Bike-A-Thon Memories

Rummaging through old boxes last night I found a bunch of long forgotten photographs. Here are three that relate to Bike-A-Thon. The first is from the 1986 BAT (the second one). A few police officers at Mission Station decided to ride in the event and this is a photo by Tony Plewik of a few of them along with four DSSF/BAT organizers–Karry Kelley, Bob Humason, Jim King, and Tom Walther. That cops would ride in the Bike-A-Thon probably raised a few eyebrows then and it was good publicity for the event. By the way Tony Plewik was a gay photographer in San Francisco and he died of AIDS in 1995.

Mission Station officers to ride 1986 AIDS Bike-A-Thon

The second is, from the looks of it, at the start of a Bike-A-Thon. It wasn’t the first BAT because the only person I can immediately recognize is Tom Walther, the person without a helmet and with the megaphone and dressed in a DSSF sweatshirt. Tom rode in the first Bike-A-Thon so this photograph must be from a later one. My guess is Bike-A-Thon 3 because that year he was the Coordinator. But Tom was heavily involved with BAT until about 1990, so it could have been any of those years that had dreary weather at the start. This photo was by Mick Hicks, another SF photographer, who now lives in Southern California. [Update: Karry remarked that the ride start of the BAT originally was on Castro Street until BAT4. So this photograph is either at BAT2 or BAT3 as I suspected.]

The third is a publicity photo. I do not recall the year but I do recall that the call went out for Spokers to show up for a publicity photo for the Bike-A-Thon, probably to be used to recruit riders, and this is it. This was also shot by Tony Plewik. I recognize several faces in this group but the only name I can recall is Abel Galvan, who is the fourth person from the left. Abel was a delightful person, a very good rider, and as I have mentioned in the past rode a impressively red full Campy Derosa. Sporting a “real” race bike in those days especially with the heritage of Derosa was very, very rare in the club. Most Spokers had bikes that came off a factory line and were quite modest. Not Abel though, and he wasn’t rich at all. But he loved cycling and must have ploughed most of his savings to get that bike. Abel died of AIDS in 1996.

If you compare this photograph with almost any contemporary Different Spokes pic, you will get a sense of how “unfashionable” the club was. Back then even members of other recreational cycling clubs wore bike jerseys and shorts. Of course back then there was a lot more wool than there is today. But our club was a mishmosh of cyclists most of whom were not coming from racing or racing culture. So you’d see a lot of t-shirts, gym shorts, and street clothes at club rides along with a few members like Abel or Jerry Basso, who were some of the earliest members to embrace the traditional racer look.

The First AIDS “LifeCycle”

from Scott Lechert; East Hampton after their bike-a-thon.

AIDS Lifecycle, the annual fundraiser for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Los Angeles LGBT Center, recently ended its last iteration. The fundraiser was first offered in 1994 and back then was called the California AIDS Ride (CAR), and it was organized not by the two non-profits but by Pallotta Teamworks, a for-profit corporation. Apparently unhappy with the proceeds from Pallotta, the two organizations eventually ended their relationship with the company and then went about organizing the same fundraising ride but now under their own auspices starting in 2002. It was rebranded the AIDS Lifecycle.

But did you know there was an earlier “LifeCycle”? In 1986, eight years prior to the AIDS Lifecycle, a man named Scott Lechert from New York organized a cross-country bicycle ride to raise money for AIDS organizations and to increase awareness of the AIDS crisis at a time when there was no concerted national action was taking place. Scott, taking inspiration from the 1985 AIDS Bike-A-Thon “Pedaling for Pride”, first organized an ad hoc bike-a-thon fundraiser in New York, which took place in September 1985. Interestingly he got 62 riders to do the one-way, hundred mile route on Long Island out to East Hampton and netted about $30,000. Those stats are almost the same as our first Bike-A-Thon.

Following that coup Scott apparently was inspired to organize a bike ride that would be much more challenging: a cross-country, self-contained ride from New York to San Francisco. He called the ride Life-Cycle ’86. But at other times it was referred to as Cycle For Life.

Here is an interview with Scott published in the March 1986 ChainLetter:

Interview: Scott Lechert (March 1986 CL)
Different Spokes/San Francisco is not the only organization planning a major fundraiser this year. Diff’rent Spokes/New York has an ambitious ride planned for this year—Life-Cycle ’86. The ChainLetter talked with Scott Lechert, DS/NY member and organizer for this event.

CL: Why are you doing this ride?
SL: The purpose of Life-Cycle ’86 is to raise money for a national AIDS foundation, educate people on AIDS-related issues and display a healthy, positive response to the AIDS crisis. And most importantly, for the participating bicyclists, the ride will be a lot of fun, a chance to meet a lot of very giving and caring people, and an opportunity for some personal growth. I, myself, think it look great on a resume as well.
CL: I understand you are planning on getting across the country and be in San Francisco in time for Gay Games II. When are you beginning?
SL: The starting date is May 26th, Memorial Day.
CL: What will the route be?
SL: We’ll be going through major cities along the way—Cleveland, Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis/Saint Paul, Des Moines, Lincoln. We should be in Denver July 7th. We’ll be arriving at the Youth Hostel in Sausalito on August 2nd and crossing the Golden Gate Bridge sometime in the afternoon on August 3rd.
CL: What support will there be on the ride?
SL: Life-Cycle ’86 will not have sag wagons except for maybe a selected one- or two-week segment. As I said before, one of the goals of this ride is to display a healthy response to the AIDS crisis. By having people carry their own gear, being totally self-sufficient, a certain strength and determination is conveyed to the public. So participating bicyclists are required to be self-sufficient—carrying their own sleeping bag, tent, and other necessary supplies. Not everything is needed though—stoves and other group-use equiupment need not be carried by every person.
CL: Riding loaded across country. How are you going to manage that?
SL: Bicyclists are not required to stay together, ride pacelines or anything. Some people are going to want to be alone on the road. But we will be sleeping and eating dinner together. A typical day will start with everybody being given the route for the day, the finishing point, and potential stops for lunch. We will be riding 65 miles a day, six days a week. Realize though that 65 miles is not a real lot when you start early and go to sleep when the sun sets.
CL: Some people might accuse you of being insensitive about the riders.
SL: I don’t mean to sound like we are not going to be concerned about the welfare of the people on this ride. We want people to participate! The whole concept of Life-Cycle ’86 is to give people the opportunity to participate in a major fundraiser for AIDS organizations. We will help and encourage you during the ride. There will be a contact phone number if anything goes wrong during the ride, and we will try to accommodate people as much as we can. We just want bicyclists doing the whole route to be fairly independent, and to realize that the ride is going to be strenuous at times—and that you may not have a shower for a week sometimes.
CL: You mention fundraising. Will you be doing some?
SL: A lot of the local events will be determined by the involvement of the local communities. We will probably have press conferences in all the major cities, and hopefully benefits as well. Since funds raised in local cities will be split 50/50, we expect a lot of organizations to become involved.
CL: How do you plan on covering the expenses of the ride?
SL: We are trying to arrange to have funds raised to cover expenses of bicyclists riding the entire route. Probably about $700 a head, which really is plenty of money.
CL How many people have expressed interest?
SL: So far there are about 8 people who want to ride the entire distance. This will probably grow as we start to get publicity. The number of people doing segments is hard to determine. Certain segments will be very popular—Madison to Minneapolis, Los Angeles to San Francisco (Ed. note: being planned by members of LA Spokesmen [now renamed Different Spokes Southern California]), and New York to Philadelphia. One thing, this is not a gay event. We have had responses from many non-gay bicyclists, and so far there are more women interested in the ride than men. We’ve also sent soliticitation overseas, so Life-Cycle ’86 will be international in scope.
CL: Any last comments?
SL: I’d like to invite San Francisco riders to join us anywhere along the route. We’ll be staying at the hostel outisde Sausalito and you’re welcome to come spend the night and ride across with us on Sunday the 3rd.

