The John Howard Frame Saga

There is a part of the story I have not told before; how I opened my frameshop in San Marcos, California in 1983 and started producing John Howard frames and why this arrangement only lasted about a year?

I went to work for Masi in October 1980 and through the following year I built about 25 or 30 frames a month. The problem was they were not selling close to that number and by the end of 1981 there were hundreds of Masi frames hanging from every available space in the shop. I had in effect worked myself out of a job, and in December 1981 I was laid off temporarily and told to sign on unemployment.

I actually got as far as standing in line at the unemployment office. I found it very degrading and left without actually signing on. I went back to Masi and asked if I could build my own frames in their shop using their equipment. I had already been building a few of my own frames on my own time the year before and I had a few orders to get me started. I started calling bike dealers all over the US offering to build custom frames. I could build a custom frame within two weeks which was unheard of at the time.

Enough work came in that I did not have to sign on unemployment. The problem came six months later when Masi had made inroads into their stockpile of frames and wanted to start production again. I now had enough work on my own frames and didn’t want to go back to building Masis. It just so happened that Dave Tesch had come along and was able to step into the breach for Masi. But the problem was we were all using the same equipment, and it became obvious that I would soon need my own shop.

I had about $7,000 of my own money saved but needed to borrow another $23,000 to open a full production frameshop. I managed to borrow this from a local bank which was somewhat of a miracle because I had only been in the US for three years and didn’t have enough of a credit rating to even get a credit card.

One of the things that helped me get the loan was that John Howard an ex Olympian and had won the prestigious Iron Man Triathlon in 1980, had asked me to build a line of frames with his name on them. I opened my frameshop around July of 1983 in a brand new industrial building in San Marcos, CA about a mile from the Masi shop. John wanted his frames to be of the same standard of workmanship and quality as the Masi frames, but he intended to sell them for less. Tough to do but we agreed on a price; the agreement was that I would build five frames all the same size at one time, and repeat that every week.

Now here is were the story gets interesting and is the part I have not told before. There was an individual who had a business in La Jolla, next to San Diego. He was a broker dealing in foreign currencies. He had salesmen going around getting investors and everyone was making lots of money. He was sponsoring the local triathletes and paying John Howard a considerable amount as their coach.

This was the money John was using to buy frames from me. Every thing went great for about a year then the investment broker it appears was not investing in anything. He was a crook and the whole thing was a Ponzi scheme, a scam using new investors money to pay off old investors.

John Howard was of course a victim of all this as much as anybody, as well as losing his source of income; he too had invested heavily with this guy. John no longer had the means to order five frames a week from me, and I had to scramble to fill the void in my production. This is when the Fuso was born.

I don’t remember the name of this individual from La Jolla which is perhaps as well. He did go to prison for a long time. He also indirectly helped the then new sport of triathlons get a boost, helped me get my frameshop going and forced me to start a line of frames called Fuso.

A Paris Sport frame has surfaced

I was recently sent these pictures and asked if I could identify this frame, the person who sent the photos said he had bought the frame in the Spring of 2005 and the seller told him the frame had been built at Paris Sport in New Jersey about the time I was there, which was January 1979 to October 1980.

I was able to tell him that I did recognize my own work and that I did indeed build this frame. Points of recognition are: The seatstay caps:


Compare this to this later frame built in California in 1983


The rear drop outs. This was how I finished them at that time

Compare these to this English built frame from 1975

Later after working for Masi I decided the way they finished their drop outs was a more aesthetically pleasing style so all frames built after 1980 were finished like this one.


This fork crown on the Paris Sport frame was forged (Hot stamped from a steel blank, not cast.) and somewhat unique in that I brazed a washer over the brake hole so the brake would have a flat surface to seat on.


The Prugnat lugs and the top tube cable guides I remember using these. Lastly the little round stop under the down tube to prevent the gear lever clamp from sliding down the tube. I went to a factory in England where they did metal stamping and collected a number of 3/16 in. diameter blanks that were left over from stamping holes in sheet metal. They made perfect clamp stops and I brought a number with me when I came to the US.


The frames I built at Paris Sport did not have my name on them. They either had the Paris Sport name or they were sold like this one with no decals or frame number. It is quite rare for one of these to surface and as they had no markings I'm sure a few are laying around unidentified.

My best 12 hour ride.

The picture here shows me aged seventeen competing in my native England in the National 12 Hour Time Trial Championship. I remember that I was the first rider off at 5:01 a.m. on a Sunday morning in August 1953 and I rode non-stop until precisely 5:01 p.m. that evening when a time keeper who had followed me for the last few miles told me to stop. The whole course was measured precisely and for the last part of the event riders were directed onto a fifteen mile “finishing circuit” until their time ran out.

