Why Write?

I have been an artist most of my life, I have painted pictures and created functional art in the form of racing bicycle frames.

The greatest gift my mother ever bestowed on me was that she encouraged me as a child to draw and paint pictures, and to engage in simple craft projects.

She would tell her friends how good I was with my hands, and she would show them what I had made.

She would do this in my presence, which boosted my self-esteem, and left me with a feeling that there was nothing I couldn’t make with my hands, given the time and the resources.

I get high on creativity, high on the feeling of euphoria when I step back and look at what I have created. Like a junkie there came a time when the art I created no longer gave me that high. I needed a better fix, so I turned to writing and songwriting.

It is one thing to apply paint to canvas and create a picture, or to assemble pieces of metal and make a solid object. But to assemble words on paper, a computer screen or even in your head, to me is the ultimate form of creativity. It is truly creating something out of nothing, pulling something out of the air, so to speak.

Songwriting takes this a step further because you are pulling musical notes out of the air and adding to the words. Paul McCartney was once asked if he got a thrill from hearing his music performed by other artists. He replied that the biggest thrill he got was from walking down the street and hearing someone singing or whistling one of his songs.

Most of us will never see firsthand the work of Michael Angelo or an original Picasso and if we do it will only be for a moment. But the written word or recorded music can be shared by anyone, even for free. No one will charge you a fee to sing a Beatles song in your shower.

Language is the greatest gift given to humankind, it is what sets us apart from the animals. Animals have feelings, they feel happiness, grief, and anger but cannot express those feelings to others the way we can. I can assemble words, and if I do it right, can make others laugh or cry, or bring out other emotions, just by hearing or reading those words. 

I can paint pictures with words, pictures far more vivid and real than I could ever paint on canvas. And the picture I paint will be different for each individual. I remember as a child listening to plays on the radio. The scenes I saw in my mind were real because they took place in my house and my neighborhood. I was in the scene, not on the outside looking in as I would be viewing a movie or television. 

Through my writing I can re-live my life, I can do the things I wish I’d done and say the things I wish I’d said. Writing is wonderful therapy and the question I often ask myself as I finish something, is "Am I a better person for having written this?" If the answer is "yes" then it is a reward in itself.

Writing satisfies the need I have to create. If someone else learns something, is made to think, or is simply entertained then that is the extra scoop of ice cream on my apple pie.

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Uncertainty

I first arrived in the United States in January 1979. I flew into New York’s Kennedy Airport, and was picked up by my new employers, Vic and Mike Fraysee, owners of Paris Sport.

From there it was probably and hour’s drive to Ridgefield Park, New Jersey. About seven miles from New York City on the other side of the Hudson River. The frameshop where I worked was at the back of a bike store that the Fraysee’s owned.

The terms of my initial visa that I had when I entered the US, was that I would return to England before the end of the first year. I could then renew my visa and come back again.

I planned to return to the UK for the Christmas Holidays 1979, which gave me almost a year to work and save for the trip. By the fall of that year, it was clear money was going to be tight and I needed to find some extra cash to meet expenses.

On the corner of the same block where the frameshop was, there happened to be a large warehouse type building. It was home to a company that packaged Christmas wrapping paper. They were hiring seasonal part time workers for an evening shift.

And so it was, I started moonlighting. When I finished my day job building frames, I would work 6 to 10 in the Christmas wrapping paper plant.

It was probably around early November that year, as I took my one-mile morning walk to work, I rounded the corner just off Main Street, Ridgefield Park, to a scene of utter devastation.

The Christmas paper business had burned to the ground in a fire during the night. Only the four brick walls were standing, the roof was gone, and firefighters were cleaning up. All that was left of the place where I had worked the previous evening was a blackened, smoldering pile of rubble.

As I walked slowly past on the opposite side of the street, the cold realization was sinking in. I no longer had a part time job, no extra income, and possibly no Christmas trip to England.

However, within two weeks, the owners of the business had salvaged and repaired some of the machinery and had started up again in another building close by.

With only a few short weeks left before Christmas, they were now desperate to replace their lost stock, plus make up for two weeks lost production. I not only got my part time job back, I was now working a full 8-hour shift, from 6pm. to 2am.