The September 1986 ChainLetter documents the arrival of Life-Cycle in San Francisco:

“CYCLE FOR LIFE SAN FRANCISCO WELCOME
On Sunday, August 3, a contingent of 35+ Spokers met to ‘welcome home’ the 19 cross-country bicyclists who participated in ‘Cycle For Life’, the New York to San Francisco trek. The 55 bicyclists were met at Twin Peaks by 20 members of Leather and Blues MC Club and the Eagles MC Club. With plenty of flash, honking of horns, blowing of whistles and cheers along with some tears, the crew took off down Market, through the Castro, past the AIDS vigil to the finish point at the Ringold Alley Street Fair. The cyclists were welcomed to San Francisco by Board of Supervisor President, John Molinari, who presented them with a proclamation from the City. San Francisco was the only city to officially welcome and acknowledge ‘Cycle For Life’. The welcome ended with a party hosted by the Raw Hide II, the country and western dance bar.”

When Life-Cycle/Cycle for Life was announced, my reaction at the time was along the lines of, ‘this is a crazy idea’. To spend over two months on the road with the prospect of a small amount of money being raised seemed like a lot of bang for a little buck. But the same could be said of the first AIDS Bike-A-Thon. I mean c’mon, ride a hundred miles in a day to raise, what? $33,000? But a spark can light a fire.

I don’t know how much money Life-Cycle eventually raised nor who directly benefitted from their fundraising. Remember too that AIDS wasn’t well-known then except as a source of fear. So Life-Cycle’s awareness raising in the communities through which it rode was equally important. You can read more about the ride in the Bay Area Reporter. In the article the writer Jim Sutherland mentions that four of the seventeen participants were from the Bay Area. By the way two of them, JT Blazer and Jill McIntyre, were members of Different Spokes!

By the way, Diff’rent Spokes/New York disappeared a long time ago. I’m not sure why but probably for the same reasons that Rainbow Cyclists in San Diego, River City Cyclists in Sacramento, and Different Spokes Seattle all eventually folded: the initial leadership cohort moves on and there isn’t a new generation of energized members to take over and direct the club. I can’t find any online references to Diff’rent Spokes, which suggests that it died well before the Internet became a reservoir of ephemera. But gay cyclists end up getting together even in the absence of an existing club and before you know it there’s another club. New York now has Outcyclists and perhaps Fast ‘N Fabulous is still alive although largely moribund after Bob Nelson, the figurative heart of the club, died in 2019.

Different Spokes Goes to Yosemite

Fancy a cycling trip to Yosemite? The club went there at least twice in the early days. The first time was in September 21-24, 1984 and it was organized by Michael John. When I think of a cycling trip to Yosemite it’s either starting somewhere in the Bay Area and riding all the way or driving to Yosemite and doing loop rides from the Park. MJ split the difference and started his tour in Mariposa. He also had the wisdom to start on a Friday and leave on a Monday thereby eluding some of the weekend crush motoring in. Cycling up the Merced River on Hwy 140 can be merciless with car and RV traffic. He also had the wisdom to have the trip sagged rather than force everyone to haul all their stuff on their bikes.

I’ve talked with MJ, Derek Liecty, and ‘Rex Flash’ aka Kevin Anderson and of course 41 years later clear memories of that trip are far and few between. This trip was one of two Yosemite club trips I am aware of, the second one being organized by Kevin it seems in 1986 although his recollection is that MJ organized that one as well.

The first trip had a short ride report and the second none at all. MJ thinks that there were nine participants and that’s what his brief trip report says even though his ride listing set a limit of eight. To confuse things further a nose count brings up nine with an additional reference to Derek, which would make ten. But that would contradict his own report. Derek does recall being on a Yosemite trip with Rex but doesn’t know which one it was. We have the photographic evidence that Derek and Kevin/Rex were on the 1986 trip. I have no idea if Derek is conflating two Yosemite trips into one or that he actually attended only one.

Nevertheless thanks to MJ’s relentless documentation and his wisdom in digitizing his collection of Different Spokes photos we have some interesting pictures giving us a glimpse of what the club was like “back in the day”. You can view the entire album here.

Unless you’re a club old fart you won’t recognize any of these Spokers. Three of the nine riders neither Kevin, MJ, or I recall their names; the other six were club stalwarts. That the unnamed riders were wearing the original Different Spokes sweatshirt probably indicates they were members. Other than Kevin and MJ (and Derek) they are deceased, three of them due to AIDS and one a car collision.

The trip started in Mariposa on Friday with a 40-mile ride up the Merced River into the Valley. Saturday was a hike up the Four-Mile Trail to Glacier Point supposedly with a ride down. Sunday looks like the group was ferried up to Tuolumne Meadows and then rode back down to the valley. On Monday it was a ride back to Mariposa.

The first four photos are ride up to the Valley; the next six are on Saturday of the hike to Glacier Point; the next six are the ride back to the Valley; and the last pic was on the ride down the Merced to Mariposa.

Things to notice about the era.
For the most part bike drag is absent. Cycling clothes was no different than gym or exercise clothes: t-shirts, muscle shirts, gym shorts (or “short shorts”, which were just “shorts” back then), and tennis shoes with white athletic socks. Cycling gloves—leather with crochet backs, ‘natch—were spreading. Jerry Basso was one of the few early members who had “real” cycling clothes: a cycling cap, a cycling jersey (short zip because full zip jerseys didn’t exist back then), and leather cleated cycling shoes. Tom Walther is sporting Sidi cycling shoes. But my recollection is that he didn’t use cleats back then. Bob Munk appears to be wearing black cycling shorts and back then even cycling shorts could be pretty “short” probably were wool; Jerry in contrast has spandex cycling shorts. Although Lycra spandex cycling shorts first appeared in 1976, it took some time before recreational cyclists adopted them.

Notice the helmets. Not everyone is wearing a helmet because the club didn’t have mandatory helmet policy until the early 1990s. Helmets on club rides were not common. But the helmets you’d see were hardshell helmets, the most common of which were various Bell helmets. You’ll see most are using a Bell touring helmet with only Jerry using a V1-Pro, Bell’s “racing” helmet; it was designed to mimic the looks of those very old-school leather “hairnet” helmets.

The bikes are unassuming. They all appear to be steel and lugged. Racks, panniers, and handlebar bags were common. Leather saddles, probably Brooks, were common too. Nobody is riding anything special or racy— no surprise since the club in the early days was primarily casual recreational and touring cyclists. No one is riding a traditional steel racing bike of those days.

MJ commented to me that in the early days of the club there was very little—for lack of a better term—class difference between members. Nobody was dressed fancy or riding expensive bikes. They may not have been ‘beater’ bikes but members’ bikes were mostly run-of-the-mill. The change to increasingly more expensive clothing and bikes didn’t accelerate until much later. A few members had bikes more in line with top end racing bikes of the time. Abel Galvan, an early member rode a bright red DeRosa racing bike. It was lovely! Luis Dufau, another early member, took delivery of a fantastic Italian Scapin from City Cycle. The first really custom frame I recall was a Sam Cotten frame that Walter Teague had made for him in the late 80s. When Ron Wilmot showed up on Merlin titanium road bike we all swooned. Mostly it was Fujis, Bianchis, Centurions, a few Raleighs and Peugeots, mass produced but good bikes, along with a slew of much cheaper bikes such as an occasional Schwinn. (Bob Humason is riding a Schwinn.) Mountain bikes didn’t start to spread until the latter half of the 1980s. By the mid-Eighties proper cycling clothes was starting to spread in the club. I recall that the Bicycle Outfitter in Los Altos opened a cycling-clothing-only store in Sausalito and it was a regular stop for a lot of Spokers looking for the latest stuff. Tony Tom’s A Bicycle Odyssey was a block away and his crammed and cramped apparel area was chock full of Euro cycling wear that we regularly marched through hunting for more goodies. But that was later as the touring crowd dwindled a bit and the fast recreational cyclists started to come into the club.

