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.
Some mornings — maybe most mornings — eyeballing the news first thing is a real bad idea.
For openers, The Duck! City’s coppers told KOAT Action News that the 11-year-old suspect in Scott Habermehl’s death had already been considered “a danger to the community” thought to have a number of antisocial pasatiempos, among them “shooting one person, shooting at another person, as well as burglarizing multiple homes, vehicles, and a business.”
Next, a Las Cruces auto show turns into a shooting gallery. The body count varies wildly depending on your source of information, but The New York Times apparently had someone on the scene and counts maybe two dead and six injured.
It will tell you much about the state of today’s newspaper business that the Las Cruces Sun News had to run with a story from its El Paso cousin before finally getting its own report online around 8 this morning. Check out the staff directory. The El Paso Times now reports three dead and 14 wounded.
And finally, the DOGEbags are busting balloons over at NOAA, as John Fleck tells us in his latest wrecking-ball report.
Writes John: “Daily radiosonde launches from National Weather Service sites across the country, coordinated with similar launches at the same time around the world, provide critical data input to weather forecast models. While satellites and other data sources play an increasingly important role, the tried and true twice-a-day weather balloon launch provides the vital skeleton on which our weather forecasts depend. … The benefits of good weather forecasts vastly outweigh the costs of collecting and analyzing the data.”
It being St. Me Day, and with a nod to The New York Timesfor its story on how the DOGEbags have been taking a shillelagh to the National Nuclear Security Administration — which is said to have lost “a huge cadre of scientists, engineers, safety experts, project officers, accountants and lawyers — all in the midst of its most ambitious endeavors in a generation” — we present The Bothy Band performing, “Old Hag You Have Killed Me.”
Big Bill McBeef, shredding the gnar. | Photo by Lolly AdventureGirl (lifted from FaceButt)
Our last track is a skull. — “Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry,” by Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison
The letter was returned, marked “Deceased.”
This is how my friend Michael Schenk stumbled across Bill Baughman’s final footprint in our lives, when one of his annual Schenk-family newsletters, sent via snail mail, bounced back from Bill’s last known address in Bibleburg.
Michael emailed me on Wednesday: “Bill Baughman passed away! Have you heard about this?”
No, I had not. And I immediately set out to learn the details.
Which … were not forthcoming.
No obituary in the Gazette. No other trail that I could backtrack via Google, DuckDuckGo, or Bing. Michael’s call to Bill’s former employer yielded only a vague reference to “health problems.”
Well, yeah. Sorta goes without saying, eh?
Bill was not always easy to catch, especially on the bicycle. But if true, this would be a breakaway unprecedented. We had always been able to find him again, somewhere. A bagel shop. A Mexican restaurant. At home, gaming, in his air-conditioned computer closet.
Old Dogs at the O’Neill farewell: Foreground, Joan Stang; background, Bill Baughman, Your Humble Narrator, Herself, and Karl Stang.
Herself and I last caught up with Bill in 2022, in Manitou Springs, during a celebration of life for another old velo-bro, John O’Neill. John, Bill, and his longtime friend Bill Simmons were among the O.D.s (Original Dogs) who joined me when I left Rainbow Racing to form Team Mad Dog Media-Dogs at Large Velo.
In those early days we trained a ton, barking Liggettisms at each other — suitcases of courage were opened, pedals danced upon or turned in anger, elastic snapped — on the Highway 115 rollers to Penrose and back; up Highway 24 through Manitou to Woodland Park and beyond; down to the racetrack south of Fountain, occasionally adding the dreaded Hanover Loop; or around the 1986 world-championships course at the Air Force Academy.
On race weekends we’d bunk three and four to a room in skeevy motels at Pagosa Springs, Durango, Crested Butte, and elsewhere. I was a popular roomie because I always packed my Krups espresso machine on road trips. The Bills proved extra popular with me after I broke a collarbone at Rage in the Sage; Simmons abandoned his own race to take charge of my bike, and Baughman drove me, my bike, and my truck back to B-burg.
