Ice Bikes For Parkinson's In The City Of Light

Sometimes it's hard to believe we're in the same state.

I'm talking about New York City--my hometown--and Buffalo.

While The Big Apple is known for its Bright Lights on Broadway, the Queen City of the Great Lakes was once called--without irony or sarcasm--America's City of Light.

That was the image it tried to portray at the Pan-American Exposition it hosted  in 1901.  At that time, Buffalo was the nation's eighth-largest city, just edging out San Francisco and well ahead of Pittsburgh and Washington DC.  Two decades earlier, it had become the nation's first electrified city; the city fathers wanted to use the Expostion to show that the Nickel City was ready to take its position as an industrial powerhouse to rival Birmingham or Manchester, a center of commerce like London or New York and a mecca of beacon of culture akin to Paris. (The Exposition featured a dazzling display of electrically-illuminated buildings called "The City of Light".) 

"The City of Light":  The Pan American Exhibition, Buffalo, 1901

Well, a number of things conspired against Buffalo becoming a world-class city.  The first was the Exposition itself:  For all of its dazzling displays, it was also widely panned for exhibits that were, frankly, hokey or simply racist and imperialist. (Yes, people levelled such charges even in those decidedly-less-PC times!)  Also, on the night of 6 July, a powerful thunderstorm knocked out transmission lines and flooded the power station as well as other cities.  In other words, the biggest attraction of the Exposition--its electricity--was short-circuited by an electrical storm!

But the "nail in the coffin", so to speak, was the assassination of President William McKinley on the Fairgrounds.  The Exposition ended a few weeks later and most of its structures were quickly razed.  Today there is scarcely a trace of the fair.  On the other hand, the Unisphere, fountains and other monuments of the 1964-65 and 1939-40 Worlds' Fairs in New York have been preserved.

Today, Buffalo seems to be known for two things:  spicy chicken wings and weather--specifically, winter weather.  Even as New York City winters become less winter-like by the year, Buffalo never seems to escape the months between Halloween and Easter without at least a couple of major snowstorms.  And, as cold as the waters of the East and Hudson Rivers may be, they rarely form ice, and then only along the edges.  At the other end of the Empire State, Lakes Erie and Ontario, which are really inland freshwater seas with their own tidal systems, routinely freeze over.

That last climatic characteristic has actually been a blessing for some.  I'm not talking about ice fishermen.  Rather, I'm referring to a group of people you might not expect:  sufferers of Parkinson's Disease.

How's that?, you ask.  Well, since this is a cycling blog, you probably have surmised that it has something to do with bicycles.  And it does.

For the past three years, the National Parkinson Foundation of Western New York has held ice bike events at Canalside.  "Bicycling has been discovered to be very, very good therapy for Parkinsons," says Chris Jamele of NPFWNY.  He explains that cycling provides the low-impact exercise people with Parkinson's need.  But riding an ice bike has one distinctive advantage, he adds:  It's very difficult to tip over.

Hmm...There's a bit of technology to be developed: A bicycle like the ice bike that can be ridden on other kinds of surfaces.  That would be an innovation as revolutionary as any shown in the Pan-American Exhibit!  Could ice bikes make Buffalo rise again?

We'll Miss Chris!

F. Scott Fitzgerald opened his short story Rich Boy with what has become one of the most misquoted lines:  "Let me tell you about the very rich.  They are different from you and me."

Well, not many people people in the bike business are among the very rich.  In fact, a joke I heard from people in the industry goes like this:  "You can end up with a small fortune in this business.  How?  Start with a big one!"

Don't get me wrong:  Some people have done very well for themselves, whether by opening a bike shop that offers the right things in the right place at the right time, or by being distributors or importers.  But whatever money one makes in the two-wheeled trade does not come easily:  Running a bike shop entails long hours (especially during cycling season) and the overhead costs are high.