The mystery sag driver.
MJ thinks that Derek may have been the sag driver; Derek doesn’t remember. Looking at the first two photographs you will see a car parked with a bike on top. That was the sag car, a pickup truck, that neither Kevin, MJ, or I recognize. Was it Derek’s? No. Whose vehicle is this? It’s not Derek’s, MJ’s, Tom’s, or Kevin’s. As far as I know Derek has never owned a pickup with a cab. In the listing MJ mentions possibly renting a car to be the sag. He doesn’t recall if that actually happened. (I doubt it did.) Notice that in the first photograph Jerry Basso is dressed in street clothes, in jeans no less, but in the second photograph taken in Briceburg which is beyond Midpines Summit on the way to Yosemite he is in cycling clothes astride his bike. My guess is that either Jerry was a passenger to Midpines or he was the sag driver and then switched with someone else. Notice in the second photograph Bob Munk appears to be getting ready to put his bike on the roof rack; he was either calling it quits for the day or else he may have been getting ready to drive.

Four Mile Trail.
If you’ve done this hike, you know it’s not easy. It’s 3,200 feet of gain over about four and a half miles. At the start no one appears to have a daypack or any water! That is not a hike you want to do without water. MJ mentions in the listing that they were to ride back to the Valley. Although there is now a shuttle bus that you can take from Glacier Point back to the valley, that did not exist in 1984. But MJ specifically mentions cycling back. That means that those who did the hike would have to have their bikes brought up. The last photo of the day is the hikers posing at Inspiration Point in the late afternoon/early evening and they are still in their hiking clothes. MJ and I have discussed this and although he doesn’t remember anymore, he thinks they must have hiked back down the Four Mile Trail and later gone up to Inspiration Point. He said he never would have cycled “in those heavy boots!” That makes sense because whoever might have hauled the bikes would have to load them all into one car along with cycling clothes and then they would have had to switch back into hiking clothes afterwards. There would also be the logistics of getting all those bikes up to Glacier. The sag vehicle appears to have three, maybe four roof rack mounts. Perhaps a couple more might fit in the back? Possible but unlikely.

Tuolumne.
This day’s photographs seem to reflect the ride listing. Everyone went up to Tuolumne in the morning in their regular clothes and had a picnic in the meadow. Later they apparently changed into cycling clothes and rode down.

Getting ready to ride back to the valley

The ride out.
There is but one image that appears to show some of the riders resting on their way out of Yosemite.

The photographer.
Who was the photographer? MJ claims the pictures don’t appear to be his and thinks maybe that he got them from either Derek or Kevin or both. Bob Humason, Bob Munk, and an unnamed rider appear in some photos with their own cameras. Were some of the images from them? But there had to be a fourth photographer then.

Much of the details of this trip are lost. The known survivors can’t recall more and even if they did, the reliability is shakey. Nonetheless the photographs are a delightful record—at least to me!—of one of the earliest club trips that was NOT a camping trip and was more in the spirit of what we now call getaway weekends. There were so many of these back then and they have almost faded away entirely. The last effort was the Marvelous Monterey Weekend in 2019; a follow up trip in 2021 was killed by the Pandemic. We had sort of a getaway weekend in 2022 when a lot of Spokers decided to go to the SLO Wildflower century and Adrienne and her husband threw a dinner party for everyone at their house in Santa Margarita. Since then no one has stepped forward to lead a weekend trip. There are rumblings of a possible trip to Moab, Utah next year. That’s a lot further away than Yosemite but it might make a lovely adventure for the club and keep a tradition alive.

Interview with Peter Jenny: The First AIDS Bike-A-Thon

Peter Jenny (left) & Jamie Moran (right) at a rest stop on 1985 Pedaling for Pride in ’85

Introduction
I first met Peter Jenny in 2015 at Derek’s “Old Farts” gathering. Derek managed to round up about 25 or so of us going back to the very early days of the club and up to the early 90s. I knew almost all of the attendees—some of whom I hadn’t seen in decades—but there were a few I did not know. We took turns introducing ourselves and Derek asked who among us had done the AIDS Bike-A-Thon especially that first one in 1985. Peter raised his hand. I took notice and introduced myself to him and we had a brief chat. I mentioned to him that I had been mulling over interviewing the surviving riders of the first BAT about their experience and he responded positively and said he would participate if I ever got it off the ground.

I first interviewed Bob Bolan shortly thereafter mostly because he’s a good friend. Then I put the project on the back burner when I became involved in other club business.

When I revived the idea this year as part of the 40th anniversary of the 1985 Pedaling for Pride Bike-A-Thon, I contacted Peter again and he was game. This interview was conducted by phone.

It’s possible that Peter and I may have ridden together or were at a club meeting. But I do not have a distinct recollection of having met him in the early ‘80s. I was riding very infrequently with the club. Also some of the rides in those days had a dozen or so riders and the monthly club meetings always had a good turnout so it’s entirely possible we just didn’t get a chance to talk to each other back then. Peter was quite young when he hooked up with the club, about 21. I recall only one other member who was younger than Peter back then. The population of Different Spokes was young but mostly late twenties to early forties with a scattering of older members such as Derek Liecty, who was in his fifties.

Peter like the previous interviewees recalls only snippets of that ride, not a surprise since it’s been over forty years. But Peter like the others does recall the era and what the club was like at that time and the impression it made on him. Unlike MJ or Jim King, Peter wasn’t involved organizationally in either the Bike-A-Thon nor the club; he was “just” a member and perhaps better represents the typical experience.

AM: I realized that one thing I didn’t really have about you is a little bit about your personal history like when you lived in SF or how you ended up in SF, and all of that. Just tell me a bit about that.

PJ: Sure, brief overview: I grew up in the East Bay in Piedmont and I graduated from high school in 1980 and came out then. I lived in the city for five weeks in 1983 in a sublet. But otherwise I was crossing the bridge a lot. Friends and I would go hang out, walk around the city and go to bars and things, underage and- I don’t know if I can say that?

AM: Sure! [laughs]

PJ: So growing up in the Bay Area and San Francisco was not too far away, so I didn’t feel isolated as a gay kid growing up in kind of a conservative town.

AM: Okay. But basically you’re local. You’re a Bay Area person.

PJ: Oh totally. Yeah.

AM: Okay. A common story is: you move to San Francisco from someplace else because you’re gay. But that didn’t happen with you. You were already a local.

PJ: Right. Yeah, I was very lucky to have that.

AM: Okay. How did it happen that you came to join Different Spokes or find out about Different Spokes?

PJ: Well, I was very shy and was trying to meet people. I wanted to have dates and I was working in cafés and in a produce market and was kind of bumping around in junior college. This was age 19, 20, 21 and I found Different Spokes and I was a cyclist and so I thought, “oh that sounds fun”. You know It’s always fun: you meet people easily when you have a common interest like that. So I started going to meetings over there near the Panhandle [AM: the Page Street branch library] and in I guess like ‘83, early ’83 and then kind of started riding with them more in ’84 and ’85.

AM: Okay. Presumably you joined the club around that time besides riding.

PJ: Yeah.

AM: Is that how you heard about the BAT was through the club?

PJ: Oh yeah, it was through the club. It was through the club, not through the community because I wasn’t really involved with the gay community in the city at all. But just through people in the club because I’d do the Decide ’N Rides and things like that. [AM: the Decide ’N Rides were leaderless rides. People would show up at McLaren Lodge at 10 AM and decide where to ride.]

AM: Okay. You know that first BAT happened really quickly. I’m not sure when it was announced to the club as a whole. It was after the beginning of February, I think, [AM: It was more like late February.] and it happened April 6. So it was an extremely short period of time. There was a club meeting once per month so there were at most two club meetings where people could have heard about it.

