Unicycle articles (but wait there's more...)

leo wrote:
*http://tinyurl.com/dekpe *


For dead link in the futu

Life has come full circle, from bad times to good, but it's all relative
to Gerry McAvoy
By Brett Savage


MANASQUAN RESIDENT GERRY MCAVOY [ABOVE] LEARNED HOW TO RIDE A UNICYCLE
WHEN HE WAS A KID, A TALENT HE SAYS, “YOU NEVER FORGET”.
GERRY MCAVOY LIKES TO SAY THAT HE HAS COME FULL-CIRCLE. THAT SEEMS THE
EASIEST AND MOST CONVENIENT WAY TO ACCURATELY DESCRIBE THE ERRATIC
COURSE OF HIS LIFE.

He’s run the gamut from good times to bad and back again, and has
experienced more than his fair share of heartache, frustration and
disappointment.

Through it all, however, he’s maintained an unflappable sense of
optimism, and appears perfectly content to view life with a
glass-half-full mentality that is both remarkably resilient and
essentially unshakable.

Mr. McAvoy, 49, is a native son. He has lived in Manasquan his entire
life, with the exception of a few brief dalliances “up and down the East
Coast.” He can fondly recall “the way things used to be in town” with
impressive vividness.

“I remember all the old businesses. I was running around the streets
when Weir’s Pharmacy still had the soda fountains, I remember Myer’s
Five and Ten, and I remember going to Ralph’s Produce Market when they
used to have the produce right out on the street for you to buy,” Mr.
McAvoy reminisced.

“There was also the Old Town Bakery, where I used to love to buy
elephant ears, and going to the Algonquin Theatre for movies, and of
course the Candy Kitchen. Things were a lot different then.”

Mr. McAvoy took pleasure in the simple pastimes offered by the small
beach community when he was a kid and profited from an idyllic setting
that was more like a big playground than a town to him.

“I remember going to the beach all the time. I loved fishing, still do
actually, and I caught my first striped bass off the ocean side of the
inlet jetty. There used to be tons of blowfish, or puffer fish, down
there by the Main Street Bridge, too. We used to grab buckets of those.”


It was also early on that Mr. McAvoy discovered he had a very specific
talent that he enjoyed nurturing.

He began to explore his creative side and started tinkering around with
various rudimentary carpentry projects. “I was always very innovative.
Way before computers and electronic games, I was always fascinated with
woodworking and liked to toy around with things,” Mr. McAvoy explained.
“I had an imagination and liked to construct things, too. I would piece
things together from discarded lumber and that type of stuff you find
lying around.”

A self-proclaimed “garbologist,” Mr. McAvoy found out that he was able
to assemble and construct whatever conceptual carpentry piece came to
his mind by simply walking around town, collecting key items he deemed
fit to serve his purposes and tossing them together.

His various experimental projects all shared this chimerical quality,
and he was able to mold this natural virtuosity into a definite skill
that turned out to be more passion than recreation.

The crowning achievement of this innovative tinkering was a relatively
detailed, and rather luxurious, tree house in the backyard.

“It was great,” he exclaimed, “I built a fort in the back yard when I
was younger. I went around town and collected the materials and built a
two-room tree house in the backyard. It had a roof, a door, windows ...
everything. I even ran an extension cord out there so that we could have
lights and a stereo. It was a great place to hang out on a rainy day
because of the roof and the windows and all.”

Unfortunately, this level of creativity, energy and bubbling enthusiasm
didn’t translate to the classroom. Mr. McAvoy, who can readily supply an
anecdote about playing hooky in kindergarten, openly admits that he was
never a great student.

“I stayed back in first grade,” he said, “and it didn’t get any better
after that. I was a daydreamer and would be the first person to grab a
seat by the windows. Somewhere along the line, and I guess it must have
been pretty early on, I developed a poor attitude towards school.”

Compounding his academic difficulties over his formative years were some
troubling events at home which inevitably impacted Mr. McAvoy.

Mr. McAvoy is the one of seven children. He has two older brothers, two
older sisters and a younger brother and sister. He said his two older
brothers had enormous influence over his life.