There was a feeling amongst the workers, of wanting to help the owners succeed. They had not given up, we were not giving up.

I was also working two shifts on the weekends. The result was I probably made more money than if there had not been a fire. I made the trip to England with cash to spare.

I often think of this incident and a quote in the form of a question,

“How boring would life be without uncertainty?”

 We need certainty in our lives to feel secure. We need to be reasonably certain that we will wake up in the morning, and that our loved ones will still be there. That our job will be there and the building not burned to the ground as I found.

Then every so often, life throws us a curve, something unexpected. Without the unexpected, life would be boring. Curved roads are more interesting than straight roads, we don’t know what is round that next bend.

Within uncertainty, there is adventure, excitement. I have always found in the past whenever a relationship has turned sour, or I have lost a job, when I look back years later, it was for the good.

Disappointments, for the most part are only temporary. Quite often they bring about an outcome that is better than originally expected. Throughout my life I’ve had many disappointments, but very few regrets.

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Marketing

David R Ball PhotoMarketing is always a tough nut for the artist.

All he wants to do is create, but then there comes a point where he must market what he creates in order to survive and continue creating.

It is tough when you have a product that you know is superior but lose sales because some large corporation has more marketing clout.

This happened many times with me in the early 1980s when customers would be on the brink of buying one of my bikes, then at the last moment opt for a Japanese Nishiki, on Centurion. Both good bicycles of that era but could never compare to a hand-built frame made by an individual craftsman.

The only reason they did this was marketing. These large manufacturers could place full page color ads in Bicycling Magazine. But at $10,000 a pop for a such an ad there was no way I could compete.

Instead I relied on bicycle dealers to sell to a small group of hard-core cyclists who could appreciate the difference between a limited production hand-built frame, and a factory mass produced item. I built a Nationwide network of these dealers by attending the Interbike Trade Show each year.

Each dealer would have bikes in stock that potential customers could test ride. Once a person test rode a Fuso, or other bike I built, and compared it to a production import bike, they could tell by the way it rode, the way it handled, this was a better bike, often for the same amount of money.

These independent bicycle dealers were my sales force, handling all the marketing for me, leaving me to spend my time building frames. For the dealer there was a 15% mark-up on a frame, not a huge amount, but when you add to this the markup on the components. Plus, back in the day, the bike store built the wheels and of course charged labor for the assembly of the bike.

It was a profitable partnership for the dealer and me, one that worked well through the 1980s, until the market changed. By the early 1990s interest switched to Mountain Bikes, which killed the road bike market.

For me to sell direct to the individual customer was a hopeless proposition. It had worked well for me in England though the 1970s, but there was a big difference in the mentality of the customer in the UK.

For a start my UK customers were almost exclusively racing cyclists. Having chosen a framebuilder, they would trust him implicitly. They would spend an hour at the most, getting measured and discussing the order. If they lived more than 75 miles away, the order would probably be sent via mail, or taken over the phone. The customer would order a frame and would most likely buy the components and assemble the bike himself.

The American customer, on the other hand, would drive hundreds of miles across state lines to visit with a framebuilder. Having done that, they would expect to spend the whole day at the shop, hanging out, watching me work, asking all manner of questions, that went way beyond the scope of the actual frame I would build for them. And there was never a gaurentee that an order would be forthcoming.

I think the big difference between the British and American customer is, the UK customer recognizes your skills but treats you as an equal. However, he respects your time and realizes it is valuable.

The American customer also recognizes your skills, but treats you like some kind of celebrity because of it, to the point at times, it is embarrassing. However, he has no respect for your time, and if he is buying your product, he expects your undivided attention that goes way beyond the time it takes to actually create that product.

It is the American way. Money talks, and the customer is King. A philosophy I never quite bought into, and was the reason I ran a strict ‘No Visitor’ policy, and sold my product through bike dealers. If I had it to do over again, I would do the same. One cannot run a profitable framebuilding business if you are spending more time talking about bikes than actually building them.

