24 BICYCLE WHEEL

I was probably a little out of breath as I pulled my 10-speed bike up to the sidewalk in front of the Hub Cigar Store. I heard the nightly Chicago & North Western freight coming out of the yard just west of Belvidere, IL as it was beginning its trip back to Proviso Yard and although the trackage through town was only 10 mph, I still had to hustle a bit to ride the 5 blocks from my grandparents home down to the State Street crossing.

The heavy door to the Hub swung freely as I entered, showing its age from more than 75 years of use at this point. Although I was only 17 at the time I took this picture from the Summer of 1981, both the nightly C&NW trains and the Hub Cigar Store were as much a part of me as my hometown of Belvidere. The Hub was that sort of store that every town had at one point. It had a barbershop in the back and a long counter down the center. Display cases along either side held cigars and nearly every candybar imaginable. Pipe tobacco, gardening gloves, razor cartridges, Harlequin romance novels, a word search book,--yup all those things and more. My grandfather always stopped here to pickup the Sunday Chicago Tribune on the way home from church. If I spent Saturday night with my grandparents I would get to go inside the Hub by myself to get the paper. I couldn't have been much older than 8 at the time.

The Belvidere Junior High School was just a block west of here and a before-school routine usually saw me inside buying a long rope of Bubs-Daddy grape bubble gum. Was Bubs-Daddy even it's real name? After school you might get a can of Coca-Cola for the walk home. The magazine racks along the south wall held a wide variety of publications. It was here that I plunked down change for my first copy of Trains Magazine along with issues of Railroad, Railfan and Rail Classics.

The early evening trains of Belvidere were also part my earliest experiences. My grandparents lived just four houses from these same tracks at 5th Ave. My father worked second shift at Chrysler so every weeknight after supper my mother would pile my brothers and sisters in the car and we'd go over to visit them. Train #96 would make an appearance every weeknight. The open autoracks from the mid-to-late 70s held large Plymouth Furys. It was easy to pickout the bright yellow taxis and the black and white police crusiers. So my vantage point for this image from July of 1981 certainly combined two different well rehearsed rituals.

But things weren't always going to remain the same for me. I had just graduated high school that spring of 1981 and I was going to be heading off to college that fall. Unfortunately, I couldn't apply myself in the realm of higher learning and found a job in a local machine shop a while later. Maybe things worked out for the best--one door closed and another one opened. What good would a Journalism degree be at this point? I might have gone to work for some newspaper--only to see it closed in the face of the digital internet revolution.

The Hub Cigar Store? Well, it lasted a bit longer, but age took a toll on the building. The two upstairs floors housed small apartments and the place really became rundown and seedy. Around 1996 or so the City of Belvidere tried to step in and save the structure, but it was too badly deteriorated at that point and was demolished. Where I once stood as those GP50s shook the chipped linoleum floor is now a parking lot.

The C&NW? Well, the Union Pacific bought the hometown railroad in 1995 and auto trains still leave Belvidere on most every weeknight, but you won't find yellow and green GP50s hauling them. The trains usually sport trios of GP15s and don't even try to see what automobiles might be onboard--because open autoracks have gone the way of the C&NW and the Hub Cigar Store. You can barely tell if those enclosed autoracks are loaded or empty these days.

So here is to those simple things that occupied my days when I was a teenager. When my only worries were cutting a few lawns, affording a roll of Kodachrome 64 to run through my Pentax K1000--and peddling my 10 speed bike around the hometown.

A friend of mine was doing web searches using my name and came across a site that has back issues of long out of print magazines from the 70's. I purchased the issue and have attached printouts of an article that ran in the October 1974 issue of Custom Chopper magazine. While I claim no credit for the success of the "Redwood Run" in later years, I was the one who was it's initiator. Bob Dron was at "The Run to the Redwoods" and is the guy parked by the side of the road watching the passing bikes in the first photo above the title. 4 years later he purchased the Oakland Harley-Davidson dealership from the surviving Self brother. At the Northern California Dealers meetings he began lobbying for a revival of the TTT event and suggested they follow the format I had established, ie. live band, food and drink provided and use the same (now improved) campsite. When it was finally approved sometime later he called and told me they had decided to call it the "Redwood Run", a slight variation on the name I used. The call was a courtesy to see if I objected and of course I did not. I attended the first event and for many years afterward. As the run grew in popularity it became profitable to a small degree. The dealers had begun contracting with the local Kiwanis Club for all site services. The local sheriff announced the dealers where going to have to begin paying for his departments "overtime" costs incurred by policing the event, to the tune of $40,000, the dealers canceled the event. The very next year the Kiwanis took out ads in several newspapers and motorcycle magazines and announced the continuation of the "Redwood Run" just as everyone had know it before. The 25th Anniversary Redwood Run was a huge success several years ago and the event also sells out early each year.
Best viewed large to read the text.
Scanned from a copy of Custom Chopper magazine, August 1974