[CR]Dr Clifford Graves

(Example: Racing:Jacques Boyer)

Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2007 10:32:55 -0700
From: "Kristopher Green" <kristopher.green@gmail.com>
To: greenjersey@ntlworld.com, Classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
Subject: [CR]Dr Clifford Graves


Ray Green (no relation) wrote:

This name rings a bell, but only just. I seem to recall an article in Sporting Cyclist in the sixties about the York Rally and an American visitor. He was riding a recumbent and I seem to think that the seat was canvas stretched across a pair of drop bars. sadly S.C. doesnt have an index but I'll look through my back issues to see if it was indeed Dr Graves.

Ray, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the American visitor was actually Dan Henry, he of the eponymous arrows that cycling clubs still paint on roadways to mark routes. Like Graves, he was one of the few, the proud, the distinctly odd Americans who perserved with cycling when it was essentially a dead letter in this country.

I rode with Dan Henry during a League of American Wheelman convention in Seattle in about 1981. For a saddle, his bike had a set of handlebars (with the stem acting as seatpost), that had numerous innertubes stretched across the drops. Henry's forks had a second set of legs that were cantilevered from pivots on the main set, and which I recall were damped by more innertubes.

There's a story about Henry's machine, with photos, in the book "The Best of Bicycling!", edited by Eugene A. Sloane.

Kristopher Hicks-Green
Olympia, Washington State, USA