Some three decades later, during our conversation at O’Neill’s sendoff, Bill seemed subdued, maybe even a wee bit sad, not at all his usual rollicking self.
His mother, ex-wife, and a son had all passed. He and Simmons had been out of touch. And he had been been hit by a car while riding his road bike, which snatched a knot in his fearlessness; he was avoiding both road and trail, and when he cycled at all he stuck to a few local bike paths. He drank only at home.
It seemed a stunning retreat by a renowned battler who, sweating tequila from a margarita marathon as the peloton thundered along, would turn a baleful eye on anyone who groused about the pace and growl, “Shut up and ride.”
Still, Bill looked good, as though he’d put on a few pounds. He’d always been thin as a frame pump. Holding his wheel during a group ride as he executed his famous “Marksheffel Plan” — an attack near the bottom of the long climb up the east-side road of that name — was like trying to draft a shark’s fin.
We talked about getting together again, the way people do when they reconnect, however briefly, to send some other old friend west. And after Herself and I got back to ’Burque I emailed him. He never replied.
How can someone just drop off the face of the earth with only the U.S. Postal Service taking the slightest bit of notice? I mean, sure, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” But you’d think Google might have the jump on them these days, especially since Jan. 20.
Facebook, the Pony Express of the AARP, was basically useless. The number I had for Bill Simmons was no longer in service. Cindy O’Neill, John’s widow, hadn’t heard the news until Herself passed it along.
And then I remembered: Amber Shaffer, who catered O’Neill’s farewell gathering, was not just a part of his Colorado Running Club crew — she was once a neighbor of Bill’s on the east side of B-burg, not far from the ancestral home of the O’Gradys on South Loring Circle. Ours really is a small world at times.
Late Friday afternoon I called Amber at Roman Villa Pizza; she said that yes, she had learned via text of Bill’s passing late last year, and … and that was all she knew. Fridays are busy in the restaurant racket, so I thanked her, promised to drop in for a meal next trip through town, and said goodbye.
Looks like Bill has dropped us all again, dancing on the pedals, the elastic snapped for good. I hope there was a frosty pitcher of margaritas waiting for him at the finish.
The patrón of El Rancho Delux, Jim “Jethro” Martinez, in his throne. The shirtless drunkard in the cowboy hat is Your Humble Narrator.
My old friend Jim Martinez went west last week.
We got the story from his brother, Larry. Jim had an episode at his cigar club: it escalated; he was hospitalized; it was bad. There was nothing to do but let him go.
He was 73.
Jim played a large role in my life. Hey, he was a large fella, nicknamed Jethro, the tallest in his immediate family — father Lawrence, mother Lucy, brother Larry, and sister Betty — and the joke was that the Martinezes must have had a very tall mailman Back in the Day®.
Jim lived large. too. While Larry and I and the rest of our gang were in college at the University of Northern Colorado in the early Seventies, Jim was working for a living.
He dressed well; fashionably, but not ostentatiously. Drove a Volvo. Your money was no good in his presence. And he loved a good party.
More than a few erupted at “El Rancho Delux,” Jim’s three-bedroom, one-bath, ranch-style rental on a rare handful of undeveloped acres in the Denver metro area. Hardly any neighbors to speak of, or to. A pub within walking distance. It doesn’t get any better than that.
The annual El Rancho Delux Welcome Back Summer luau in particular became legendary. Those free-for-alls recalled the parties in Jack Kerouac’s “The Dharma Bums.” I swiped Jim’s copy, which I cherish and am leafing through right now:
“Japhy kept wandering to all sections of the party with a big jug in his hand, his face beaming with happiness. For a while the party in the living room emptied out the bonfire clique and soon Psyche and Japhy were doing a mad dance, then Sean leaped up and whirled her around and she made as if to swoon and fell right in between Bud and me sitting on the floor drumming (Bud and I who never had girls of our own and ignored everything) and lay there a second sleeping on our laps. We puffed on our pipes and drummed on.”
