In 2001 some of my customers encountered an unusual cyclist way out in the country. He was heavily loaded, and flew the flag of Nepal from his front fork. They sent him to me upon learning his story and told me to give him whatever he needed, at their expense.

These customers were not wealthy individuals, but they were so impressed with the goals of this man that they wanted to help in any way that they could. He was Pushkar Shah, the remarkable Nepalese ambassador of peace who eventually cycled around the world.

He reached my store two days later. I was able to check over his bicycle and unlike most touring riders, he lacked nothing and his bike was in fine shape. While he was out with some of my customers, riding one of my bikes, I threw some extra cables and a chain into his stuffed panniers.

I estimate that he was carrying eighty pounds in his four Ortlieb panniers. All of his equipment had been stolen during his sojourn in the Pacific Islands some weeks before, so Sir Edmund Hilary had replaced it all! Many of us remember Sir Edmund Hilary was forever indebted to the climbers of Nepal and has sworn to protect the people of the Himalayas in any way, especially the Sherpa. I estimate that he was carrying eighty pounds in his four Ortlieb panniers.

While Mr. Shah was out riding with my friend Steve Grills, I rounded up some folks including my father, who I knew would want to meet this amazing traveller. He was delayed in returning, however. It seems that he was so used to riding an overloaded mountain bike that he fell while riding a light bike with no packs on his way home from buying postage stamps with Steve.

Later that afternoon, Paul Hetland happened to come by on a routine shopping trip. I never knew that Paul had been in the Peace Corps in the late ’60’s. Turns out that he spoke some Nepalese. Another customer came by shortly after that who also knew some Nepalese. I am never surprised by the amazing learned people of Rochester.

My father stopped in and he went over to Rowe Photographic next door to find a photographer. They just happened to have a professional there, of course, and I have some great pictures of that day.

Several weeks later, Mr. Shah was supposed to be in NYC to speak to a large group of Peace people. He missed that rendevous due to oversleeping, however, so was not present at the World Trade Center the morning of September 11. He was in many ways a lucky man. One does not easily survive a ten year journey on bicycle with only five dollars starting money without much luck. One can not have this much luck without merit. Check him out on google. Or ask me.

Scott Cox was an undergrad at RIT in the early years of this decade. Some students come in every year and ask to shoot pictures of my store or of me. I think that the composition possibilities of a cluttered store and a disheveled merchant make for a good photo.

Scott was very modest and insisted that I not feel at all compelled to pose, but we had had several conversations about bikes and traveling, and he was an interesting person. I was eager to see his work. It was October and he thought it would be a good shot if we could go somewhere outdoors where there were lots of yellow leaves on the ground. I took him up the street to Mount Hope Cemetery which has 200 acres of rolling hills and valleys.

Some parts of the cemetery can truly be said to be nearly wilderness in that you can see no city clutter on all four sides. It was gratifying to be the person to introduce an artist to this wonderful location, and we did two days of shooting that resulted in this photo and one other which shows the rising sun from the east and my red outfit with a red racing bike. He used an old fashioned view camera that uses full size glass plate negatives, and a huge flash unit that barely fit into his little car. His eye for detail and for deep focus is hard to discern on the computer screen, but if you come to the store you can see a real good print he made me. He also made prints for my sister, my wife and my parents. This was expensive for a starving student!

I heard from another student some months later that Scott had received some nice commissions after graduating and that he was traveling in Central Europe. His work on Scott-Cox.com is very special. If you see his self portrait I think you can get a good idea of what he is like as a man. His demeanor is calm and he is a good listener. I expect great things from him in the future and that he will make a contribution to the world of documentary journalism. His pictures of the hard working people in these scenes shows real talent.

It used to be that bike shops hired and trained skilled and semi-skilled craftsmen who built the bicycles mostly from scratch. But retail is no longer seen as a lifetime career by most owners and employees. People who own bicycle stores do not want to take the risk of training skilled mechanics and offering them lifetime employment and good wages. (This is not unique to my industry, as we all know.) The bike industry has complied with the desire to make bikes easier to build and sell by assembling them in mass quantities on an assembly line, usually in China. The work they do has vastly improved in the last decade, actually. Wheels, for example, are spoked tight by the automated wheel machines. They were really bad back in the 1980s.