PJ: Oh wow. That’s amazing.

AM: Yeah, It’s pretty astonishing.

PJ: Well, I think there was such a grass roots thing going on in the city and then in the gay community people could organize pretty quickly and to get the participation. I think it was the Woods where we stayed. I know where it is but I can’t remember the name, and then I don’t know how much help they had but it seemed like a pretty organized ride.

AM: Yeah, I got more of the back story when I interviewed Jim King who was another rider but he was also very involved in subsequent BATs and then of course I interviewed Michael John who was one of the principal organizers of that very first BAT. Basically the division of labor was that the club handled recruitment and getting riders and organizing much of the stuff on the first day, the ride up on Saturday. And then Sunday was the AIDS Foundation with their volunteer appreciation event and providing lodging and the buses back to San Francsco. But then subsequent BATs it was all the club that did everything. It wasn’t split up, the AIDS Foundation and the Different Spokes.

PJ: I see, that’s really interesting. I did the ’86 one too but then I got busy with other stuff and didn’t do any ones after that.

AM: So what led you- you did the first BAT. That was a hundred miles. What led you to do that?

PJ: Well, I was a strong cyclist and I liked the idea. It was participarting, I just liked participating in these things. I think you asked me something about some relationship between me and the AIDS crisis and was that something that spurred me on. I suppose there was some of that. I mean ‘cause we were completely freaked out. You know! [laughs]

AM: Yeah, I lived through it. I went through that same era.

PJ: So you know, and I don’t know if you were living in the city. It was a little different in the city.

AM: It was. I was living on Haight Street in the lower Haight. But I was so busy I don’t think I did a ride for like a year or a year and a half after I joined [the club]. But anyway then the AIDS thing happened and it was pretty freaky.

PJ: Yeah, it’s interesting to see on Facebook the AIDS memorial thing and they profile all these different people. At this age it really hits home how many people were infected and died. I was just a young kid kind of bumbling along being careful. But you just don’t grasp it and you think “Oh my god, we lived through that! What a time!” So when you ask me about the BAT, it’s like god I wish I had something more, there was some deeper drive to do this. [laughs]

AM: Well I wouldn’t say it’s a common thing but people think you did the BAT because you were a Different Spokes member and maybe because you knew somebody who had AIDS. It was more than simply an abstract issue. The common thing you hear is that we were all helpless and we wanted to do something and this was something to do: raise money. We couldn’t get rid of AIDS but we could raise money to help people who were infected and dying.

PJ: Well right and that’s the thing. That was probably the basic thing where it was doing something, something. I didn’t think where the money went or what the money was necessary for. I mean I heard about the different projects and things that were trying to help people and the scrambling to provide services and I didn’t really know anybody then. I mean you mentioned Hal who had been the librarian. So Hal was the first one and then I just remember being in the Castro and seeing guys who were not well and then a year or two later guys that I knew and guys in the club were getting sick and things. So then it become much more…

AM: Real.

PJ: Yeah, real. Yeah, I was just sort of a dumb kid goofing around in college and in cafés and things. I later inherited a house in the East Bay and so I started redoing that in ’85 and that’s why I ended up not really participating in Different Spokes much after ’87 because I was just literally up to my waist in stuff.

AM: I see. So your period of being more involved in the club was really from what ’83 to about ’87.

PJ: Yeah, ’83 to about ’87, probably ’87. I did some rides then. Yeah.

AM: Did you by any chance know Jerry Basso?

PJ: I didn’t know him very well but I really liked him. He was such a nice guy. And very friendly. Were you friends with him?

AM: Yeah, I rode with him a fair amount. He and I liked to do the same rides. Hal was someone I knew of but didn’t know personally. I knew he was the librarian and I probably met him at a club meeting but I don’t have a distinct recollection. I never rode with Hal but I rode with Jerry quite a few times and so when Jerry…I don’t know if you know that Jerry died of AIDS.

PJ: Yeah, I knew that.

AM: He showed up on a ride. He was gone for a while, wasn’t participating in rides and we thought oh y’know people come and go and he’s just really busy. And then he showed up and talked about having vision problems.

PJ: Oh man!

AM: And of course my first thought was: I wonder if he has multiple sclerosis because that’s not uncommon. I wasn’t even thinking of HIV [laughs]. But then you start talking. I remember talking to Dennis [Westler] and probably others, “Gosh I wonder if he’s infected or not”. And then he just didn’t come back. He was like dead two months later. He was sick and apparently what happened was his family lives in Atherton, and he went there, and they took care of him. And when he died there was such stigma around AIDS they didn’t want, they wouldn’t admit the fact that Jerry had AIDS. But we all thought “hmm, interesting timing”.

PJ: Wow, so that wasn’t given as the reason. I mean was there a memorial?

AM: No. Nothing, nothing. There was nothing public.

PJ: That’s so terrible.

AM: Michael John told me this: when the quilt was being developed and we wanted to make a panel for Jerry, his family just no no no no no. No, they didn’t want that.

PJ: Really! Oh god.

AM: He was really the first person in the club that I knew personally who died of AIDS and then after that there were a slew others that came. But he was the first.

PJ: And Jerry was sweet. And there was somebody else…I dunno there was like a little group of those guys and there was another couple of guys who were racers and I rode with them.

AM: Who raced? Huh. People in the club who raced? That’s a really small group!

PJ: Yeah, I think there was just a couple of guys.

AM: Yes, Chong. Did you know Sam Chong?

Yes! Again not very well. Like I talked to people on rides but I was just- I lived in the East Bay. I made some friends though Different Spokes and dated some of the guys and things. But I wasn’t like super social with everybody. But I remember him. Yeah, I know that there weren’t a lot of racers and actually I don’t know if they were doing criteriums or if they were just wearing the garb and had racing friends. I would ride with them because I was a strong rider and I kind of thought about racing but I was kind of spacey and would hit people! You know when you’re riding in a pack, I didn’t want to get injured. I crashed enough on my own!

AM: What about Bruce Matasci? Did you know Bruce?

PJ: Bruce…

AM: Bruce was the strongest rider in the club. He was an ex-pro and he had raced against Greg Lemond. When Greg was a junior, Bruce was racing in the seniors and Greg was kicking everybody’s ass. Greg was like 16 or 17 and beating everybody. I remember Bruce telling me that. And Bruce actually had a stint as a paid rider with Specialized Bicycles. Bruce was incredibly strong. He’d just dance up those hills and wait for us. He was incredible to watch. I think at the time— this would have been about ’85. He wasn’t racing at that point, he was car mechanic by then. He had raced before that. And Sam I knew was interested in racing. Mike Cannon, Mike was probably a little bit later. I don’t know if you knew Mike. He was an electrical engineer working for I think HP and living some place on the peninsula. And he raced. I think he was Cat 3. He was very strong.

PJ: No, I didn’t know him. I think Bruce sounds really familiar and he knew one of the guys I’m thinking of…yeah, throwing names out, some of them I can come up. In the photos I’ve been seeing- someone posted a bunch of stuff through Instagram from ’84, ’85, ’86 and I recognize a ton of people in there.

AM: You said you were a strong cyclist. Had you ever ridden a hundred miles before?

PJ: I’d done a couple of centuries and I rode 60 miles lots and a hundred miles wasn’t that more. I think I’d done a double century that year. So yeah.

AM: Wow, okay! Some people who did BAT their standard ride was 20 miles, and then there was Bruce who did it and he was an ex-racer and then Bob Bolan did it too and was doing centuries as well. So for those guys it wasn’t a big deal to go to Guerneville. But for a lot of other people it was. There were some riders who didn’t make it. They didn’t have the stamina to make it all the way to Guerneville.

