INDIANAPOLIS — About 50 years ago I was tooling through the streets of Lawrence, Kan., on my prized Campania Sport bicycle when I plowed through a pothole that was a bit too deep.
I hopped off and noticed a blip on the rim of my front wheel. My friend Chuck Magerl (today the proprietor of the popular Free State Brewery) and I ran a little bookstore in a cooperative grocery store. One of our titles was a funky little publication on bicycle maintenance.
Putting the book into use I turned to the appropriate page where I was instructed to get a tongue depressor, place it against the damaged area and then use pliers or even a vice grip to repair the damage. The next sentence was key. It said something like this, “Caution! At your fingertips at this very moment lies the risk of destroying the entire roundness of your rim.”
Consistent with the times that sentence seemed meaningful, and it is still instructive to me now.
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