Over the years I’ve had folks ask how long I’ve been in the bike business, how I got started and how I ended up opening my own shop. Since I’ve been involved in the bike biz for 30 years now it’s not a short story but here goes.

Some of you might have read about the JK Special and my father ( http://www.kirkframeworks.com/jk_special.htm ) building me my first bike when I was young. Little I did I know then that my lot was cast.  He instilled an interest in bikes and mechanical things that keeps me busy to this day. A few years after he passed away my Mother remarried and we moved from downtown Rome NY to the suburbs where there was room to ride and trails to explore. It’s those trails that lead to BMX for me. All the kids raced through the woods, built jumps and acted like kids. Some of us took it more seriously than others and I entered my first official BMX race in Syracuse NY in about 1978 or so while in high school. BMX became all I could think about.

During my final year of high school in 1980 I found out bike shops were the coolest places on the planet and I started hanging out at Dick Sonne’s Ski, Hike and Bike ( http://www.dicksonnes.com/ ) in New Hartford NY. I’d never had a job before but I knew I wanted to work there so I asked the manager Steve for a job. I was told they didn’t need any help and I left dejected. But I talked with one of the wise old guys in the back room, Peter O., and he gave me a piece of advice that changed my life. He told me to show up at the shop every morning 15 minutes before the doors opened and be standing there when the boss arrived for work. I took his advice and each morning I got there and waited and the boss would come and tell me he didn’t need any help and I would leave to come back the next morning. On the 4^th day he hired me. I ended up working there for six years on an off and I was taken under Peter O’s wing and he taught me everything I could absorb. The key thing that he taught me that really stuck with was to never take short cuts and the quality of the work you did would be noticed.

Shortly after high school was over a friend and I took a road trip to Florida to meet girls. I did meet a girl I liked very much and I fell in love with the Florida weather and the fact that I could ride my BMX bike year round. I shocked my parents when I got home and told them at 17 I was ready to move from NY to Florida on my own. Somehow they let me and I was off. I lived in the very small military town of Niceville Florida. It was very “nice”. I enrolled in school there and studied art at first and then moved to mechanical drawing and design. I moved to Pensacola Florida and got a job at a newly opened bike shop called Cycle Source, worked for Tom and Lee and started racing BMX seriously. There were a number of local tracks and I lived at them. I ended up with a coach and a sponsor and lots of miles on my little Ford Courier pickup truck. I raced all over the southeast and got pretty good at the BMX thing winning some state titles and national rankings.

During breaks from school I would head back to NY and race and work at Dick Sonne’s. It was then that I branched out into road and mountain bike riding. The shop gave me a Raleigh International and I started entering road races and doing better than I thought I would. I also got my first mountain bike and entered my first off road race. My girlfriend was a road racer and was headed to New Hampshire for the road nationals so I went part way with her to Massachusetts to the first annual Ross International Stage Race. I didn’t know enough to be scared and just jumped in with both feet on this 3-day stage race. When signing up I was asked what class I wanted to race and I said “pro” with too much confidence, as I was a pro BMX’er. How hard could it be? I didn’t know enough about the scene to know that folks like Ned Overend and John Tomac were big names and I raced as hard as I could and while I didn’t do particularly well in any one stage I did mange a 7^th overall in GC. It was at this race that I first met the framebuilder J.P. Weigle. He was racing the most wonderful fillet brazed bike and I’ll never forget it. I guess I’d never really thought about framebuilding before this. Bikes just existed and I didn’t really think about the men and hands that made them. Seeing his work and meeting J.P. Weigle changed all that. I now needed to be a framebuilder.

It was about this time that I moved back from Florida and lived full time in NY and raced whenever I could on whatever bike I could. I raced BMX, road and mountain but enjoyed racing offroad the most. One night the phone rang at my parent’s home and my mom answered it and yelled to me “some guy named Ben Serotta is on the phone”. I of course knew exactly who he was and thought it must be a friend teasing me. No way Ben Serotta would call me. But it was Ben and he told me he’d heard of me (Rome NY was about 2 hours away from Saratoga Springs where Serotta was located) and asked if I would be interested in coming out to interview for a job as a mechanic. Hell yeah. I drove out there and met Ben briefly and had interviews and in the end was offered the job. I of course took it. I gave notice at Dick Sonne’s and was ready to start a new chapter. I was getting ready to find a place to live in Saratoga when I got a call from the person at Serotta who hired me named Rory. He told me they were a bit behind schedule and I should give him a call in a few weeks. Two weeks turned into 4 and then into 8 and then he stopped taking my calls. Obviously there was no job there. Steve Sonne was very good to me and let me stay on even after giving notice.

About a year later I started working at a shop in my hometown called The Schuss shop ( http://www.schussshop.com/ ). The Schuss Shop was best known as a ski shop and I was hired to set up a bike department for them. I spent two good years there and learned a huge amount about business and customer service from Dan that serves me well to this day. Then the phone rang and it was Ben Serotta again. I thought, “Oh great, here we go again” but listened to what he had to say. He’d just found out how I was treated two years previously and wanted to apologize to me and ask if I would like to interview again. It turns out that maybe Rory wasn’t very honest and had done the same thing to others and Ben hadn’t known about it. Since Rory was gone I got back into the car and headed to Saratoga Springs to interview. The night before I was to go I was goofing around on my observed trials bike and hopping around on a log at dusk and was attacked by a swarm of bees. Great, my hands were so badly stung and so swollen I couldn’t even reach into my pocket to get my car keys. This was going to go very well.

