filter.
A high school kid gets turned down
for a bike shop job and inadvertently
midwifes a hotbed of frame building.
The story of the bike industry in New
England begins not in Boston, the
hub on which all of New England
turns, but in New York City. The
year was 1973 and a skinny kid from
New Jersey boarded a bus bound for
Burlington, Vermont. The Village Voice
was running an ad for a bike mechanic
at a shop in Burlington and Richard
Sachs aimed to fill that position.
When he arrived at the shop,
unannounced, he learned two
things. First, the position had
been filled weeks prior. Second,
he was unqualified. Revenge is
often served hot; Sachs grabbed a
copy of International Cycle Sport, a
notepad and headed for the UVM
library. He wrote to 30 different
companies, offering his services in
Text > Patrick Brady Images > Natalia Boltukhova
NEW
ENGLAND
GENESIS
exchange for an apprenticeship as
a frame builder. Three replied and
one—Witcomb Cycles—said yes.
Witcomb Cycles was an English
producer of frames and they hold
the unlikely position of catalyzing
most of the bike industry based in
New England today. Roughly a
month following Sachs’ arrival in
Deptford, London, Peter Weigle
arrived. The two got an education
of sorts in frame building; less than
a year after their arrival, a shop was
set up in East Haddam, Connecticut.
Witcomb USA began selling bicycles
in 1972, though initially, Sachs and
Weigle weren’t producing them. The
owner of the U.S. operation, Ed
Allen, set up a proper frame shop
to supplant the stock of frames he
was bringing over from England.
Sachs says the bikes coming out
of Witcomb’s satellite operation in
Wales were terrible and arrived
infrequently, so Allen set Sachs and
Weigle up with a frame shop to fulfill
the orders he had.
Allen was a salesman’s salesman.
Sachs says he never appeared more
at ease than on his boat and with a
highball in hand. When the operation
ran out of headsets for the sample
frames to be shown, Allen wasn’t
worried and told Sachs, “It’s my job
to make the sale.”
“Ed really was a dream-come-true
for an aspiring frame builder,” Sachs
says. “He was a sugar daddy; Peter
and I got to learn the craft of frame
building without having to be out
there on our own.”