Because bikes are assembled in the factory, bike shops can just take them out of a box and in less than twenty minutes, sell them to you. But the mass assembling of bikes in factories is still done with poor practices; nuts, bolts, spokes, brakes and derailleurs are screwed on with no lubrication, control wires are installed similarly dry. They can corrode easily . They are stiff and soon wear out.

I totally renovate these parts by hand. That is fairly simple and takes only a few minutes to take apart and reassemble. The most complicated renovation in my process is the overhaul of internal ball bearing assemblies. These parts are also factory-assembled with hardly any grease inside them. Hubs and other components that have ball bearings have to be dis-assembled and each of the parts must be visually inspected. I then re-build them. I can vastly improve them with cleaning and by replacing the ball bearings with much more precise ones.

This is time consuming and it probably triples the cost of my assembly, but this process makes bikes run smoother and makes them totally resistant to wear. The rider will thus enjoy more riding time and the components will need almost no adjusting and repair. The owner will save enough over the life of the bike to pay for the bike.

I thus can create what I consider to be a hand built craft piece out of each bike. I do make one of a kind custom bikes, but not many people can afford them. I would love to sell hundreds of custom bikes, but by re-buiIding every bike like it was a custom, I am able to, in effect, make hundreds of hand made bikes each year. It is a pleasure to work this way, actually. The skill required to do this work is lost if one does not do the work often, so I can keep my skills honed and be quicker than if I were only doing it once or twice a month. Employees at most other bike shops never get to make even one hand made bike. They mostly are underpaid and are often poorly motivated and most of them do not know what they are missing.

The best thing about being a one person store is that I no longer have to work among a group of men with bad attitudes. Bike shops tend to be staffed by smokers and burnouts. I have not been around people like this for over 25 years.

This is so much better for my passion for work. This business is then able to communicate a passion for quality to the customer. In businesses that are staffed by people who own and invest in the business, the customer will have a better experience. An owner operator such as myself can motivate customers to desire quality and hence spend more and see it as a much better investment.

I believe that my shop is seen as a place that values fine arts and crafts and that I have a desire to connect to the historical traditions of folks who make fine craft products like, for example, jewelry, fine machines, clock works, pianos and furniture and other things that last for generations. I really believe that a hand made bike will similarly last for a hundred years or more.

There have been some very few people who know me well that have been surprised that I choose to do work that is not, shall we say, white collar or academic or highly paid jobs. I understand that it is unusual for students, such as was I, who score well on tests to become low paid guys with dirt under their fingernails. Folk who do manual labor that “requires no mental or book learning.”

Lately there have been a lot of good articles about the falsehood of such a division. One of the best authors is Matt Crawford who wrote a book that was published in 2009 called “From Shop Class to Soulcraft”. He had been a cubicle/office worker and was on the track to making big money, but now he is happier as a motorcycle mechanic. He discusses the wrong concepts we take up such as the idea of “meaningful” occupations versus “just working to make a living” and attacks the tendency of public schools to drop shop classes in favor of computer labs. Here is a quote from Matt:

“…mechanical work has required me to cultivate different intellectual habits. Further, habits of mind have an ethical dimension that we don’t often think about. Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street. Cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate. The slap of worn-out pistons hitting their cylinders can sound a lot like loose valve tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly open to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is a virtue that is at once cognitive and moral. It seems to develop because the mechanic, if he is the sort who goes on to become good at it, internalizes the healthy functioning of the motorcycle as an object of passionate concern. How else can you explain the elation he gets when he identifies the root cause of some problem?

This active concern for the motorcycle is reinforced by the social aspects of the job. As is the case with many independent mechanics, my business is based entirely on word of mouth. I sometimes barter services with machinists and metal fabricators. This has a very different feel than transactions with money; it situates me in a community. The result is that I really don’t want to mess up anybody’s motorcycle or charge more than a fair price. You often hear people complain about mechanics and other tradespeople whom they take to be dishonest or incompetent. I am sure this is sometimes justified. But it is also true that the mechanic deals with a large element of chance.”

I have a one-person business so I can do a variety of tasks, and I get to talk to all the customers. I am able to see my relation to the community at large, and the relationship between my giving things away and my receiving many more things back. It has been my observation that if commerce is done correctly, it can be the most rewarding form of human interaction. To me it seems logical that a very small business in which there is little or no division of labor is a sort of ideal.

Therefore, I thank all the folks that I have met over the last 30 years in this craft/business. For me, this passion I have seems to fulfill a lot of the unconscious needs I have had, and it is nice to read about its psychological dimension. I would appreciate your thoughts on this.