The Mystery of Tom Pritchard’s Bike | Hacker News Reader

The Mystery of Tom Pritchard’s Bike

bicycling.com

316 pointsmstats24 comments

What a great man and what great storytelling. Thank you for sharing.

I happen to have an Eisentraut ‘Limited’ of similar vintage. I bought it off of a retired aerospace engineer a decade ago. It's equipped with the same classic Campagnola and while the frame is a little tall for me I still get great pleasure in riding it around town. It is beautifully made, very light, and a piece of art.

Not mentioned in the story but Albert Eisentraut was building his bicycles in Oakland.

A couple old photos I dug up off my social media accounts:

https://scontent-lax3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/67766_15300271...

https://scontent-lax3-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/e15/1...

What a great story and an amazing person. It's always nice to read about someone who was genuinely a good person. I especially liked the quote: “Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived that distinguish one man from another.”

Fully agree. What an amazing read :)

As to the significance of "5826 D.B.T. 1976", it appears that it stands for Denver Bicycle Tax. This is probably why the author tried phoning the Denver police and then the oldest bike shop in Denver.

It seems that you can me make a movie on this guys life. I got to know a few characters like him and the truth is that they are awesome people but never stay around for long, as they are always seeking the next adventure.

For those who want more, here's the piece he wrote on Tom: https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2009/01/11/moose-and-the-my...

Try this link if you don't want to subscribe to the Tampa Bay Times to read one story:

https://archive.vn/QyMnG

I've lived in St. Pete since 2000. If Tom was who I think he was, he was certainly a character. He'd drive around with that d* jeep blasting flight of the Valkyries.

> Eisentraut trained Bruce Gordon, Joe Breeze, Skip Hujsak, and Mark Nobilette, among others.

That's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Breeze who built some of the first mountain bikes.

I spent half a day with Bruce Gordon and bought one of his bikes a decade or so ago. He's gone now, but he was an interesting character in his own right - seems the bike world is full of them.

Here's the piece he wrote on Tom https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2009/01/11/moose-and-the-my...

> "He said he was trying to get the attention of a beautiful young woman who was a serious cyclist, and he couldn’t just ride up on a Schwinn Varsity."

So, I had an orange Schwinn Varsity when I was in jr. high school. (40 pounds of steel baby). Then one year, one of my friends got a 20-something pound Nishiki. What a revelation that was; the feeling of efficiency was just incredible.

When I was in college, I listed after the Bridgestone MB-0....until they got in a Nishiki Alien.

That thing was mind bogglingly different...I looked it up earlier in the year and...it's not so mind boggling different anymore.http://www.retrobike.co.uk/forum/download/file.php?id=230276

I need to know more about Tom Pritchard apparently, but I've been embarking on my best attempts to upgrade my bikes on my own. When I saw that 6-speed with down-tube shifters and the camo road bars! God, it's so fun. I need to redo the paint on my SE Draft Lite so I can take some pictures and at least try and feel like I have a cool classic bike.

> I need to redo the paint on my SE Draft Lite so I can take some pictures and at least try and feel like I have a cool classic bike.

Or not! To learn from Tom, he had the adventures but wasn't outspoken about them - the stories were told by others. With a bike, the point is to enjoy it! I have an 80s steel frame, not as unique, but it gets me around, fast, and I've had tons of fun with it over the past 15 years. Camping in the woods with it chained to a tree, riding through 6" of slush on slick tires, wiping out and learning multiple times... I've touched up scrapes and dings with not-quite-matching shades of nail polish, my handlebar tape is falling apart, my bottom bracket sticks out a bit because I did a shit job of replacing it 5 years ago. But I love it anyway. Or as the article said,

> “Bicycles are not built to be used as status symbols,” Eisentraut himself wrote in a chapter on framebuilding for a book called Bike Tripping, published in 1972. “The cyclist should ride his chosen bike, instead of bullshitting about its angles or its chain stay length.”

OK, my green nail polish running out will probably be when I do something about the brake levers and the damage done to the original paint by said brake levers.

This is a really wonderful story. For anyone like me who's reading the comments but doesn't care at all about bikes: read the story, Tom Pritchard sounds like a great man.

Many, if not all, lives are as rich as this and would benefit from as romantic a retelling.

I think that's a bit unfair. Most Americans for example haven't even left the country(and many, their state), much less try and smuggle hash into Spain.

While my story isn’t done being written, I doubt mine would hold up a candle against what Tom had experienced by my age so far. Some people just live unusual lives.

or even left their neighborhood

i grew up on an island less than a square mile and some never left it, and thought the US was tge same size

A fine story, and a sweet bike. The engineer in me says "perfection".

I also appreciate that the author doesn't wear stupid gaudy bicycle jerseys and shorts.

Having lived in Florida, I would wager that the author is suffering for fashion in jeans and a black shirt moreso than he would be in "gaudy" bicycling attire. Or maybe that's your point -- that we should all prefer looking hip over dorky-yet-functional?

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