I have been missing a Celmins frame since 1992, when it was stolen in Santa Barbara, and I STILL want it back.
(Skip to the end for the pertinent details, but if you know Santa Barbara there may be some stuff below that you'll enjoy).
A little background: I somehow talked a retired Mike Celmins into building a frame for me in late 1989. I was an aspiring racer, getting some good results on my stock Tange 2 Performance Strada with mostly Suntour Cyclone parts (basically a touring bike) and decided that I needed something a little quicker and racier. I asked around about local builders and pretty much everyone suggested Mike Celmins, and in the same breath said that he wasn't building anymore. Another local builder, Al Wanta, was just getting started, but I wanted someone with some experience, so I hunted Mike down and found him at the end of a dirt road near the airport in Goleta (the small town just north of Santa Barbara) and hassled him until he agreed to build me a frame.
He wanted $950 for it, which for a 19 year-old who was skiving off college to race, and getting by on working in a 1-hour photo lab was a lot of money.
It took about 3 months for the frame to be finished, and when I showed up in a borrowed car to pick it up, it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen; the red paint positively glowed, the lug shorelines were crisp and clean, and I couldn't wait to get it home and and hang all the Shimano 600 parts (they had indexed shifting!) that I'd been squirreling away. (My dad had raced on Campagnolo, so I wasn't having any of that. Couldn't afford it either, and SIS was SO cool).
Anyway, built the bike, raced it a lot, did ok, but mostly just rode the hell out of it and loved it. (I was working at Westmont College then, and would come blasting down the twisty roads at 11:00 pm on my way home, my old Bell V1 Pro firmly on my head, in the total dark. It was pretty great).
I left the bike in the basement of my workplace (Cafe Roma on State Street where I also worked) on a Friday when some friends and I drove up to San Francisco for the weekend. When I got back to town the bike was gone, and I got fired (the first, and only, time I've been fired).
The firing had nothing to do with the bike being stolen, and I was much more upset about the loss of the bike than the loss of the job. I traded my 3Rensho Superbe Pro track bike for a Dave Scott Centurion after scouring the streets for the Celmins. In retrospect that was a horrible decision, but I rode the hell out of the Centurion and still have it, and I was a roadie, not a track guy. It made sense at the time.
So I'm still looking for that bike. The serial number is C90 03 (my original post about the bike, available in the archives, say C90 01, but that was an error on my part). I don't expect to ever find it again, but miracles happen, and if ever there was a group that could ferret out that frame, this one is that group.
In the interim, if anyone has a 52-53cm Celmins, and/or a 52cm 3Rensho track (white with yellow accents please) that needs a home, please contact me, I might be able to help.
(I do want to acknowledge the listmember who, last time I posted this story, offered me a gorgeous Celmins pretty close to my size. Various circumstances prevented me from being able to accept his offer, but it made me very happy to be part of a group that returned so much for my minor contributions).
Many thanks,
Galen (thank god he finally shut up) Pewtherer San Francisco, CA, USA