The Bloomington Bicycle Club was formed at the instigation of Steve Burch, the working partner in the Bike Rack, a bicycle shop located on the south side of the first block of East Sixth Street. This shop had been started by Jeff Modesitt in 1970; however, after two very heady years of startup, Jeff sold the shop to a partnership of Keith Hamm, Kent Taylor, and Steve Burch. The first two partners have long been better known in Bloomington as the proprietors of The White Rabbit, now a Starbucks Coffee Shop, and of FinePrint, a print shop on South Morton.
I bought my first adult bicycle, an inexpensive LaPierre, there in 1972 and had it stolen while swimming at the old Packing House Road quarries in 1974. Unfortunately, Jeff Modesitt was killed in 1973 driving his car west across the new IN 37 by-pass on SR 48--one of the first victims of the grade crossings on SR 37 that led to their being changed to ramped exchanges.
Those early 1970s were the heyday of the bicycle revival in the United States when adults for the first time bought bicycles not as toys for children but as vehicles--for exercise, sport, and recreation.
In 1975, Steve Burch started talking about forming a family-oriented bicycle club in Bloomington with his customers, I among them, and received considerable encouragement. The last organized Bloomington bicycle club, The Southern Indiana Bicycle Touring Association (SIBTA), formed by various local people and students in the mid-1960s, among them Hartley Alley, Charles Eckert, and Lee Ellers, had created two lasting accomplishments. The first was the old signed Indiana Creek Bikeway; some faded signs may still be encountered. The second was the Hilly Hundred, begun in 1967 with a southern route toward the new Lake Monroe from the then Poplars Hotel on east Seventh Street.
When by 1972 the membership had generally dispersed, with Hartley Alley moving to Boulder, SIBTA disbanded and handed over stewardsip of the Hilly Hundred ride to a new Indianapolis club being formed by some recent IU graduates with SIBTA roots. They called their new club the Central Indiana Bicycle Association (or CIBA). Had the BBC existed, the Hilly Hundred would be its club tour today.
But another four years elapsed before the BBC was to come into existence. During 1976, Steve Burch went ahead with formation of the Bloomington Bicycle Club.
In its earliest formative stage, the Bloomington Bicycle Club was both blessed and cursed with acquiring a racing team, before it could ever develop a base as a family-oriented touring club. During its first few years, it was a struggle to attract touring members. Although I never raced, my own early interest in the club was to support its powerful racing presence while building a touring base.
Racing clubs are required to hold an open race yearly as part of their USCF affiliation, while touring clubs generally will host a similar tour. Having to do both strained BBC resources at the time and caused tensions that never were very successfully bridged. Racing teams exist to train, travel, and race regionally and nationally as they are able; expecting the racers to devote energy and time to leading tours, supporting touring events, participating in club social activities, writing newsletter articles, managing club competitive events like time trials for the general membership were goals never successfully realized and probably unrealistic.
Similarly, the BBC Racing Team expected a full range of support (preferably cash, clothes, and cars) for their racing endeavors, not to mention the manpower to manage and run the annual local criterium race; after all the team members expected to be winning the races, not running them! Mostly the racing team got the support it needed, but not without grudges and resentments developing; and mostly the racing team failed to provide the tourist faction the compensatory support it felt it had earned. This classic bicycle club dilemma remained unresolved until the early 1980s.
By the time I became active in governing the Bloomington Bicycle Club, the organization had begun to grow as a touring organization that had a crack racing team. Its first major touring event in the still-chilly early spring of April 1978 was dubbed the Limestone Century, and was probably a metric century as its successor event always was. The Limestone Century Tour was renamed the Hoosier Hills Metric Century the following year and became a two-day June event, comprising a metric century around Lake Monroe on Saturday and a fifty mile ride on Sunday to Spencer and McCormick's Creek State Park.
The renaming and rescheduling were to associate the event with a new county-wide, two-day festival dubbed the Hoosier Hills Festival that existed from 1979 until 1982 or 1983, when its declining success caused the supporting organizations to back a new Taste of Bloomington event at the Graham Plaza parking garage.