“My oldest brother, Dave, was a major influence in my life. He was very
much the older brother in that regard. He was on the football team, the
wrestling team, involved with all the clubs. All that stuff. He used to
teach me to do everything back then,” Mr. McAvoy said.

When Mr. McAvoy was in middle school, his eldest brother went off to
college and fell into the seductive, experimental, open-minded and
free-spirited allure of late-1960s counterculture.

“I was exposed to all that stuff real early on because my brother was
right in the middle of it all and what he did meant so much to me,” Mr.
McAvoy said. “You know, I was in sixth, seventh and eighth grade, I
didn’t like school, I was already at the window seat and all that, and
on top of this I was exposed to what my brother was experiencing. It
didn’t help my poor attitude any.”

By the time he reached high school, Mr. McAvoy had had just about enough
of education. “I quit [school] at the age of 15. I left in September of
my freshman year so it was right at the beginning of the year. It was
that same year that my eldest brother Dave died in a car accident. I
remember how it impacted me. I never really got a chance to grieve
because there was so much going on at once.”

After leaving school, and feeling lost after the death of his brother,
he managed to take advantage of his polished hand at carpentry and
landed a job for a local cabinetmaker. A chance to utilize his talents,
the job acted as a stabilizing force in his life.

“I remember when I first went for the job. The manager asked me, ‘What
do you know how to do, you’re just a 15-year-old kid?’ Well, I told him
that I had made a pretty nice tree house in my backyard, and I told him
all about it. I think that impressed him because he ended up hiring me
because he said I reminded him of himself at that age.”

It was not long after the death of his eldest brother, that his
second-eldest brother, Kevin, became involved in the counterculture
lifestyle.

“Kevin and I were very close at the time, and his actions had an impact
on me,” Mr. McAvoy said. Mr. McAvoy’s life began mirroring those of his
two older brothers.

He stopped working for the cabinetmaker and began picking up a number of
odd jobs around town to make a living.

“I worked for a bunch of different contractors at the time. They knew
me, and if they needed some work done they would call me up and I would
be able to help them out while they were helping me out. I also did a
lot of traveling around that time. I was all up and down the East Coast.
I spent a lot of time in Maine with friends. I was basically
self-employed for a long time,” he said.

“People knew that I liked to collect things, too,” he added, “so they
would give me a call and I would clean up basements or garages or attics
and take whatever I wanted. The two-car garage at my grandparents’ house
was filled with stuff that I had collected at this time. I started to
buy things and collect antiques and just pursued various interests to
keep busy,” Mr. McAvoy added.

“A couple of times I sold Christmas trees. I would drive up to Maine
with my pickup truck rigged with racks and I would buy a bunch of
Christmas trees that I brought back and sold,” he said.

It wasn’t long before his brother Kevin became a casualty of the
counterculture lifestyle he was leading.

Kevin died of AIDS in 1987, but before his death, Mr. McAvoy said that
his brother had managed to effectively set his life on the path to
recovery. It was a watershed moment that proved to be an inspirational
turning point for Mr. McAvoy.

“Prior to his death, he was able to set a good example for me,” Mr.
McAvoy noted. “During the time that he was sick I started to realize
that it mattered that I had quit school. That I wasn’t going in the
right direction. That I had obstacles I needed to overcome. It was also
around that time that I realized that I could do this [go back to
school], if I tried. That was a big transitional moment in my life,” Mr.
McAvoy said.

Mr. McAvoy went to the Long Branch Learning Center, where he pursued his
General Equivalency Diploma [GED].

He remembers the road being extremely rough and daunting initially, and
not without some formidable bumps; but his Kevin was able to set him
straight and lead him in the right direction.

“I went to see my brother in the hospital just before he died,” Mr.
McAvoy recalled. “It was right after I had taken a test and I didn’t
think that I had gotten any of the questions right. I told my teacher
that it was because of all the stuff that was happening with my brother
at the time. There was so much to think about then. When I told Kevin
what I said to my teacher, he removed his oxygen mask and simply stated,
‘Don’t use me as an excuse.’ That put everything in perspective and I
was able to persevere from then on.

