Happy Birthday, Dad

   Today, being April 3, 2013, is my dad's 49th birthday.  I felt it only appropriate to make a post celebrating the day, and I felt a good tribute would be talking about what was his (and my mom's) most successful business venture:  Pisgah Bike Center.

Pisgah Bike Center in its original location, during the winter.
Date unknown, probably 1995 or 1996

     On May 2, 1992, Pisgah Bike Center was opened for business on 210 East Main Street in Brevard, North Carolina.  Before my parents acquired the lease to the building, it had been a bakery.  I remember scraping off cartoon bats which had been window painted onto the large front windows.  My guess is that it went out of business around Halloween.  I'm not sure what business occupied the building before the bakery, but it was originally an auto shop.  As you can see in the picture above, there were two large garage sections.  The left garage housed my dad's work area, and the garage to the right was storage for bicycles.  The storage garage even had a pit for changing the oil of a car.  A heavy steel grate had been placed over it, and my brother and I would often fish for quarters and other loose change in the bottom of the pit with a long, flexible grabbing tool we borrowed from my dad's toolbox.

My dad at the register of Pisgah Bike Center, before we officially opened.
Date unknown, probably April, 1992

     In the beginning my parents sold Mount Shasta mountain bikes, which were a cheaper, lower quality subset of bikes made by GT Bicycles.  Eventually my parents were able to secure the rights to sell bikes made by GT themselves, along with Balance and ParkPre, and eventually made it into the "big leagues" via Specialized.  They don't make Mount Shasta, Balance, or ParkPre anymore, if that is any indication of how different it was back then.  Our family bike shop was very successful for a lot of reasons.  The most powerful factors were simply that we were in the right place at the right time.  The mountain bike boom of the late 1980's and 1990's was still going strong, and we had moved to the front-line of one of the best mountain biking regions of the eastern United States:  western North Carolina.  Pisgah National Forest in particular is well known as a mountain biking mecca of the East, and Brevard is right on the southeastern edge of the Forest.  When my parents opened Pisgah Bike Center, we were the only bicycle shop in Brevard.  The closest shop was in Asheville, the cultural center of the Blue Ridge Mountains, about thirty miles away.  Add to that mix my parents strong work ethic and enthusiasm for mountain biking, and you have a winner.

Before we officially opened, waiting on bicycles to arrive.  This wall would eventually contain our lineup of bikes to sell.
Date unknown, probably April, 1992

     I have some memories of this time, but they are not especially concrete or clear.  I was, unsurprisingly, not paying that much attention to the bikes or what my parents were doing.  Most of my time was spent playing in a back room where my parents set up a very tiny TV for my brother and I to watch cartoons.  We would venture out to cause a ruckus in the rest of the store from time to time but when things were busy we were usually scooted to the back.

     I only recall my dad trying to show me how to do some work on a bicycle once.  Being seven or eight at the time I guess I was too hyper to sit and learn something, because all I remember is my dad showing me a set of brakes and explaining how you adjust them.  I didn't understand it but I didn't really pay attention either.  I don't know if I was too young or too preoccupied with trivial, boyhood things like video games or the Power Rangers, but I had no interest in learning what my dad did.  That has always been a tremendous fault of mine:  I've always had my head somewhere else, never in the present and never in what I was doing at the time.

     We had the shop at that location for about four years before tragedy struck.  We were leasing the building from an eccentric elderly lady, whose son managed her various properties.  According to my mom, he was very friendly and easy to deal with.  The elderly lady eventually passed away, so the property was passed to the son who was managing it for her anyways.  Then, he unexpectedly passed from a massive heart attack.  At this point, another son of the elderly lady we hadn't known about comes into town from Virginia and claims his inheritance.  Without us knowing, he sold our property to another local business owner who owned a knickknack shop nearby.  They sold things like porcelain unicorns and glass dolphins.  These new owners appeared on our doorstep on my little brother's birthday in 1996.  They were doubling our rent and forcing us to relocating to a temporary trailer so they could demolish our shop to build a strip mall, from which we could then rent space.  My parents rejected this offer and immediately started looking for a new location.  We only had about a month before the new doubled rent would go into effect.

     Unfortunately, the best location my parents could find in time would end up being the first nail in our coffin.  Whereas before we were located downtown in an easy to find building, we were forced to move to a extremely out of the way residential house on one of the state roads going into town.  We were about two miles from the entrance to Pisgah National Forest, but we were also in the middle of the rural countryside.  No one would think to find a bike shop there.

The second location, before my dad turned it into a store.
Left:  Almost every wall you see here was eventually knocked out.  We also pulled up the carpet.
Right:  Taken from the kitchen, which would be my dad's work area.  The dining room type area would become the office.
Date unknown, sometime in 1996

     My dad knocked down a lot of walls and converted the house into the best store that he could.  His work area got much, much smaller, going into what was once the kitchen.  Thinking back, I don't know how he worked in such a small space.  The basement provided a lot of storage, but it was really too much for what we needed.  We were only at this location for about a year before we were forced to close shop for good.  We were losing money quickly and only our most loyal customers would come to our new location.  After a while, even they stopped showing up.  It was a bad time for our family, laced with uncertainty and doubt after a handful of years of uplifting success.  Other bike shops, some in unbeatable locations, started to pop up in Brevard around this time and we could not compete.

     Even today, my mom still harbors resentment towards the people who had malicious parts to play in those events.  She found out later that the plan to push us out of business had been a calculated move, strung up from one black-hearted person to the next in a web of foul play.  A local outfitters store which also dealt in bicycles wanted us out of business, so they used their friendship with the people who underhandedly bought the property we were leasing to drive us out.  According to my mom, a lot of bad things happened to the people involved in that.  Infidelity legal issues, illegal substance abuse and ill-fated business moves came to those people.  I guess the world has a funny way of working itself out sometimes.

My dad's truck, painted up as an advertisement for our store.  Parked in front of the
small duplex we lived in when we first moved to North Carolina.
Date unknown.

     My mom started to work part time for UPS to help the family, eventually venturing into real estate, and after we closed the shop my dad went to work for a former customer who owned a machine shop.  He quickly distinguished himself as one of the best manual machinists there and made quick friends with just about everyone he worked with.  He worked there until we moved to upstate New York in late 1999, and again in 2000 after we moved back to Brevard.  I think of all the "real" jobs my dad had, where he clocked in and was payed by someone else, the job at that machine shop was probably his favorite.

     My dad held onto a few relics from our time as bike shop owners:  small parts and oddities, things that we hauled to New York, and then to North Carolina again, and finally to Indiana when we "returned home". When I embarked on my first backpacking adventure in 2007, my dad fished out what he said was the last ticketed item from Pisgah Bike Center:  a set of sunglass straps, made of blue cord to look like climbing rope, still in its package with one of our price tickets on it.  I took that to the Uintas of northeastern Utah with me, but I didn't end up wearing my sunglasses for more than a few days so I got little use out of the straps.  They actually broke on me near the end of the trip, no doubt because they were over ten years old at that point, but I was fool enough to throw them away when we got home.  A small mistake, I guess.

     My father of course held onto nearly all of his bike tools.  After I started to become a mechanic, I asked if I could have them for my own use and he gave me nearly all of them.  They are now lying in my wooden tool chest, only a few feet from me now.  They are old and most of them worn; some are so depreciated that they don't even make tools in that style anymore.  Not that they are ancient, they are just relics from a time not too long ago.  I will definitely hold onto them for the rest of my life.  Maybe someday I can pass them on, as they were passed to me.  Hopefully at that time, cone wrenches and lock-ring bottom bracket spanners are still relevant.