PJ: Oh yeah! I think they had a sag wagon? I think someone was sweeping.

AM: Yes, there was ! [laughs] We’ll get to that in a bit!

PJ: I was living- before this, for the two years before this I was going to City College in SF and I lived in the East Bay and I would ride my bike to Macarthur BART, put it on the bike shuttle, go over to the city and I would ride with my books up Market Street and over Market and down Teresita to school and then I would ride back up over Market or sometimes over Twin Peaks and ride back to the thing. So I was riding with two panniers full of books every day and that was kind of my training for everything, rain or shine.

AM: That’s good training!

PJ: I mean I know there were people who kind of struggled. But it was a great thing because everybody was embraced. It wasn’t like us and them. It wasn’t divided up that way [on that first BAT.]

AM: Do you remember what bike you rode that day?

PJ: Yeah, I had a Miyata 610.

AM: Did you have a triple crank or was it a double?

PJ: It had three rings, yeah.

AM: That seems to be pretty standard for people who did that ride, the ones who made it.

PJ: No one-speeds.

AM: Yeah, no! Any other ways that you were involved with the LGBT community at that point in time? Were you doing any sort of HIV or AIDS work or any kind of political work? The cafés what you worked in were they gay cafés?

PJ: Yeah, they were very gay. I mean it was in Oakland and I was working at more of a lesbian café or very lesbian-centric, on College Avenue. I wasn’t involved in any HIV stuff I think because I was just terrified. I would volunteer for things. I grew up sort of volunteering for stuff. We went to the First Unitarian Church in Berkeley and volunteerism and protest was a big deal. So it wasn’t a foreign thing. I wasn’t like heavily involved in anything. I might have gone to some protests and stuff and I would go to Gay Freedom Day and things. And I worked in these communities but I had a big mix of friends. So I wasn’t really immersed in the gay community that much. I felt like I didn’t fit in really because I was like…I drove a truck [laughs]. Mark [Paez] said someone saw my truck parked in front of his apartment once and said, “He can’t be gay and drive something like that!” That was my reality. [laughs]

AM: The day of the ride, do you remember much about the day of the ride? Do you remember what the start was like when you left the Castro?

PJ: God no, I don’t remember it being particularly difficult. I saw your questions about this and people’s reminiscences like, oh my god I don’t remember much at all. I remember when we got to Guerneville and we were kind of hanging out there. I remember it was sort of a party. But it was like another hundred mile ride where we kinda connected with people along the way.

AM: Yeah. Were you riding with anybody? Were you riding with friends or were you just riding by yourself?

PJ: I’m not sure. I would ride with Jim Lindauer y’know. [AM: Jim Lindauer didn’t do the BAT. Peter must mean he rode with Jim at other times.]

AM: Oh, I remember Jim.

PJ: Yeah, he was a friend of mine. I’m afraid I kept in minimal contact with him over the years and then he died in 2019. But he and I would ride- it’s funny to see these pictures that were posted of me hanging out together a lot. He helped me a lot with my bike. He liked me and…a very nice man. I think I might have ridden with him if there was anybody. Actually I kind of made friends with Eric Johnson. [AM: another BAT rider] And he stopped- he kinda dropped out I think because he was studying diesel mechanics and he had been in the military, a very nice guy. But I think he may even have dropped out then.

AM: Okay, okay. Was there anything memorable about the ride, that stuck in your mind?

PJ: Well like I said it was mostly it was at the end. I don’t remember the route. I thought it [the ride] would be like I said, easy and it was pleasant and nothing sticks out as being much different from a regular century and then we got up to the Woods [AM: Molly Brown’s] and that was fun. I wish I had more to offer in terms of those kinds of memories for you.

AM: I was going to ask you a question about that. So the arrival is what sticks in your mind. But I was going to ask you: the club had actually led a couple of weekend rides from SF to Guerneville prior to BAT. Did you participate in any of those, either of those?

PJ: No I didn’t. I rode on a couple of rides to like Pigeon Point, overnight rides, but I didn’t know about the ones to-

AM: The Guerneville Weekend rides.

PJ: Yeah. Yeah, I wasn’t really like tuned into Guerneville. Mark Paez, we were friends then and he grew up there and so I would go up there with him. But it really wasn’t kinda my thing. So it wasn’t on my radar if there were rides.

AM: Okay. What do you recall about the arrival in Guerneville?

PJ: More again like ending up at the- is it the Woods?

AM: The ride officially ended at Molly Brown’s which doesn’t exist anymore. But that’s where the ride ended. But did you spend the night in Guerneville?

PJ: Yeah, so I think it was at the Wildwood or something. As you’re driving out of Guerneville it’s on the left. [AM: Peter is probably referring to Fife’s.] There were cabins and it was kinda wild what was going on there [laughs]. You could hear people going at it.

AM: How that worked out is that the AIDS Foundation arranged for inns in Guerneville presumably to donate lodging overnight for the cyclists. Basically everybody got spread out. You weren’t all staying in one place, like a few people were at this place, a few people were at another place. So when you mentioned the Woods I thought well maybe that’s where you were farmed out or where you chose to go to spend the night. But the event officially ended at Molly Brown’s. It’s on the left just before you come into Guerneville from the west and it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s now an Autocamp, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Autocamp.

PJ: Yeah yeah yeah. Well I drove through there. You know we lived in Sea Ranch for 18 years and so I was driving through there a couple times a week. So it’s familiar. The Autocamp may have happened since. We left in 2020.

AM: It’s just not there anymore. Anyway that’s where the end was, the finish point. Then people went and stayed at different places. But then Sunday it was the volunteer appreciation event that was put on by the AIDS Foundation and that included people who had been involved in the BAT. I know you were there because I saw your picture, the one with the people up on stage. Do you remember anything about that?

PJ: Kind of a vague memory of being up on stage. But I think it was up at the Wildwood or something.

AM: No, that was at Molly Brown’s. [AM: I was wrong. It was at the Woods and I may have confused Peter.]

PJ: Molly Brown’s…how weird. Okay. God, usually I have a better memory of things like that. It’d be interesting to see the photos.

AM: So when you got to Guerneville, how’d you feel? Do you remember?

PJ: Kind of overwhelmed. It was kind of a hard, heavy duty gay thing— maybe it’s my perception of being at one of the resorts in the Russian River ‘cause I was like 22 and kinda hadn’t really done anything like that. I think I pitched a tent or something and it was a party atmosphere and that’s kind of what I remember. I remember then the next day I wanted to get home and I don’t know if it was like the buses were late or something like that and I knew a woman who was up there and I tried to hitch a ride with her back to the Bay Area. And I ended up riding back [on the bus] and I sat with Eric and that was kinda fun.There was a bus. They put the bikes in like a Greyhound bus kinda thing.

AM: Yeah yeah yeah. Okay. The AIDS Foundation arranged to bus people back. But some people just got back on their own. They didn’t get back [by the bus].

PJ: Right. Yeah people who had- I don’t know if they were support and had driven up there or friends of people who rode up there.

AM: Yeah. So you got on the bus that was arranged for everybody.

PJ: Right, I spent the night and then got on the bus.

AM: Do you remember where you stayed that night in Guerneville?

PJ: I wanna say- I was thinking it was at the- and I have to look and see if I’ve got the name right. It was at the place on y’know if you’re driving west on 116 out of Guerneville, it’s on the left and it was…

AM: Driving west out of Guerneville, okay.

PJ: Well, kind of yeah I mean out of downtown but you’re still in kinda Guerneville.

AM: Was it Fife’s?

PJ: Yeah, I think that was it.

AM: Okay. The Sunday ceremony what I’ve heard is that that was a long event. Basically people were lolling about on the lawn.

PJ: Yeah.

AM: There was food there and people were lolling about on the lawn. Do you remember much about that?

