Frank Berto has joined Sheldon Brown in the Great Big Bike Shop in the Sky.
Bicycle Retailer has a note up, as does René Herse Cycles.
At the former, Jim Langley notes in comments:
“Gearing always has and probably always will mystify new cyclists — and Frank, as technical editor, made sense of it all for legions of readers through his columns in Bicycling magazine. It can’t be overstated, the impact Frank’s writing had on our industry and sport.”
Condolences to his family, friends and fans.
Gahan Wilson, whose surreal cartoons regularly appeared in National Lampoon, Playboy, and other top-shelf mags, has stepped away from the drawing board.
He died Thursday in Scottsdale, Ariz. Complications of dementia, they say. He was 89.
This guy was funny. Bleak, weird, the owner and operator of left field, he kept you off balance like some psychotic judo master. There was nobody else like him working Back in the Day®, and if he has a successor, I’ve not seen him or her yet.
One of my faves? An overstuffed chair absorbing a reader. Eyeglasses and book lie on the floor. All you can see as the reader vanishes is a pair of hands, protruding from the seat.
Another depicts a gardener who has unearthed a skeleton. His employer, a stately, dessicated husk of a woman, says, “I think you would be advised to locate the new delphinium bed elsewhere, Hobbs.”
Yet another shows a soldier covered in gore, muck and God knows what all, knife in one hand and assault rifle in the other. He stands alone in a smoking hellscape that makes the “Terminator” future look like Disneyland. His eyes pop out of the murk like cue balls. And he smiles. “I think I won!” he says.
Dracula with a vampire hand puppet. Dracula with a salt shaker. (Dude liked Dracula, what can I tell you?) A woman who has stuffed her husband into the trash can outside her apartment door (“You don’t get rid of him that easy, Mrs. Jacowsky,” says a man who may be the building superintendent). A writer for “The National Confidential Weekly” who, stuck for a lively bit of the old Fake News®, finally leaves his typewriter for a while and returns to tap out, “It isn’t easy cutting the heart out of a woman with a dull knife. And it takes time. It takes a good fifteen minutes.”
Oh, Gahan Wilson was one of the greats. I hope he and Charles Addams are hoisting a tall cold one in the Beyond.
This one goes out to every aging child who, come Veterans Day, misses the old man (or old lady, for that matter).
Or maybe you just miss Steve Goodman.
Ed Zink, one of the founders of the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic in Durango, has gone beyond.
The Durango native died Friday of complications from a heart attack, according to The Durango Herald. He was 71.
Ed was a rancher, a retailer, and a pillar of the U.S. cycling community. He ramrodded the Iron Horse through good times and bad, helped bring the first World Mountain Bike Championships to his hometown, and was a gent when dealing with irksome cycling scribes who wished to quiz him about this, that and the other.
A memorial service will be held at 10 a.m. Monday at the Community Concert Hall at Fort Lewis College.
Contributions in Ed’s memory can be made to Trails 2000 and the Mercy Health Foundation. My condolences to his family and friends.
The cantankerous carrot-top has finally drummed himself off to the Other Side.
It goes without saying that I listened to a lot of Cream as a young ne’er-do-well, and this cut was a fave. So was this one. And this one.
Baker was apparently not fond of reminiscing about those days — “Oh, God, Cream’s a bloody albatross around my neck,” he once said — but I remember them fondly.
What I remember of them, that is. At least I managed to steer clear of the smack.