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Plan Ahead

The simple things in life we plan ahead, for example going to the grocery store. We plan the meals we are going to make and create a shopping list.

When we get in the car, we have a definite plan. We decide ahead which grocery store to use, and the route we are going to take. If we need to make a detour to get gas or buy something from another store, we decide ahead of time the order in which we a going to do things.

We cannot imagine driving around aimlessly until we just happen upon a grocery store, And yet so often when it comes to the big things in our lives, careers, relationships, our whole future we have no plan, we drive aimlessly around.

I am often guilty of this which is why I am writing this piece, as a reminder. Being aware of a problem is halfway to fixing it.

Even at this point in my life when most people my age would not buy green bananas, I still make short term goals and feel that my best work is still ahead of me.

I find with short term goals it is easier to remain focused. If I always have a plan, and as long as I am moving forward, I don’t need to think about next week’s grocery list at this moment.

What tricks do use to stay focused and on course?

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Remembering Luton

I have led a somewhat nomadic life and prior to moving to South Carolina in 2001, I had never lived in one place longer than ten years. I have lived on both the East and West Coast of the United States since 1979 and even my native England seems like a foreign country to me now because I visit there so infrequently.

I often wonder where do I call home? I was born in Surrey, England but left there as a baby and have never been back, but there is one place where I lived between 1949 and 1959. I was 13 when I moved there and 23 when I left.

The town is Luton, about thirty miles roughly due north of London. This is where I spent my teen years, where I grew from a boy to a man. If I have a place I can call my home town it is Luton. This was the town where I was given a second chance. I had failed an exam at age eleven which would have enabled me to go for a higher education.

I failed because my schooling was disrupted when we moved three times that year because my father kept losing his job. But at aged fourteen I passed an exam to attend Luton Technical School, which later led to an apprenticeship in engineering.

Part of Luton Technical School was a Community College where older students would attend. Some of these students were racing cyclists and the school bike racks would be full of beautiful lightweight racing machines with names like Hetchins, Holdsworth and Hobbs od Barbican.

This is where the fascination with the bicycle began, I joined The Luton Arrow Cycling Club and started racing. I would later learn to build racing bicycle frames. A skill that eventually led to my moving to the US and a successful bicycle manufacturing business in Southern California through the 1980s.

I haven’t been back to Luton for many years. Online searches lead me to websites and message boards where ex Lutonians like me post messages from time to time. Sometimes people are unkind to Luton and I have seen it described as “The worst shit-hole in England.” What happened? As I remember it was a great town.

The 1960s came right after I left, the boom years when money was being made and was being spent just as fast. The Luton Town Council, the politicians, decided in their wisdom to tear down many of the beautiful old buildings and rebuild. A good example is the old library building right across from the Town Hall. (Pictured above.) This building was a gift to Luton donated in 1910 by Andrew Carnegie the American philanthropist.

It was a beautiful old building with great character where I would often stand on its steps and wait for a date to show up. We had no cell phones, few of us even had phones at home and we had no cars, we used public transport. if we made a date we would have to arrange to meet somewhere. The Town Council replaced the library with a soulless glass faced monstrosity.

Like the unscrupulous surgeon who will operate on you whether you need it or not, just to take your money, the Town Council in cahoots with the big developers ripped the heart out of Luton. They made it a less desirable place to live so people started moving out. And an immigrant population moved in.

Luton today has a huge Moslem population and I have even seen it featured on the TV news here in the US because of some links to the terrorist bombings in London. I’m sure the majority of Luton’s citizens today are law abiding but there always a few who drag down the reputation of a place. Not that I am suggesting you put Luton on your list of must-see places if you visit England.

Large Towns and Cities have a soul. It is I believe the collective souls of all the people who live there. New York City for example has a special energy that you feel when you are there. San Francisco and London have it also. Luton definitely had a soul when I lived there, and if it doesn’t have one now maybe it’s because the people who live there don’t have a sense of belonging there. They are nomads like me.

I will probably not go back to Luton, I prefer to remember it fondly as it once was, and for any ex-Lutonians out there, (It seems we are scattered all over the world.) take comfort in the fact that Luton is a very good place to be from.

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