The mileage was marked on the finishing circuit at every quarter of a mile. From the point where my time ran out the time keeper went back to the nearest marker and on a fixed wheel bicycle counted pedal revolutions to the point where I had stopped. Using this method each rider had the distance covered measured to the nearest yard. I covered just over 220 miles my best ride for this event and one that I never bettered in later years. The winning ride that day was around 250 miles.

After I set out that morning other riders followed at one minute intervals; 120 in all over a two hour period. It was a perfect day as I remember, overcast but not cold and little or no wind. The course was on the famous Great North Road where time trials had been held since they started in the late 1800s. The Great North Road or “The A1” as it is designated was the main arterial road from London to Scotland at the time. The first freeway or Motorway as they are called in England was not built until 1959.

The course started at Girtford Bridge about 40 miles north of London and went as far north as Grantham in Lincolnshire. The course was laid out like a giant tree with the A1 being the main trunk running south to north and along the way we were diverted off on branches running east and west. Riding along a branch road to a certain point then doing a “U” turn to ride back to the Great North Road. In the picture I had just done one of these "U" turns and was out of the saddle getting back up to speed. The whole event monitored by volunteer marshals and everyone checked to ensure they rode every part of the course.

When I say I rode non-stop I mean non-stop. I was held on the start line by a helper, and as the seconds counted down I strapped my feet into the pedals and they remained there for the entire twelve hours; my feet never touched the ground during that period. I carried food and drink with me, and more was handed up during the event. My favorite food to carry was rice pudding with raisins in it. My mother would bake it in the oven until it was semi solid but still moist and could be cut into rectangular pieces and wrapped in grease proof paper. This was before the time of plastic wrap and aluminum foil.

It was still officially dark when I started and I had to use battery lights. You can just see the tail light mounted above the rear brake. The heavy front lamp was clipped to my handlebars and I had dropped that off en-route by the time this picture was taken. In case you are wondering I did not have to pee the entire twelve hours; I guess perspiration removed any excess liquid from my body.

    

Perfectionism

Sometimes a person will say to me, “I am a perfectionist.” They say it with pride as if perfectionism is a virtue. Perfectionism is a curse that will bring nothing but misery to the perfectionist and those around them. It is a personality trait that goes hand in hand with low self esteem. Why? Because you can never achieve perfection, you are always a loser.

My own perfectionism led to my success as a frame builder but self hatred and anger as a person. My perfectionism was caused by abuse not only from my father but by the British school system; a system that beat down kids, and used sarcasm and ridicule as well as physical abuse. If you have seen the Pink Floyd movie “The Wall” you will know what I mean. That movie touched me deeply and helped me understand later what was going on.

I believe the reason all the great music came out of Britain in the 1960s was because of our childhood during WWII and the school system there. I was just another child of that era whose creativity went in a different direction. But for the fact my anger was directed towards myself I could have just as easily gone a different direction. Had my anger been directed towards others I could have become a violent criminal as many of my generation did. This forms the basis for my novel Prodigal Child It is a work of fiction, a story of what my life might have been had it taken a different turn early on.

As a child I was never given credit for doing well; only punished for doing wrong. As an adult I continued with the self punishment if I screwed up and I would not tolerate anything but perfection from myself. This led to success as an artist, but failure in every other aspect of my life. Many times in my early days as a framebuilder I would take a hammer and destroy a frame because of some minor flaw. Afterwards I would sit and cry like a child, then work all night to replace the frame. This was my punishment for screwing up.

By the late 1980s my second marriage failed and I realized I needed to change. I was not always a pleasant person to be around; the sheet rock on the walls of my frame shop was full of the impressions of tools I had thrown across the room in a temper tantrums. The anger was always directed at myself never others, but those around me had to witness and listen to this. I knew I had to change; for my own sake as well as others around me. I started to look deep within myself to see why I was the way I was.

By the early 1990s the bike business had also changed. Bicycle dealers almost overnight it seemed were switching from road bikes to mountain bikes. By 1993 I knew it was time to leave and there was one incident that I think pushed me over the edge. A customer called me saying his Fuso Lux frame he had bought had a tiny bubble in the Columbus decal. Columbus decals were always a pain because of the material they were made from caused them to bubble when the paint was being baked in the paint oven. This is why you don’t see a Columbus decal on a custom ‘dave moulton’ frame.

I told the customer to send the frame back. When it arrived the “bubble” in the Columbus decal was buried deep within the clear coats and was so tiny you almost needed a magnifying glass to see it. I stood there looking at it, seething with anger. I had finally come to terms with my own perfectionism, but still had to deal with the perfectionism of others. This customer expected me to repaint this frame and there was no guarantee if I did that the Columbus decal would be any different, and maybe it would be even worse.