I went to the interview and was excited to see that they had moved from the barn with the chicken coop paint booth (I couldn’t make this stuff up) to a renovated schoolhouse that looked luxurious in comparison. The interview was going well and I spoke with Ben and many others and the last person I spoke with was Kelly Bedford. Kelly asked me a few questions and then took me down to the shop and was going to have me show my hand skills with a file. Well I pulled my hands out and put them in all their swollen glory up on the desk and told him I didn’t think I could do that. They were huge. Interview over. Ben called a few days later and offered me a job as general shop help for $6.50/hr. Not big money even in 1989 and it was about ½ what I was making at the Schuss shop but I had to give it a try. I gave notice at the Schuss and moved to Saratoga. This was 1989.

My first day in Saratoga I looked across the street and was surprised to see someone I knew. It was David Olivares who was the Trek rep that serviced the Schuss shop. David and I became great friends and riding partners and it was a wonderful welcome to a new town. I spent 10 years in Saratoga working for Ben and learned more in that ten years than many get a chance to in a lifetime. It was hard and dirty work but very rewarding. I started out in the production shop operating the sandblaster and moved on from there. Serotta (http://www.serotta.com/ ) was a great place to work because it was growing fast which always meant that there was an opportunity to move up and I took every opportunity I was given and then some. I think this history has been detailed elsewhere so I won’t bore you with the details but I will say I went from being a shop guy to being the custom builder who built all the customs and pro team bikes to being the head of R&D (the whole dept to be honest). I stayed at Serotta for 10 years and it was a mix of some of the best years of my life along with a few of the worst. There was lots of turmoil business wise and it could be a very stressful place to be but I loved being at my desk, the drawing board or my bench and the work itself was always challenging. The freedom Ben gave me to learn and develop new things was unusual and special and I can’t thank him enough for that.

It was during this time that I met the lovely Karin Bohacek. She was the president of the Skidmore College cycling club (http://www.skidmore.edu/studentorgs/cycling/ ) and was running a mountain bike race in the woods around the Skidmore campus. My real racing days were behind me but I wanted to be around this woman so I was off to the races. We were married in 1995 and Peter O. from Dick Sonne’s was my best man. On our first date Karin and I talked about wanting to live and ski in the mountains and that desire never left and after being at Serotta for ten years I left Sarartoga with Karin to start a new life in Bozeman MT.

We picked Bozeman after taking a ski vacation in the area and feeling very at home here. Karin went to grad school at Montana State University and I took a winter off from work and got lots of time on the snow. But I needed to work and I’d heard there was a framebuilder in Bozeman so I went and introduced myself to Carl Strong (http://www.strongframes.com/ ). He offered me a job and I was happy to have the work. Carl and I went through a lot together and started a business called Acme and the two of us along with the then new owners of Ibis were partners. We built lots of steel Ibis bikes here in Bozeman along with a good number of Strongs. It turned out that the folks that bought the Ibis name weren’t as honest as original owner of Ibis, Scot Nicol, had been and they ripped us off big time. A hard lesson was learned and we moved on.

For a few years following this I worked a bit for Carl and also worked at the Bridger Bowl Ski area (http://www.bridgerbowl.com/ ) as the supervisor of the snowboard school. I’d never done anything like this and it was a huge change to not earn my living with my hands. I also spent a summer working on a water well drill rig trying to not lose my fingers in huge machinery and realized that while my boss Kevin was very cool it was not for me.

It was then that I got a call from Ben Serotta (see a pattern here?) and he told me that they were in a bind and that they needed help with some work back in Saratoga. He flew me back and I worked long and hard for about 10 days building CSi’s they had on order but couldn’t build. Before I left for home we struck up a deal for me to build CSi’s from Bozeman. I built about 60 CSi’s from my little corner of Carl Strong’s shop before the reality of the cost of shipping stuff back and forth set in and Serotta decided stop Bozeman production.

I was all tooled up and building again, doing the lug work I liked so much but had no work. It was then, in June 2003, that I started Kirk Frameworks and set up shop in our home. I’ve been building here ever since and now almost 6 years and over 200 frames later here I am. I no longer work at Bridger Bowl but play there a lot and Karin works there as a ski instructor. Carl Strong and I are close friends and we travel to shows like NAHBS (http://www.handmadebicycleshow.com/index_01.htm ) together and rely on each other when an extra hand is needed. I still talk with Ben whenever I can and stay in touch with a few of my old Serotta friends and get back to Saratoga for some riding with old friends when I can.

I see myself living in Bozeman, being a builder and doing what I do until I can’t do it anymore. It’s a wonderful place to live and work an I count myself as lucky.

That’s the long and the short of how I ended up doing what I do, where I do it. Thanks for reading.

Dave

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