Killing time between breakfast and burial last Saturday I drove out State Avenue to River Road and parked at a little pullout across from the Cattails Golf Course, where a couple sat chatting as a kid fished.
Alamosa didn’t seem much changed from 1971, when I was a freshman at Adams State College, the only school in the state that would have me.
The school is called Adams State University now, but that seems a little grandiose. It’s still a small college in a small town, and the dorms — from the outside, anyway — seemed untouched, save by the ravages of time and undergraduates.
Coronado Hall, undated; shoplifted from the Adams State website.
Coronado Hall still has that generic Fifties-to-Seventies vibe. Could be anything from a budget apartment building in a Seventies sitcom to a residential treatment facility to a nursing home.
But the McCurry-Savage-Moffat-Houtchens L-block apartments would embarrass an East German, even before the Berlin Wall came down.
I took no pix of this academic detour down memory lane, not eager to be dubbed an elderly perv’, or worse, a narc.
“Do you have any children here, sir?”
“Uh, no, officer, not that I know of. If I did, they’d be in their 50s, and I could see their pictures any old time down at the post office.”
I don’t recall which of these hovels was my last known residence at Adams State — but Savage would seem appropriate, so I’ll take it. My roommates and I broke all the written rules and some of the unwritten ones, too, until I dropped out after two years and discovered the wonderful world of work. This sent me shrieking back to school in a year. Not to Alamosa, though. To Greeley, where I met all these Martinezes.
A half-century later, as I hauled bike and baggage into my motel, a man and a couple of women were discussing in low tones some loved one bound for a stretch in the federal pen. Could’ve been me in ’73. Stay in school, kids. And don’t deal drugs from your dorm room.
In other news, the Safeway has moved across the street. The Campus Cafe, Bank Shot, and Purple Pig are still around, but the Ace Inn is not. The Rialto, where I saw The Firesign Theatre’s “Martian Space Party” — double-billed with “Zachariah,” written by the Firesigns — is no longer a theater.
Tell me my man Jim isn’t gonna set this big ol’ cigar to smoking. …
And everyone still does their serious shopping in Pueblo or Santa Fe. In Alamosa, a Martinez cousin groused, “There’s nothing.”
Well, that’s not entirely true. There was a big gay-pride rally just down the alley from William’s house on Saturday. The youngsters dashed over to buy a rainbow flag and T-shirt to prank their elders.
Speaking of pranks, there’s a largish artillery piece not far from where Jim and Lucy were laid to rest. I can see Jim having some fun with that on Halloween, New Year’s Eve, maybe Super Bowl Sunday if the Broncos ever get there again.
I can hear Lucy telling him to knock it off, too. “Cállate, mijo, people are trying to sleep here.”
This past weekend it struck me that I’ve probably spent more of my life with Martinezes than O’Gradys.
More waking hours, anyway. Not necessarily conscious, but in motion, for good or ill.
Lawrence Martinez, ex-cop, telling jokes to an ex-dope dealer he’d just met while taking five from his backyard grill in Alamosa, Colo. His wife, Lucy, making breakfast for the same ne’er-do-well and her eldest son, Jim, after their feeble attempt to follow in the oversized footprints of Hunter S. Thompson in Las Vegas.
The family came together again on Saturday as Lucy and Jim joined Lawrence at the Alamosa municipal cemetery.
Whenever I hear of a friend’s passing I always hope it’s a case of mistaken identity, or someone’s idea of a joke, and that we’ll see each other again.
But when I’m standing in front of a big stone with the name chiseled in … well, that’s one hell of a fact-check.
At graveside Larry Martinez spoke briefly of his father, mother, and brother. Sister BettyJo and her husband, Tom, were there, as were Larry’s wife, Sherry; their sons, Will and Stefan; daughter-in-law Kaitlyn and baby Delilah May; Jim’s son, Kelly; the resident wildman William, a.k.a. Guillermo; the fabulous Leonard R. Dogg; and a moderately sized coterie of other family members, friends, and hangers-on, among them Your Humble Narrator.
During a Friday-night barbecue at William’s and a late lunch Saturday at Nino’s Del Sol, old feats of dubious valor were revisited and new tales added to the family mythology. Some made me wish I was still a youngster sucker-punching his liver; others, not so much. Ditched in a small-town bar, stuck for a ride? The woman with four kids who says her place is a lot closer than yours? It makes for a good story later over margaritas, as long as the kids aren’t calling you daddy when the ex shows up unexpectedly.
I settled for writing a note to Jim that went into the earth with him, and placed a flower at graveside. And I bowed thrice to Lawrence, Lucy, and Jim, thankful to the universe for giving me two families — the one I was born into, and the other I stumbled into.