The frame was in a vise held across the bottom bracket faces. If a fit of rage I grabbed the head tube and folded the frame in two with the head tube ending up next to the rear drop-outs. This time I did not cry; I did not stay up a night building a replacement. Instead I walked into my office and wrote the customer a check for the full retail value of the frame. I attached the check to the frame with scotch tape, threw it in the box and shipped it back. I never heard from him again.

As well as coming to terms with my perfectionism I realized that all creativity comes from the same source. It is not a right brain, left brain thing; it comes from deep within the artist, his soul or very being. The artist is simply a vehicle through which art appears. Because all art comes from the same source; all art is the same and if I had been successful in one art form, I could do so in another.This is why I was able to leave the bike business and take up writing and songwriting. If I screw up in writing unlike frame building it’s easily fixed in a rewrite.

Writing has been great therapy for me; better to get all this shit out than to hold it inside. Which is exactly what I am doing now so thank you for allowing me to indulge myself?


  

27 years ago the National Enquirer promised to do a story on me. I’m still waiting.

1978 was drawing to a close and I was winding down my framebuilding business in Worcester, England. Finishing up a few remaining orders and preparing to emigrate to the United States in January 1979.

The phone rang one day and a voice on the other end told me the call was from the US. It was someone from the National Enquirer and went on to tell me they were the largest circulation newspaper in America. The part about having the largest circulation was probably correct, but where they were misleading me was in describing the publication as a newspaper. Newspaper implies a paper containing news. But as the National Enquirer does not reach the British supermarkets; in my ignorance I took the man’s word for it.

Why were they calling me? They had somehow found out that I built bicycles and they needed a very special bicycle. There was a family in South Africa, a husband and wife with sextuplets. Actually, these were the Rosenkowitz sextuplets, three boys, and three girls born January 11, 1974. They were the worlds first surviving sextuplets.

Apparently this family had a contract with the National Enquirer which allowed them to exclusively take and publish photos of the kids. They were soon to have their fifth birthday and someone at the National Enquirer thought it would be a neat idea to photograph Mum, Dad and their six offspring on a bicycle made for eight.

What a strange coincidence I thought. Here was I just about to emigrate to the United States where very few people knew who I was, and here was someone from “The largest circulating newspaper” in the US calling me. I had visions of becoming a household name in the US overnight. The next thing I knew I was agreeing to build this strange octi-velocipede (or maybe octdem) at my own expense in exchange for them doing a story about how this special bike was built by a famous builder of racing bicycles.

I drew up sketches of the proposed machine; they sent me measurements of the two adults and their six children and I set to work. The design would be very simple as time was short and as I was paying for it labor and materials had to be minimal. I bought a pair of used moped wheels with balloon tires. They also had drum brakes built into the hubs which made the braking system very simple. All I needed was two brakes levers and cables to connect. The front rider would operate the front brake and the rear rider the rear brake. These would be the two adults; the kids would ride in the middle.

Rectangular 3in. x 2in. box section steel tube would form the lower part of the frame. Eight holes were drilled through sides of the bottom box section and plain bottom bracket shells were welded into place. Eight seat tubes of varying lengths came up at the appropriate angle above each bottom bracket. A fabricated heavy duty front fork and a conventional rear triangle and the frame was complete.

I used inexpensive steel cottered cranks and chainwheels; adult size front and rear and kiddie size with short cranks for the six children. Chain tension was taken care of with little adjustable jockey wheels at the bottom of each chain. This simple design as it turned out made for a very stable and easy to ride machine, because the weight of the steel box section tube together with all these heavy steel cranksets attached was well below the wheel center making for a very low center of gravity.

The National Enquirer commissioned a local photographer to take pictures of myself with the half finished eight seater. The bike was completed in December 1978 and a truck came to pick it up. The National Enquirer arranged and paid for it to be packed and shipped to South Africa. And that was the last I heard from them.

In January 1979 I arrived in New Jersey to begin work with Paris Sport. Sometime in the summer of that year a local bike rider came in with a copy of the National Enquirer. Inside was a photo of the special bike I had built with the family of eight actually riding it. Mother was up front steering and Dad was acting stoker at the rear and the sextuplets, I seem to remember three boys and three girls, pedaling merrily away in the center seats.

In the short caption under the picture there was no mention of the framebuilder, famous or otherwise. The only reason it had caught the attention of the bike rider who brought it in to show me was because I had the foresight to have ‘dave moulton’ painted in three inch letters on the down tube.

All my effort and expense had been in vain. I let the matter drop because I realized that very few serious bike riders read the National Enquirer anyway. But if anyone from the National Enquirer reads this blog; you owe me an article. I have the original drawing and a letter of intent from NE to prove it.

Perhaps they could dig out the original 1979 picture from their archives or even find the bike. The sextuplets will be in their thirties by now so how about a then and now picture. But I am not going to hold my breath and anyway I no longer build bikes. I am a writer now with a published novel, but I doubt many National Enquirer readers are into literature either.