His desk was a yard sale of books, magazines, bike parts, assorted sheets of paper, journals and probably at least one classified Pentagon report.
No, that's not a description of my work space though, at times, it would have come close to being one. Rather, it's how "Padraig" of The Cycling Independent recalled his friend and onetime colleague Garrett Lai.
If that name sounds familiar, you probably were reading Bicycling! and Bicycle Guide during the 1990s and early 2000s, when he was an editor at each of those publications. Or, a few years earlier, you might've been perusing copies of Road and Track magazine. You may also have been one of the world's more arcane subcultures (this, coming from someone--yours truly--who's spent time in the academic world): the California community of vintage typewriter enthusiasts.
(Garrett Lai, left, with Yeti Cycles co-founder John Parker)
I was unaware of that last group of people until today. But it makes perfect sense that Garrett Lai was part of it: He was all about anything mechanical and anything that could be expressed in, or used to communicate, words. A self-described "failed engineer" who could make the most technical details comprehensible, and even readable (much like the much-missed Jobst Brandt and Frank Berto), Lai had, in Padraig's words, "more sides than a round-cut diamond."
But he passed away, at age 54, last week. The coroner is still determining his cause of death.