• • •
After lunch, pursued by an electrical storm, I drove to Colorado Springs to pay my respects to another friend, from another life.
I’m on a first-name basis with a lot of the ghosts in that haunted house of a town, enough of them to launch a chain of Overlook hotels.
There’s my dad, Col. Harold J. O’Grady, USAF (ret). And mom, Mary Jane (Dickey) O’Grady. My first dog, Jonathan, a.k.a. Jojo (William in Alamosa still remembers Jojo). Marguerite “Rusty” Mitchell, food editor at the Gazette, who dubbed the burg “a cemetery with lights.” My Zen bro Steve Milligan. My bike bros John “Usuk” O’Neill and Bill Baughman. “Doc” Lori Cohen, who put me back together every time I disassembled myself. Ike, a.k.a. Chairman Meow, the mini-kitty who fought off a coyote only to be felled by an enlarged heart.
Andy was a character in the second act of my little theatre of the absurd, in which I played a cycling journalist. A former technical director of the U.S. Cycling Federation who would later be dubbed “a problem promoter” by a top dog at that organization’s successor, USA Cycling, Andy was, simply put, a fool for bicycle racing.
He told me once: “Back, way back, in the late ’50’s through the mid-’70’s, I used my trusty Hallicrafters shortwave receiver to get Tour de France updates from the BBC in London on the hour. There was no other coverage anywhere here. I still have it within arm’s reach, though it’s long broken as tubes and parts are nearly impossible to find.”
Andy not only loved listening to bike racing, he loved watching it, on TV and in person, so much so that starting in 1991 he and his wife, Kathleen, began busting their butts promoting their Sand Creek Series of races in and around Colorado Springs, which despite the presence of USCF, USAC, and the rest of the Olympic “family” was woefully short of, y’know, like, actual bike racing, an’ shit.
The Bohlmann family — Andy, Kathy, and their sons, Matthew and Philip — picked up where that better-known, better-funded family left off.
Like another tireless Colorado race promoter, Boulder’s Chris Grealish, Andy could find a diamond of a course in the dung of unlikely places. The recurring nightmare “Hell on a Hillside,” for instance, which I remember as a vertical mountain-bike crit in Manitou Springs that was not at all tailored to my particular strengths, which were overshadowed by a multitude of weaknesses, primary among them a fear of death and/or dismemberment.
By turns goofy and grumpy this blue-collar bull in cycling’s china shop was forever tilting against the carbon-and-titanium windmills of the sport’s polo-shirt governance, and frequently found himself “in exile,” as he called it in a ceaseless torrent of emails to friends and foes. The Bohlmanns’ Sand Creek and Ascent Cycling races weren’t for the 1 percenters; they were for the rest of us.
Hell, they were there for you even if you didn’t know a chainring from a cassette. A 2013 race in Palmer Park sought donations to the Care and Share Food Bank for the firefighters battling the Black Forest blaze — at the time the state’s most destructive fire ever — and the residents affected by it.
As their sons grew and Kathleen fell ill in the mid-Nineties, Andy took on more responsibilities. There was college, and caregiving; he watched over his wife in their Colorado Springs home for nearly a quarter-century until she passed in 2013. He considered stepping away from cycling after that, but the boys encouraged him to carry on.
And so he did, until his own health took a wrong turn. I last caught his act at round four of the 2014 US Cup Pro Series in Pulpit Rock Park. In 2017, after we relocated to Albuquerque, he emailed to say he’d been out of the game for more than a year.
And then, on Aug. 1, son Matthew wrote to say his dad was gone altogether. A one-two punch — a stroke followed by the diagnosis of an inoperable cancer.
“He passed peacefully and comfortably at home with Philip and I with him,” he said. Good lads. They learned a lot from Kathleen and Andy, and not just about bicycle racing.
So there I was on Sunday, back at the old Bohlmann place on the east side of town, where my high-school pals and I used to act the fool in the boonies now buried under rooftops and retail.
Matthew and Philip had Jimmy Buffett on the stereo (“A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean”) and hoisted a pirate flag to a clangor of cowbells in a driving rain (Andy had taken a nautical turn at one point in his life, and it certainly felt as though we were at sea).
Stairway to heaven? The racers in the Mad Dog cyclocrosses at Monument Valley Park never called it that.
The mourners dined on Cuban sandwiches from a place he favored — call it a “Cuban Crime of Passion,” which of course I did — and shared memories face to face and over an Innertubes hookup for those who couldn’t attend in person. It was a fine sendoff for the old privateer.
Over the next couple of days, as sort of an homage, I visited a few of the courses Andy and I used for our respective events Back in the Day®: Palmer Park; Bear Creek Regional Park; Monument Valley Park
I brought a Steelman Eurocross and running shoes, but couldn’t get a whole lot of use out of either. The sky kept crying.