So, the people who choose to go into the bike business are different, if not from you and me, then at least from people who go into other industries or professions.  I am thinking now of a shop in which I worked for a time:  One of the partners was a fellow who spent years working in shops, mainly as a mechanic, and decided that he wanted to open one of his own.  The other was a retired Wall Streeter who, after a couple of years, was unhappy that his investment didn't yield a bigger and faster return.  He didn't realize that such was the nature of bike shops, and the bike industry in general.

Of course, that former Wall Street denizen's motivation for opening a bike shop was entirely different from that of his partner.  He was not entering the world of cycling; rather, he thought he saw another business opportunity.  I can't really fault him for that:  All of his years on "The Street" conditioned him to think that way, if he hadn't already had such a mindset.  On the other hand, the mechanic genuinely loved bicycles and cycling. (I know: I raced against and rode with him.)  As some might say, cycling was "in his blood".

Chris, with his son.  From the Velo Orange blog.

Another such person, I believe, is Chris Kulczycki.  Many of you know him as the founder of Velo Orange.  As he often said, VO began with a "part time gig" after selling another business he'd started.  He brought it in some bike parts and accessories, mainly for touring and randonneuring, from Europe and Japan.  Some of those items had not been made in decades and, in some cases, the companies that made them hadn't been in business for as long.  

Then, of course, he started to have parts and accessories made after the designs of those vintage items.  The result of his work, and a few other like-minded people, is that we have more choices about the kinds of bikes we ride, and about the way they look, than we did fifteen or twenty-five years ago.  Gone is the tyranny of the racing bike/mountain bike binary that dictated most of what was made and sold during the 1980's and 1990's.  We also are free of the dictate that everything must look like carbon weave or be finished in black.  (Isn't it ironic that the most expensive bikes had such a palette decades after Henry Ford said that customers could get the Model T--the first car for the masses--"in any color as long as it's black".)

In other words, Chris not only has a passion for cycling, he also has a particular love of particular kinds of cycling (and bikes) that were all but unknown to most Americans when he started Velo Orange.  And it has paid off, for us and for him.  

As for him:  It's paid well enough that he's retired, after selling the company.  All I can do is hope that he and Annette enjoy their retirement, which they have certainly earned!  And that his cancer doesn't return.

Riding Off Into The Sunset--From A Singles' Ride

I have never been to any sort of event or function with the word "singles" in it.  Honestly, I have never felt any great urgency about meeting a potential date or mate.  Other people in my life, however, have felt such anxiety and have tried to get me to go to bars, parties, dinners, book clubs, lecture series,gallery openings, church "socials" and even bike rides for the unattached.  Or they've invited me to lunch or dinner and, when I arrived, they introduced me to some similarly solo friend or co-worker who would be "right" or "great" for me.

It seems that there aren't as many singles' events as there were in my youth, and singles' bars seem to have disappeared altogether.  The main cause, I suspect, is the all of the ways in which people can find each other online.   
So I wonder what people who met on singles' fora of the past tell their children, or other young people--most of whom, I suspect, have no concept of the sorts of things I'm describing.

I am thinking now, in particular, a woman whose story I came across recently.  Suzanne Travis, a California nurse, went on a singles' bicycle ride on--you guessed it--Valentine's Day.  

As she tells the story, she was, in addition to a nurse, an aspiring stand-up comedienne.   She went to the bike ride the way she went to other singles' events: expecting that not much would come of it besides material for her routines.  After all, how many jokes or monologues have you heard about successful relationships or people who lived "happily ever after."

From Out and About Singles

On the ride, she met a man she describes as "adorable."  And, of course, she invited him to her show.  One thing led to another and now they have been married for 27 years.

She still rides her bike.  And she tells her jokes--to her patients.  They are a "captive audience", she says.  Apparently, that's what she needs: "I found that I became a little less funny the happier I got."

Hmm...More happy=Less funny?  Could that be the reason why we haven't heard many stand-up routines about cycling?