On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 3:18:22 PM UTC-7, AMuzi wrote:
On 9/11/2020 12:30 PM, William Crowell wrote:
I find that for some reason I am not the slightest bit interested in watching it this year. It just seems so irrelevant somehow. Does anybody else feel the same way?


I look at the highlights from yesterday on the French news
every morning here.
Doesn't seem any different overall than recent Tours to me.

It is much more immediate than in my youth when we anxiously
awaited the British (I.C.S.) and French (Le Miroir)
magazines a week or two after the Tour.

In the mid-70s, during college, I'd go to the local bike shop in SJ where they would put a Telex of the results up in the window. Right the https://tinyurl.com/yyftpsdp Back in the day, exactly one-half that store front was Terry Shaw's shop. I think there was a barbershop or something on the other side. Terry's shop was the size of a telephone booth, but it was awesome -- total Campagnolo shrine. Terry moved, and the shop turned into something else -- and then it became a bigger bike shop again in the '90s.

Before Terry, earlier in the '70s, it was the same tiny cubby-hole with a bike shop operated by a different guy, Steven Blyler, who went bankrupt -- with my PX10 on consignment and my $200 deposit for a Proteus frame, when Proteus was just getting off the ground. That would have been my first custom frame, but alas my $200 disappeared. One rainy night, Steven appeared at my apartment, PX10 in hand, so I got that back. http://www.classicrendezvous.com/USA/Proteus.htm Bunch of hippies! I had to wait until 1975 to get my first custom frame from my friend Dale Saso. https://sasobike.com/ I bought his fourth or fifth frame -- and many after that. He taught Keith Bontrager how to braze. I rode one of Keith's first mountain bikes around a parking lot and thought "what a pig, this will never catch on." The good old days.


-- Jay Beattie.