Not all of the fallen are found on the battlefield.
Some don’t turn up until later.
Less of both sorts, please.
Toward that end, what say we give our men and women in uniform better civilian leadership? It’s not much to ask of those of us here in the rear with the gear where there is no fear.
Weird dreams last night. Lots of rain; a bicycle with a dynamo light I couldn’t get working; a close encounter with a mystery motorist who nearly clipped me as I wrestled with the unresponsive light; long drives with people I knew through vaguely familiar landscapes and towns; a small, dilapidated guest house that likewise had the feel of someplace I’d lived before; a couple of friendly dogs I didn’t recognize; and a visit to and some conversation with a genial old man living in a single cluttered room.
What finally blew me out of bed at 5:19 a.m. — and I mean had me out of the rack and onto my feet in some fight-or-flight reaction — was the sound of a woman either laughing or crying.
Herself watching a cute-animal video on the iPad? The garlicky pasta sauce I made for dinner? La Llorona?
Wasn’t Herself. She was in the kitchen making coffee and entertaining Miss Mia Sopaipilla. And she had disturbing dreams too, about her late mom and an old friend who passed not long after Herself the Elder. So it could’ve been the pasta sauce, I suppose.
La Llorona? A strong maybe. This is the Southwest, after all, though my crowd, the Ó Grádaighs of County Clare, is more closely associated with the banshee, an Irish herald of death.
So it may be relevant that yesterday I spoke with one old bro’ about friends and relatives gone west, and with another about the Doors, who took their name from Aldous Huxley’s book describing his experiences with mescaline, “The Doors of Perception,” its title likewise lifted from a William Blake metaphor in his book, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.
Now, I have had my own experiences with mescaline and other psychedelics, starting in “high” school and continuing off and on into the Eighties. And they certainly took the Windex to my perceptual doors, if only for a little while.
But these days I see “through a glass, darkly,” as did Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, adding, “now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
Or, as newspaper lingo once had it: “More TK” (more to come).
Y’think? Naw. Maybe? I dunno.
Until further enlightenment arrives, I’m betting on either garlicky pasta sauce or acid flashback, though the latter doesn’t explain why Herself had weird dreams too. An acid head she was not.
My 1994 DBR Prevail TT with its Neuvation wheelset.
John Neugent has gone west, according to Bicycle Retailer. He was 76.
Like many of us in the bike biz John wore a series of hats. His résumé includes stints at (or with) Sunshine Cycle, Service Cycle, Sachs USA, EV Global, Trico and Schwinn.
Eventually he went consumer direct under his own shingle — Neugent Cycling — and kept in touch with his customers via e-mail newsletter and a YouTube channel that he used as a showcase for his banjo chops and wheelbuilding skills.
John was an affable gent, occasionally mildly retrogrouchy, but without the grouchy bits, and he maintained a certain flexibility as regards the catechism. Here’s an example from a March 2019 edition of his newsletter:
It recently occurred to me that there is a generation, maybe two, who never used friction shifting. The type I grew up with that preceded index shifting, hyperglide, and electric shifting. Any real rider would also have downtube shifting where you needed to take one hand off the bars and bend over enough to reach the downtube. There are no studies done on this, because, in all likelihood, a bike like that made with modern technology would result in a much less expensive, lighter, and, one could argue, better bike. The real problem: They would be less expensive.
Imagine if you might how light a real 10-speed (five in the back and two up front) with downtube shifters and pedals using toe clips would be. Add tubular tires and carbon frames and rims and you are probably well under 10 pounds. Probably even more when you consider how much weight they could save in brakes, derailleurs, chain, sprockets, and anything else. I know there are grand fondos that require the use of bikes like that but they don’t use today’s technology.
At some point they are going to have bikes that pedal themselves. Oh wait, they’ve already done that. They’re called electric bikes and they are the new rage. How come I feel that many steps forward are really steps backward?
If someone presented a post-modern bike like the one I imagine I bet people would look at it with awe in the same way they recently did with single-speed bikes (known as track bikes 50 years ago). True spoke-sniffers like myself are not only dreaming of the possibilities, but are thinking about how to put one together with parts lying around.
John and I emailed back and forth now and then, and I always enjoyed his laid-back perspective on La Velo Nostra. I never got my DBR Prevail TT down to 10 pounds, but it wasn’t the fault of his Neuvation wheelset — I hung on to my heavy STI shifters, nine-speed cassette, clipless pedals, and ti’/chromoly frameset.
Peace to John, his family, friends, and customers. He will be missed.
Mad Blog Media 