At U.C.Davis, we are working on creating a bicycle-only museum built around the Pierce Miller collection (70 bicycles from 1820-1905). This museum will be an excellent place for individuals to donate their bikes, parts, and other bicycle specific items. This museum is run by people that love vintage bicycles and know how to care for collectable bicycles. This is a place for those who wish for their bikes to be loved, cared for and displayed properly for others to enjoy. Dan Kehew and myself will be putting (loaning) more than 40 vintage lightweights into this collection, as well as other local collectors that wish to donate/loan to the museum. Please consider loaning bikes to our museum. The bike/s remain yours to sell or keep as you wish, and the musuem gets to display a greater variety of classic lightweights. If I kicked-the-bucket, I would want one of my bike friends to sell them to people who would love and appreciate them as much as I do, and give the money to my wife and kids ( she could care less about keeping the bikes).
Robert St.Cyr
General Manager, ASUCD Bike Barn
Board of Directors, California Bicycle Museum
Restoration committee
Davis/Sacramento Ca. USA
>From: "Tom Sanders" <tsan7759142@sbcglobal.net>
>To: <classicrendezvous@bikelist.org>
>Subject: [CR]What to do with your bikes...use caution with museums
>Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2006 16:15:47 -0500
>
>David Bean rightly pointed out that museums will likely just sell a bike
>that comes their way unless it has some special significance related to the
>museum's special mission or thrust. Museums are constantly deaccessioning
>items they don't need or that no longer fit with their goals. Most larger
>museums only display a small portion of their items...often as little as
>10%. The remainder is usually stored in an annex.
>The longer an item sets in their storage the more at risk it is. Normal
>problems with aging and environment are combined with such other problems
>as
>fire, theft, etc. Don't think that the threat of theft is insignificant.
>A
>nearby museum has had a collection of very special pocket watches
>decimated...a few were recovered, but I never heard of anyone being
>prosecuted. They also had the special collection of a famous and wealthy
>Automotive Pioneer's wife's Indian baskets just fade away. She collected
>many of these from the sources in the period shortly after 1900, going to
>the original sources to see them made and then purchased them. I remember
>seeing them on the shelves of the museum annex 35 years or so ago and being
>stunned that they had never been exhibited on the museum floor. They were
>in every way the equal of anything I had ever seen in books or magazines.
>Color and condition were superb. My impression was of 30-40 or more of
>them
>in my memory. A few years ago I saw them again and there were well less
>than
>ten left. I asked what had happened to them and a low ranking person there
>told me that was all there had ever been as well as she could recall. I
>was
>then rushed off in another direction.
>Unless it was something like the Smithsonian or a museum whose existence
>was
>specifically as a bike or transportation museum, I would not leave bikes to
>them. In the event one does, it is possible to forge an agreement so that
>if the item were no longer wanted it would revert to your heirs...much like
>folks sometimes do when donating park land to a city.
>Best to give them away so you can enjoy folks enjoying them or sell to aid
>your estate, as Lou Deeter suggests.
>Tom Sanders
>Lansing, Mi USA