However, the BBC's Hoosier Hills Metric Century continued through the end of the twentieth century, although it was scaled back to a one-day event in the1990s as interest grew in RAIN, HUMOR, the fall Nashville Club Century, and TRIRI, all BBC events started in the 1980s.
My involvement with BBC administration was brief but not without a few significant developments. I began by managing the BBC's Criterium Race in 1979 and again in 1980. Both races were held in the Elm Heights Neighborhood, the first around Bryan Park, and the second to the north and east of the park. I accepted the nomination of and was elected president of the club in the fall of 1980. During my term in office, I
I also represented the club on the city's Transportation Commission and on the city of Indianapolis' Bicycle Commission, which was aggressively supporting the Parks Department Director Art Strong's plans to build the Major Taylor Velodrome and other bicycling endeavors for the benefit of Indianapolis and central Indiana.
During my presidency, Edwin Martin served ably and forcefully as Racing Director and Charlie Ellis (deceased) rather brilliantly though erratically as Touring Director. Jim Burns undertook the BBC Map Project, whose products have provided a small income for many years. Burns succeeded Charlie Ellis as Touring Director. Kathy Meyer served as Vice President, Linda Black (now Mrs. Thomas McClain, Steve's sister-in-law) was an extremely conscientious Secretary, and Jim Perin replaced Mike Romy to serve the club for many years as Treasurer.
In addition, I took a strong interest in growing the membership and believed the monthly calendar and the newsletter had key roles to play in that endeavor. The Touring Director and each ride leader were expected to file reports for the newsletter and most did so, some with great panache. It was during and following this period long into the 1980s that the newsletter grew from two or three pages to a format familiar to older members during the long years that Frank Prosser provided the brilliant editorial leadership that made it the most widely read bicycle publication in the midwest.
It was not uncommon to receive a newsletter in those days of 48 and even 60 pages (8.5 x 11 folded in half to create a 8.5 x 5.5 page for text). Membership was hovering around 200-220 when I was President, and the BBC took advantage of its bulk mailing permit for the newsletter whenever the threshhold allowing its use was reached.
Among the wonderful features in the newsletter of that era were reports from one departed member on his two-year-long round the world bike tour, the occasional pieces by George Malichinski on the bike tours he worked into his endless schedule of international conferencing in Europe and Asia, Matt Melchert's endless series testing saddles for comfort and later during his new life in New Zealand, Frank Prosser's various pieces on safety and smart cycling, and many reports submitted by League of American Wheelmen members from elsewhere.
By the end of my one year term, my fellow officers began to protest the heavy schedule I had imposed on them and counseled that the previous disarray in BBC administration seemed to have been corrected. I took the hint. I volunteered to serve as Racing Director, hoping to develop some greater support from the racers.
I had been unsuccessful in an effort to increase the sponsorship by Noble Roman's Pizza from its original $5,000, mostly used to purchase clothing. In fact, an article in the Bloomington Herald-Telephone about a BBC touring event caused the club abruptly to lose the Noble Roman's sponsorship entirely when its chief officers, Spiro Athanas and Stephen Huse, objected to the failure of the newspaper article to mention the Noble Roman's Pizza sponsorship.
So the racing program was somewhat under a cloud, partly of my causing, and I hoped to redeem myself. Another sponsor was briefly found in the Green Mountain Ski Shop (somewhat succeeded by J. L. Waters), which was competing with the Bike Rack for bicycle business, but that sponsorship had an alienating effect on the shop which had originally given the BBC its start.
Unfortunately, my term as Racing Director coincided with the failure of the sponsor's business and the racing team's decision to resign en masserather than submit to new rules requiring its members to shoulder a great deal more responsibility for the racing program, for securing sponsorship, and for assisting with touring events in exchange for touring support for racing events. It was an opportune moment for me to step back to pursue other interests that I had been developing. Since 1981 I have been a cyclist of variable commitment--some years intensely active, others not at all.
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