I read someone asking about pockets of frame builder around the country, mostly on the coasts. I think most of these little mini-renaissance areas had one guy that kept the love of fine bikes alive in their town. In my case the guy was Phil Holstein in Portland. He had a Shiwinn shop for many years, I think before WWII. Put local races on and was ABL rep. He sold me my first good bike, along with I am sure many other people. He always had some real fine Paramounts in his shop. The other thing that helped Portland was we had a track. I think Alpenrose was built in about 1966, but before this Phil held track events on the 1/4mile car track.
I started building frames because I looked at what was being sold and figured I could improve on them. I was a machinist and did quite a lot of silver soldering at the dentist equipment company I worked for. I had no one to show me how to do it, so just started doing it. This was around 1972. It helped that the bike boom was going on, any bike was sold instantly. This is when all the junky French bikes came here. I found a distributor in California, DIN I think it was, that was bringing Columbus in. I also found some other small outfits that had lugs and BB shells. I did not learn from Andy Newland of Strawberry. I was building before he started. Mark Dinucci was building for Strawberry at first. He must have been about 20. We were friends, but competitive. My focus was more touring, as I had just returned from a 6 month ride to Panama, Europe and North Africa. I learned a lot from this ride.
I will continue later.
Jim Merz
Bainbridge Is. WA