Long, slow exhale. Holding an eagle to the east in memory of an amazing person who left us too soon. https://www.sheldonbrown.com/eagle.html
There was a phrase, before this list, before Rivendell was more widely known: AASHTA "As Always, Sheldon Has The Answer" Back in the days of Usenet, when dealing with a technical cycling problem - heck, even building a wheel from scratch - was a 17th-level-mason-guild-craft-mysto riddle you had to solve through elusive scraps of information (and certainly no online videos), there was one person who consistently wrote copious, logical, detailed answers to technical bicycle questions: Sheldon Brown. He set the standard in assistance, all from the back room of this shop I'd never visited in Newtown Mass. Back in the days of dial-up. Rec:Bicycles:Tech (and a dozen other sub-topics in Bicycles) was an oasis and generations of riders owe him a serious debt. By his own admission, the Harris Cyclery folks let him tinker around and play on this crazy experiment of internet "discussion groups" long before it was widespread. But we are richer for those decisions. It has a lot to do with how riders became aware of stuff other than "what the pros ride!", learned the history of the sport and bicycles in general, and it coalesced the perspective of many of us who realized the sublime perfection of the bicycle in its most basic form. It is part of the foundation of this list, to be sure. There were so many articles, you cannot scratch the surface - it was the original archive. https://www.sheldonbrown.com/retroraleighs/history.html https://www.sheldonbrown.com/tandems.html He is the one who finally nudged me into trying a fixed-gear https://www.sheldonbrown.com/fixedgear.html "Coasting is a pernicious habit" His technical knowledge ran deep. No, deeper than that. His humor to his last days filled the world. One of my favorite chuckles was when he photographed Grant at the Bridgestone booth at the 2005 Interbike. https://www.sheldonbrown.com/lasvegas/2005/ I feel very, very lucky that I am out of retail these days. Running a high service, knowledge-based store is a very difficult challenge when you can get stuff delivered in 4 hours from a warehouse across your state. Layer on that the constraints of doing business the last couple years and you have a very tough equation to solve. It's why remembering and supporting those quality organizations who hang in there is so important. I'll admit this hit me unaware. But, it has hit me. Didn't realize they had shuttered. I guess I'll go pour one out, as the kids say. Thank you Sheldon. Thank you Harris. You have blazed a trail and kept it clear. Now it's our turn to continue. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/24/metro/we-had-people-with-tears-their-eyes-west-newton-bicycle-shop-closes-after-70-years/ On Thursday, September 30, 2021 at 6:44:46 AM UTC-7 George Schick wrote: > I just happened to check into Harris Cyclery the other day to see if they > had a certain component in stock only to find this announcement: > https://www.sheldonbrown.com/harris/ > Apparently they closed back in June but I had not checked the website for > a while and just discovered it. > > I've purchased many bike parts as well as one complete bike from those > people over the years and they were always very friendly and knowledgable. > Further, that shop was central to the famous Sheldon Brown. Fortunately, > it looks like the website and links to all of Sheldon's articles and advice > is still up and running. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/c41d1b95-2137-49b4-adf5-375098c8fbbbn%40googlegroups.com.