PJ: No, just like I said, sort of a party thing. That’s sort of the vague memory I have. People were hanging out. I just don’t have really specific memories.

AM: Okay. So that’s mainly the questions I have about the event itself. So this was a pledge event. Do you remember how you got pledges?

PJ: Yeah. So that was tough because I tried to get pledges from friends and everybody [laughs] was kind of in the same boat: poor. And so I got a bunch of $5 pledges, not a whole lot. I kind of struggled with that. Some guys got thousands of dollars, I mean did really well. I was kind of begging from my friends! [laughs]

AM: Okay. So you didn’t do anything aggressive like go to stores or organizations and say,”Hey do you want to support me on my ride to Guerneville”? [laughs]

PJ: No, I wasn’t that resourceful. I did not do that. This was a bigger deal and I realize that people got big amounts of money that these guys were really organized and put it out there. But I just went to places I knew and friends and things.

AM: Okay. At that time HIV and AIDS were kind of either very scary and there wasn’t a lot of information about it or people didn’t know anything at all. They were totally in the dark about it. And I’m wondering to get pledges from people, what was their reaction when you told them “I’m gonna ride to Guerneville to raise money to fight AIDS”?

PJ: I don’t remember anybody being negative about it because like I said I posted something at the place I worked, which was this very gay café on College Avenue and then friends who were gay and my friends were- I think everybody was supportive. We were freaked out about it, young gay men, and we were reading what we could and then straight friends knew less as I came to find out, obviously as you can imagine. But there was never any bad resistance. It was more like people just didn’t have much money to give.

AM: The last thing I wanted to ask you was how old were you when you did that first BAT in ’85?

PJ: I was 23.

AM: 23 okay. Yeah, you might have been one of the youngest people to do it.

PJ: Oh really? I guess so. Mark’s a year older than I am, Mark Paez, but he wasn’t there and Eric was a little bit around my age. I guess Jerry Basso and those guys were – they wasn’t too much older than I was.

AM: I don’t recall how old Jerry was but my guess is that he was probably 30.

PJ: Oh wow. Yeah?

AM: He wasn’t 20. If he was, then he was a very old-looking twenty year old! [laughs]

PJ: [laughs] Well I know I was kind of the youngest one there and I think I was kind of treated like that, you know what I mean? Sort of like young and goofy [laughs]. Goofball. Yeah, well anyways it’s great to get to chat about this. It’s so interesting to sort of dust it off. I wish I had more to…

AM: No, actually what you’ve contributed so far is impressed me because first of all remembering something that happened 40 years ago is hard. It’s hard period and there’s absolutely no way that you can remember something unless it was something that affected you, you know like a traumatic event.

PJ: Right yeah. We’re old, yes, and there are certain things I remember more clearly from then and I just don’t know- I mean it was a fun- y’know it was…it was fun. I really liked Different Spokes but blank!

AM: I actually have one other question. Did either being a member of Different Spokes or doing the BAT or both have some- did it have an impact on your future or was it just one of those things that you did and then you moved to whatever, the rest of your life? Did it hold some significance for you or was it like “no no, I was just a cyclist and hung out with Different Spokes”?

PJ: Well, y’know I was never athletic growing up. I rode a lot and then to join a group where it was like “oh okay I can hold my own with these people”. It was significant. It was funny— these kinds of things happen to people at a younger age whether they did sports in high school.

AM: Maybe you got some confidence.

PJ: Yeah, that and then also meeting some really nice people, Jim Lindauer, and Mark Paez, I didn’t know Eric for very long, But there were some good friends made. It was a good experience. It wasn’t like anything else. I mean it was also a sense or community, I guess, you know being in the East Bay, and I worked and had gay friends and things. But being a part of a group like that that was in the city and then doing stuff like this, like the BAT where they were kind of diving into providing services for people and people were sick in the club, it was a really significant exposure for me that way and nothing else has been like that. So I suppose…so that’s what I would say.

AM: Okay, sounds good. Peter, thank you very much.

PJ: Oh sure Anthony, it’s great to chat and thanks. Good luck with it.

AM: Okay and thank you, Peter, I really appreciate it.

PJ: Oh no problem at all, alright take care.

AM: Take care.

PJ: Bye.

Epilogue
As with Bob Bolan, riding a hundred miles in a few hours wasn’t a dramatic challenge for Peter as it was for most of the participants. He remembers the ride as “easy”! I rode up to Guerneville several times for the club’s Russian River Weekend back then and I had also been doing centuries. Although I wasn’t wiped out upon arrival, I would never call that ride easy. Obviously all those commutes by bike made a difference in how he experienced the ride itself. Peter echoes comments by others that the early phase of the AIDS epidemic was on everybody’s mind—there was no escaping the fear, anxiety, and grief—and that reverberated through the club and was the incentive to ride the Bike-A-Thon: we had to do something. Although Peter grew up in the Bay Area, had been out for a few years already, worked at a gay business, and had a circle of gay friends already. Yet he found a community in Different Spokes based around common activity and eventually a common goal (Bike-A-Thon). These days kids are coming out earlier and earlier but back then coming out after high school still would have been very daring. The club was a way, as it was for many back then, to connect with other LGBT folks in a much less daunting environment than the gay bars.

Interview with Dr. Bob Bolan: The First AIDS Bike-A-Thon

Bob at the start of the first Bike-A-Thon (from the BAR)

Introduction.
This interview was conducted ten years ago and then put on the shelf until now. In early 2015 Derek Liecty organized a secret “Old Farts” of Different Spokes gathering where about 30+ former members from the 80s and early 90s convened to catch up with each other. It was immensely enjoyable and out of that gathering I became interested in documenting “the lost history” of the club and especially of the AIDS Bike-A-Thon. Shortly thereafter I interviewed Bob, who had been a member when he lived in the Bay Area. Although he decamped to Southern California in the mid-90s for professional reasons, we’ve been in touch through the years (and not through FaceBag!) I asked Bob to be interviewed first primarily because it was a good excuse to get back in contact with him after a two-year hiatus when he stopped riding or so I thought. Little did I know that he was back on his bike six months later—addiction is hard to beat!

Bob and I go back to the mid-80s although neither of us can recall exactly how we ended up being such frequent riding buddies. I have many fun memories of riding with Bob since our personae, riding abilities, and work ethic were very much in alignment. We always had a friendly competition! Then we jointly purchased a racing tandem probably because both of us realized that instead of beating each other up on the bike, we could work together and just slay everyone through combining our strengths. Bob and I rode a lot of centuries on that tandem and we were always doing it very fast. A ride with Bob on the tandem was always exciting. And fast!

Bob, as you’ll see in the conversation, was an unusual BAT rider because he was already fully involved in the AIDS epidemic even at that early time. As a practicing doctor in San Francisco with a predominantly gay male patient base, he was seeing AIDS make sick and kill almost every day. He was also already an avid cyclist. So the AIDS Bike-A-Thon may have been a challenge but it wasn’t a new one for him since he was already seasoned from riding centuries.

AM: When you did the Bike-A-Thon (BAT) in ’85 were you already a member of Different Spokes?

BB: I think I was not…what I was… well alright, I’ll just let you ask the questions and I’ll get to what I was.

AM: So I’m just wondering- the point of this: was doing BAT, was that a reason why you might have joined the club afterwards?

BB: Well yeah, I think so because it turns out that really the punchline is that I was already president and chairman of the board of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. That was from June of ’83 to about June of ’86. So I don’t remember that my being in that position really had much if anything to do with having the BAT and having the AIDS Foundation be the beneficiary. But I think that the fact that the club did do it sort of prompted me to become a member. That’s how I remember it.

AM: Okay. Actually I just wrote an article about the history of BAT published on the club blog.

BB: Yeah, you sent me a draft of it.

