Greetings campers and Raleigh-phobes
Accomplishing nothing at this point in the day, waiting for traffic to thin a bit, so thought it would be fun to kill a little time adding to the usual Raleigh confusion. The paint color chart for 1974 shows a "Blue Mink", and a "Bronze Mink". And what the heck is Bronze Mink you ask? I didn't know either, but on the specs page of the catalog, I discovered that the only model for which Bronze Mink/Silver was available was the Super Tourer. Where have we seen that color before?! On 70 & 71 brown Pros. So by 74 it wasn't even just "Mink" anymore, it was officially "Bronze Mink" in Raleigh-speak, which certainly opens the door to the other possibility. Perhaps the Raleigh exec visiting Grubic's Tow Path Cycle had not been properly indoctrinated with the official Raleigh party line. Or ........ so many possibilities.
Flipping through catalogs (73, 74, 75, 76), price lists (73, 74, 75, 76, 77), and color chart (74, the only one I have), the Pros are all Blue Mink/Silver combination. Steel Blue first appears in a 78 catalog. I think even Raleigh could have corrected a "printing mistake" in less than 5 years. Yeah, I know, that's uncharacteristically optimistic coming from me, but it happens, accidentally. Just trying it on for size once in a while. No, it never fits. So if anybody has pics AND serial numbers of alleged 72, 73, or 74 Mink Pros, I would love to see them. Been looking at this junque a long time, and ain't seen one yet. "Year of purchase" doesn't change a 71 to a 74. Not looking for an argument, just looking for proof. Haven't seen a brown Pro with a serial later than "F". All the Gs and later that I've seen were blue. I keep checking them. I don't know why.
I have one of the rare and elusive Coffee Internationals and have seen a couple others. I've seen several silver or grey Ints (don't remember that ever being in a catalog, but at least one had a 1974 serial number. "That's what we had in the spray gun, so that's the color we painted 'em that week.".). Seen several formerly white Pros that had been repainted to blue/grey with correct decals (at least one alleged factory repaint) but they didn't fool me for a minute. Frames are physically different. So obviously I'm open to any weirdness that doesn't fit the prescribed pattern. Terminal curiosity. Please feel free to add to my internal collection of Raleigh weirdness. "I want to believe". Data points. Need more data points.
So just for fun I checked the 69 Pro in the catalog again, just to make sure it didn't say "Cumulo-nimbus Appliance White Mink Pearl" or any such thing. Just plain "White". Ohhhh, how boring. They could have done better than that. And eventually they did. By 74 "white" had transformed into "Ivory Glaze". Ahhh, that's much better. The person who came up with that could certainly have come up with "Bronze Mink" and "Blue Mink". I'll have whatever he was smoking.
And none of this matters anyway.
My chariot awaits. I gotta go. Larry "white, brown, blue" Osborn Bruceton Mills, West Virginia USA
At 12:40 PM 4/23/2008, you wrote:
>One of the troubles here seems to be that the catalog printers
>f****d up. For several years in the '70s, there were blue with
>silver bands or brown (mink) with silver bands, but also silver
>with black bands. In '74, all three color schemes were available,
>and listed in the catalog in a way that made it seem like the blue
>was called Blue Mink -- "Blue Mink/silver or Silver/Black" The later
>catalog perpetuated the weirdness, because the Mink/silver color was
>dropped, a color patch added, but the copy not changed.
>Am I the only one on the list who worked in Raleigh dealers big
>enough to have had all the color combinations on the sales floor?
>Catalogs can be and sometimes are WRONG! That Raleigh sold so few
>Mink/silver Pro Mk IV's that almost nobody has one does not turn
>Blue into Blue Mink, except in the minds of people who read catalogs
>instead of riding bikes.
>Sorry to rant, but I had this discussion in 1977 at Clay Grubic's
>Tow Path Cycle in Georgetown with at least one senior Raleigh exec,
>a couple of people who had worked in the shop through the entire Pro
>Mk. IV production run, and a woman who owned a '74 Mink/Silver Mk.
>IV. I was told of my error in calling the color of a blue and
>silver Pro Mk IV "Blue Mink" in vociferous enough terms that the lesson stuck.
>Earle Young
>Madison, Wisconsin, USA