“I always used to sabotage my own efforts,” Mr. McAvoy continued. “Then
I would become overwhelmed by everything and quit. Even worse, I would
justify quitting.”

After receiving his brother’s inspirational message, Mr. McAvoy dove
diligently into his workload and earned his GED.


continued...


--
unicycle6869 - LEVEL 10 RIDER-HELL YA!

Jamey (formerly known as tuna6869)

Which is worse, a president who screws an intern, or a president who
screws the country?

*20 Years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you
didn't do than by the things you did-EXPLORE-DREAM-LIVE!
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M-tv's pimp my ride was planned to be titled "pimp my unicycle" as
well.
http://tinyurl.com/8s6s8


--
leo

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leo Wrote:
M-tv's pimp my ride was planned to be titled "pimp my unicycle" as
well.
http://tinyurl.com/8s6s8


Here's that article:

One tricked-out stroller

By DAVID BURGER, Californian staff writer, e-mail:


Posted: Sunday October 2nd, 2005, 5:08 PM
Last Updated: Sunday October 2nd, 2005, 5:08 PM

BEFORE MTV PREMIERED ITS POPULAR SERIES “PIMP MY RIDE” — A SHOW DEVOTED
TO TRANSFORMING TEENS’ BEAT-UP LEMONS INTO LEMONADE-COLORED CARS — IT
MAY HAVE CONSIDERED SOME OTHER SHOWS: “PIMP MY SKATEBOARD.” “PIMP MY
UNICYCLE.” “PIMP MY HEARSE.”

“Pimp My Stroller” probably wasn’t among the ones considered, mostly
because the Bakersfield creator of the deluxe, souped-up and
tricked-out stroller is only planning on making one — for his daughter,
3-month-old Ashley.
“You don’t want to build the same thing,” said Barry Doyle, 26, a
welder by trade who lives in west Bakersfield. “My next project is
going to smoke this.”

But for the time being, while he and his wife Amy, 26, enjoy being the
parents of only one child, the proud father is also going to enjoy
showing off his newborn in a pink stroller that’s nothing like any
stroller you’re ever seen.

Aluminum chassis with air-bag suspension. Twenty-two-inch-tall ATV
tires. Airbrushed pink flames on the grill and sides.

The combination of a Formula One vehicle with some baby formula came
from Barry’s job, where he works on custom vehicles at DeBerti
Designs.

When Amy told her husband that their firstborn was going to be a girl,
he was initially disappointed — he had wanted to decorate his baby
boy’s room with aluminum — but then he came up with an idea.

“The boys get all the cool stuff,” he said. “Why can’t girls have neat
stuff, too?”

Four-thousand dollars later, Ashley is rolling around the streets of
the Kern County Fair in a ride called “Ms. Lilft,” named as a homage to
the monster truck Bigfoot. Doyle’s self-imposed deadline was the first
day of the fair, his and his wife’s favorite part of living in
Bakersfield. (They’ve been to the fair eight times this year.)

“(The fair) makes this town seem so much smaller,” he said. “Everyone
goes to the fair.” Amy originally had some qualms about toting Ashley
around in the stroller until she saw how much Ashley enjoys it.

“She likes the motion of the stroller,” Amy said. “If it stops, she
starts to fuss. ... It puts her right to sleep with those tires.”

As Barry pushes around Ashley at the fair, drawing oohs and aahs even
more than the Bungee-Plungee, he already has set his mind toward his
next project.

Barry wants to build an adult-size Big Wheel, a version of those
plastic tricycles that were ubiquitous on the block back in the 1980s.

“Why should kids get all the fun?” he said.


--
unicycle6869

Jamey (formerly known as tuna6869)

Which is worse, a president who screws an intern, or a president who
screws the country?

*20 Years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you
didn't do than by the things you did-EXPLORE-DREAM-LIVE!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
unicycle6869's Profile: http://www.unicyclist.com/profile/8990
View this thread: http://www.unicyclist.com/thread/22148