The Martinez brothers, always a persuasive pair, moved into politics, working with the likes of Ed Graham, Monte Pascoe, Michael Dukakis, Ted Kennedy, and Denver Mayor Wellington Webb. I stumbled from one newspaper to the next until I realized that they were all the same newspaper, which is even truer now than it was then.
My wedding, circa 1990, Santa Fe: In the foreground, (L-R): Jethro, Intercoursey, Shady (yes, that would be me); background, Rudi Boogs, Mombo.
More than once when I went overboard it was Jim who threw me a line. El Rancho was like Motel 6; Jim always left the light on for you, sometimes for days at a stretch. If the spare bed was spoken for, there was a couch. The couch was taken? Plenty of room on the floor. No, your money’s no good here. You need some? How about clothes? Jesus, Shady, you look like hell. More chins than the Hong Kong phone book.
In 1983 Jim really went the extra mile — miles, actually, and plenty of them — after I broke an ankle as I was preparing to leave one newspaper in Oregon for another in Colorado.
I had a start date, an apartment to empty into the truck, and no way to drive a five-speed manual with one foot in a cast. It took several friends — hey, you know who you are; there’s only so much room on the Internet, y’know — to get me boxed up and shipped east, Jim among them. He caught a flight west and drove my truck, me, and my dogs back to the Ranch(o).
We hit Denver just in time for the party.
Jim was one of the many good Samaritans who put me up, and put up with me, after I burned through that gig in Pueblo and another in suburban Denver in five years.
He had his own problems by then, but found time to school me on the ROI of a creative hair stylist and a small quiver of pro duds, because looking like a werewolf with the mange was not helping the job search any more than my résumé, which had more holes than the Albert Hall.
I finally found another newspaper job, my last one, about a week before I ran out of unemployment insurance and Jim ran out of Christian charity.
Jim and brother Larry enjoying a smoke in 2009.
Then time passed, and things changed, as they sometimes do when you’re not paying attention. Our paths simply diverged. We traded abrazos at our respective weddings, reminisced with other members of the club in ones and twos, here and there, and enjoyed a few those-were-the-days chuckles during a reunion of a select few of the El Rancho mob at Larry’s place outside Denver in 2009.
That was the last time I saw Jim. I thought of him now and then, recounted the legend of Jethro — maybe embellishing just a bit here and there for literary effect — but I didn’t know that he had a son, or that his marriage had ended. For a so-called newsman I wasn’t exactly up on current events.
In Jim Harrison’s novel “Warlock” a character who lives in the real world says to another who doesn’t: “Don’t you know everyone’s life is shit? You’re smart enough to do something about your own. Don’t be such a drag-ass.”
He also said, “Every time I pass the cemetery on the way to work I get the feeling we don’t live forever.”
I’ve read that book a dozen times. Own two copies, one of them autographed. Paid for them and everything. You’d think I would’ve gotten the message by now.
The most recent images of Jim I’ve seen show a smiling, silver-haired gent in glistening casual athletic wear, hobnobbing with various powers-that-be. La Eme meets the Sopranos with a side of Corleone (Mikey always dressed better than Tony). On social media, former mayor Webb mourned his old friend and assistant as “family,” dubbing Jim his “Luca Brasi.”
Jim knew about family, blood kin and the other sort. His father passed far too early, in 1984, but his mother, now 92, is still with us. He visited her every day.
Larry says there will be a celebration of his brother’s life once this unusually cold Colorado winter takes its foot off the throttle, a posthumous and perhaps premature Welcome Back Summer gathering.
Not at El Rancho Delux, though. Our old outlaw hideout is long gone, entombed beneath a jumble of “apartment homes,” though the pub remains.
And now its proprietor, the host with the most, is lost to us as well.
I miss my brother Jim Martinez. Peace to him, his family, and his many, many friends. Leave the light on for us, homes. We’ll be along directly.
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