AM: So my understanding was that the idea of BAT didn’t come from the club. It didn’t come entirely from the club, that the AIDS Foundation approached the club. They said “we wanna do some kind of charity event for the AIDS Foundation and we thought it might be cycling”, and then the club just went, “we can do that” and pulled it together in basically two months.

BB: I must have had something to do with the idea because the AIDS Foundation in 1985 was not that terribly…lemme see, where was our office? Were we still on…did we move to Tenth Street? I can’t remember. I mean we didn’t really have that huge of a staff and I would have been in close communication with our fundraising people, whoever they were. So I probably had something to do with- if not coming up with the idea although I don’t remember that I did, with at least nurturing it and saying yeah that sounds like a pretty good idea, let’s reach out to y’know… [AM: Bob did not come up with idea; it was Ricky Johnson according to MJ.]

AM: So the next question is obvious: how did you hear about the BAT? Obviously since you must have been involved in it, certainly through the AIDS Foundation you knew about it.

BB: Yep.

AM: Yeah, and the reason why I put this question is because this event was pulled together—the first meetings apparently between the club and the AIDS Foundation were in February and this event was April 6 and there was an information table put out on Hibernia Beach for the month of March. I’m thinking March, that’s like a month to get all the pledges and people to ride! [laughs] So it’s conceivable that you could have walked by there and said, “Hey that’s a great idea! And wait, I’m president of the AIDS Foundation. I should do this!” [laughs]

BB: I don’t think it happened that way. I think it’s much more likely that I had something to do with pointing them in the club’s direction.

AM: That makes much more sense. So why did you do the BAT?

BB: Well, I figured that if the AIDS Foundation was gonna be a beneficiary and I was a bicyclist, that it would be improper for me not to ride! [laughs] Y’know I just wanted to show support and gratitude to the bike club for doing it.

AM: Okay. What kind of cyclist were you before BAT?

BB: I was what I would call a ‘cycling enthusiast’. I mean I didn’t train for the ride. I was probably riding centuries at that point. I’d have to look through my old pile of…

AM: Maps and things, patches. [laughs]

BB: Yeah, patches and patches and patches. I still have a pile of those things someplace in a drawer up there. [laughs]

AM: So the BAT was a hundred miles. So you probably had done a hundred mile ride [already].

BB: Yeah absolutely, absolutely.

AM: There were definitely people on that ride who were like, “A hundred miles? I haven’t even done twenty!” [laughs]

BB: Right, right, right! Right.

AM: There were some people who actually didn’t make it all the way. Not many but there were a few. Do you remember which bike you rode? You rode a road bike, right?

BB: Yeah, I did ride a road bike. I don’t remember what bike I had. I was thinking about that after I read through the questions and probably I had a Bianchi.

AM: Yeah, I remember you having a Bianchi and I think that ended up smashing into a garage.

BB: That’s exactly right and I think it was exactly that Bianchi because subsequent to that I did the Davis Double century and it was when I came back from the Davis Double century I was so wiped out that I forgot to take my bike off the top of the car and went into the garage with it. It was all right around that time.

AM: Okay. So again this is a question I already know the answer: Did you know anyone who had AIDS before you did BAT?

BB: Sure!

AM: Yeah, you knew lots.

BB: I knew lots, right. I knew lots.

AM: And that was because you were doctoring these people.

BB: Yep yep. But interestingly at that point by the time of the AIDS BAT I didn’t have any personal friends or acquaintances. That came later.

AM: Okay. Now there was a doctor [in Different Spokes] who rode a bike with tri bars. He worked at the Davies Medical Center and he died of AIDS and I know you knew him. I think his name was Charlie but I’m not sure.

BB: Right! Yeah just- right, Charlie, exactly. Just as you said that, it was Charlie…what the hell was his name? He actually had hepatitis B or C as well because he eventually developed ascites and- what the hell is Charlie’s last name? But yes I remember him on his bike with the aero bars. Wow, that’s interesting.

AM: Yeah. That might have been well after BAT because I knew Charlie from doing club rides and I wasn’t riding that much in ’85 with the club. I was just starting to ride, I think, ‘cause I think I joined…the year before the Olympics and I was so busy with graduate school. I think the first ride I did with the club was in ’84 and then I didn’t really start leading rides until ’85. So I’m not really sure. I might have run into Charlie in ’85.

BB: Yeah. His name might come to me. When did you and I meet? We must have met-

AM: I don’t remember. You mentioned meeting up on Skyline and I do remember that, that somebody introduced us. I was on a club ride, I think, and somebody introduced us. You were either on that club ride or you were doing your own ride and we ran into you.

BB: Right, exactly.

AM: And it might have been Ron Decamp who introduced us.

BB: I don’t remember.

AM: But somebody introduced us and I don’t know when we started riding together but I knew that’s when we met. I had forgotten that but when you mentioned that it came back to me.

BB: Yeah. Good, cool cool right. So at least we share that memory!

AM: How involved were you in the LGBT community at that point?

BB: Oh wow, quite a lot because of the AIDS Foundation.

AM: So the BAT didn’t draw- you were already drawn in.

BB: Now, remember I was also a member of the Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights.

AM: Oh right!

BB: And in ’85…so my first connection with the gay community when I came to San Francisco in 1979 was with the Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights (BAPHR) and I eventually became the secretary and then president elect of that organization and I was the president elect at the same time that I was president and chairman of the board of the AIDS Foundation. That was my most manic year and I think it was probably ’84. That’s when I realized that I just didn’t have a life. [laughs] So I stopped the Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights and just devoted my energies to the AIDS Foundation.

AM: Okay, what I was trying to get at and I think I had that picture is that you were already a pretty enthusiastic cyclist. So the AIDS ride was not an incentive to draw you into riding you were already doing that. But you probably became a member because of the club, because of the ride. But you were already pretty well hooked into the gay community as well. You knew a lot what was going on with HIV and AIDS in the community at that point.

BB: Yep.

AM: So it wasn’t new to you at all.

BB: Not at all.

AM: Okay.

BB: At that time it was old, tired news.

AM: Do you remember the day of the BAT? Can you recall what it was like? Like did you ride down from your house to the start or did you drive down? Do you remember anything, the beginning of that ride?

BB: I don’t. Tell me where it started.

AM: It started in the Castro, in front of the Castro Theatre. And my suspicion is that it was a…it was a…

BB: A mass start?

AM: Yeah, a mass start.

BB: Yeah. I don’t remember that…yeah…the first thing- my first memory is actually riding along the- toward the coast. And it was probably up near what, Olema?

AM: Oh really, that far north.

BB: Occidental or something like that. That’s my first real memory and I don’t know if that’s because I was getting tired and hungry or exactly what the deal was. But I don’t remember any of the rest stops. All I remember is by the time I got there I was riding alone and I was chasing somebody. [laughs] Who I never caught. [laughs]

AM: Yeah, I’m pretty sure that person was probably…

BB: Probably Bruce.

AM: Yeah, Bruce was very strong in those days.

BB: Right and you know actually when I got your email about that, that’s possible. I subsequently met him on another ride after he was sick and I didn’t know that he was sick and he had probably had changed quite a bit. So even if I had- you say he died in ’91 or ’92?

AM: I can’t remember exactly when he died. [AM: He died February 2, 1991.] But it was before the accident [AM: Tom Walther and I were hit head-on while driving to Guerneville.] so it probably would have been- and I believe I was already living with Tom. So it would have been possibly ’90, ’91, maybe even early ’92 that he- ‘cause I remember going to his memorial service at that Irish mortuary right on Market Street near the Castro. Duggans, Duggan’s Mortuary.

BB: Oh yeah, right. Yeah, so my only real clear memory of him was a ride that we did and it was a loop ride and it was in Marin. And we did a loop and I don’t know how many loops we did or whether it was a criterium or what the hell it was. But I remember that I lapped him and I remember that he- I knew that he was a strong rider and I didn’t know that he was sick but he looked a lot older and I remember I said something, I was just making small talk with him while we were riding and I said something about oh this was a bitch of a ride and I said something about my age and I said so you’re probably my age and at that point I was in my late 30s. He said he was like 30 or something like that. So I mean obviously he was sick and had aged. So it was entirely possible that that was him who was ahead of me.

