or, at least not as much as in cities like San Francisco, Boston and New York--there.  I am making such an assumption based on what I saw in my admittedly-limited time in other Texas cities.

Perhaps one of the cleverest attempts to use cycling to "get out the vote" is taking place in Denver.  B-cycle, the city's bike-sharing program, is waiving its one-day membership fee today. 

Being the cynical New Yorker that I am (ha, ha), I wonder whether some candidate is behind the freebie.  Even if that's the case, I still applaud the move.  A free bike share is better than a lot of other things politicians have given people whom they want to entice to vote for them.


Speaking of politicians and bicycles:  The 1946 Schwinn catalogue featured, among other things, a President-to-be and his first wife with Schwinn Continentals, "the only really fine lightweight bicycle made in America today".

Whatever you think of his politics, you've got to admit that very few people ever looked better with Continentals (which, at the time, had Sturmey-Archer three-speed hubs) than Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman.  In fact, those few included a couple of other Hollywood stars featured in that year's catalogue:

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall will always get my votes!