17 and restless in 1972..........
Join hiking club in highschool sponsored by a youthful English teacher and her husband who later have an idea of starting a cycling club
Spend many weeks oogling various promotional brochures and daydreaming with friends over the possibilities of riding exotic multi-speed lightweight bikes and gaining our freedom to motivate at will
Scratch and scrape together enough dough from various jobs to purchase Gitane TdF.
Shortly after doing some group rides in our new cycling club - one of the cycling club sponsors tells us about a friend of theirs who lived /raced bikes in Germany and is willing to take those of us with an interest out for some training rides. He has an orange 60's campy equipped Rickert. We get up a small group and I thought I would die from exhaustion that first time - but I was the only one in the group that kept riding and got into racing.
Met a fellow in Chapel Hill who was racing named Bob Anderson. We became good friends and logged many miles together. He had an all campy Falcon and lived an alternative lifestyle with his wife in a little farmhouse outside of Chapel Hill with a whopper room dedicated to bike stuff! There was a 60's Bianchi there with some missing headset parts that kept the frame just that. The farmhouse was authentic - just electricity - no heatin' or coolin' goin' on there. Rode my first rollers there. He had all kinds of euro cycling mags and we would spend time talking about the big races and marvel at the doings of Merckx and all his main rivals. Bob really had the racing bug and it wasn't long before he was off to Europe for some racing - I think his dad was stationed there with the armed forces- and when he came back he had a custom built Pog. He loved that bike! We went to a number of races together.
Spring of '73 and I had to upgrade to "keep up with the Jones's" and demonstrate my seriousness - I was working in a bike shop and after scraping together enough, got my dream machine electric blue Colnago that met it's end a couple years later in an accident. The next year it was off to college and the beginning of my training for my career. I wish I'd discovered cycling earlier - it changed my life in so many ways.
So many exciting and joyous memories from those times!
Roman Stankus
Atlanta, Ga.