AM: Yeah. I can’t remember. In fact every road ride, there’s a not a single road ride that I did with him that I ever beat him up a hill. He just was like ‘bye’ [laughs]. I’d just see him pull off on the front, just like disappear up the road. It was like, okay I guess I’m chasing Bruce, sigh. [laughs]. So he was pretty awesome and I remember him telling me he used to race with Greg Lemond and I said, “Yeah I can believe that!” [laughs]. “Yeah yeah, I think you raced with Greg.” He was probably Cat 1. Pretty strong.

BB: So yeah I don’t really remember anything else about the ride itself except pulling into the parking lot. So how many rest stops were there? You said about every 20 miles or 25 miles?

AM: There was rest stop every 25 miles and a check point every 12 miles to make sure people were alright. I think because this was such an unheard of thing to go a hundred miles and there were a lot of people who had not ridden this length and they wanted to make sure that you were not in trouble and they would sag you out if you said I’m done, I’m out of here.

BB: So I’m really not getting any more memories. I mean it was one of those kind of rides, that it was hard work and when I’m on a hard work ride, I just kind of put my head down and work and I don’t really look around and enjoy much of it. [laughs]

AM: I know you well enough to know that any ride you do is a hard ride [laughs]. But I would have thought that the camaraderie of the start would- it wasn’t a race but it somehow it turned into another race for you and I’m wondering how that happened. [laughs].

BB: Well, I’ll tell you, it really is the story of what cycling was to me during most of the ’80s and that was a response to my frustration over not being able to really do much or accomplish much of anything that I could see for my patients and then we weren’t making any significant headway in the AIDS crisis and we were struggling to get money for it. We were always struggling. It was always just an ever building crisis of more people dying, more people getting sick, less attention, little attention on the part of governments, and not enough funding and so on and so forth that I was constantly frustrated and cycling became a release for me. It was something that I could excel at, I could be strong, I can look at a hill and I can say I can get myself up to the top of that hill and I can get there fast and strong. You know it was a compensatory mechanism. So when I got on the ride, it was like okay here I am, I’m the president of the AIDS Foundation and I’m going to burn through this ride! I wasn’t trying to a hero or anything. It was just like that was my element.

AM: Okay okay. So if Bruce or somebody had not been in front of you, you still probably would have been going pretty hard. It wasn’t just chasing Bruce but you just-

BB: Oh yeah, yeah yeah yeah.

AM: Okay, that makes more sense to me now. So the next question is: did you ride with friends or by yourself, and obviously you rode by yourself.

BB: [laughs] I think so.

AM: The next question is what was memorable about the ride and it sounds like you don’t really have strong memories of it except that you were busting your gut trying to get to Guerneville and catch this guy [laughs]!

BB: [laughs] Yep, that was pretty much it!

AM: Okay. What was the hardest part of the ride or of the day. Did you have a moment where you like had a cramp or something- you said why am I doing this or you just…put your head down and did it?

BB: I do remember that- actually I just flashed: I remember the last—either a check point or a rest stop, I don’t remember which—and it was the last one before Guerneville and I remember pulling into it just as Bruce was pulling out and I knew that I had to stop because I was fried and so my ‘nemesis’ was in my sights and I thought that if I just stopped for a few minutes I’ll catch him before the end. That’s the clearest memory that I have. [laughs]. So this isn’t turning out to be a really good camaraderie story for you.

AM: Yeah, it says a lot about you though [laughs]!

BB: Yeah, [xxxxx]

AM: So this experience of doing BAT as you look back on it now…was it a positive experience, a negative experience, a mixed experience and why?

BB: Oh, it was a positive experience. I mean it was a positive experience because it was…I remember it was really uplifting and really- it was really cool to be part of an event that so many people participated in enthusiastically and pulled together so quickly and that had the same focus. It was the first time of actually doing something that was…I don’t know…I wanna say altruistic but…like people were doing it for a cause, you know. It was a shared cause experience. It felt incredibly affirming. I just remember feeling very proud of not only my accomplishment on the ride but proud that I was doing the work that I was doing and a part of something big.

AM: Okay. Yeah, I know what you mean. I think it’s one of the reasons why Lifecycle- I think all these events have sort of a cult feeling to them-

BB: Yep.

AM: -is that there is something about when you realize- or you have a revelation of the efficacy of concerted group action. There’s a collective action that has a desirable, positive effect especially when you’ve been doing something that seemingly doesn’t have a reward, like fighting AIDS. What I didn’t mention in the online article is that this was when Reagan was president. [laughs] Do you remember what that was like? That totally sucked!

BB: Yeah, that totally, totally sucked. That’s absolutely right. Right. He never said the word AIDS.

AM: We were pretty much on our own. That’s what I remember is: if you’re expecting any help or sympathy, give that one up right now, you’re gonna do this on your own.

BB: Yep.

AM: I think the BAT was a response from within the community, y’know people who were sick, some people who were sick, some people who weren’t sick, a lot of us who were afraid we were going to get sick, to do something when nobody gave a fucking damn about what was happening.

BB: Yep, that’s exactly right.

AM: I get why I hear back from people who fall in love with Lifecycle of why they do it. It’s like yeah, y’know, it feels good to be part of something where there is a goal, you accomplish the goal not only in terms of the ride but of your fundraising and guess what? That money goes to do really good work. It’s just like a win-win-win all the way around. So I get why people get into that, like ‘I’m going to do it again, I’m going to do it six times, ten times!’ Because it has a really positive- I wouldn’t call it endorphin-like but the reinforcement is very good.

BB: Yeah, it’s very potent, very, very potent.

AM: Yeah yeah yeah. So did doing BAT change you in any way? Or do you think it did. Or didn’t?

BB: I think it just affirmed what I already knew, that bicycling for me was a very powerful…compensation, a way of feeling strong, and it just felt really good to sort of marry that own personal feeling of accomplishment and compensation with kind of an objective knowledge that I was turning it into something that was benefitting more than just me. And I think that feeling kind of persisted after that. Though it probably was important to me and changed the way I looked at things.

AM: Did you do any subsequent BATs or was that the only one you did?

BB: I think that was the only one I did. Yeah, How many did you say there were?

AM: There were a total of ten that were sponsored by the club and 11th one was done only by Project Open Hand.

BB: Yeah, I did one here in Southern California…actually it was a club century. It wasn’t a bike-a-thon.

AM: Okay. Um…but you subsequently did Lifecycle.

BB: Yeah, I did the California AIDS Ride…

AM: Oh, you did the California AIDS Ride?

BB: Yeah, I can’t remember which one I did. I did that a couple times and I think I’ve done a total of- I think I’ve done a total of three times, maybe four.

AM: Okay. So these other questions are: did doing the BAT, was that an incentive for you to do other charity rides or activities. Or did it encourage you- the other way to look at is did it encourage you to cycle more?

BB: I don’t think it encouraged me to cycle more because I was already doing cycling. Yeah, I don’t think it encouraged me to do more charity events because by that point I was pretty much consumed with doing the work with the AIDS Foundation and keeping my private practice going.

AM: Do you remember what it was like to arrive in Guerneville?

BB: [laughs] Yeah, I was happy and tired and I rolled into that big parking lot and I remember the big parking lot from once I got off the road. I remember ‘oh my god I gotta go all this distance to the front door!’ [laughs] and this was after I’d ridden a hundred miles. [laughs]. I was fried by the time I got there I couldn’t even barely get across the parking lot!

AM: Oh okay [laughs]. Um there was supposedly as I understand it there was a ceremony at the Woods the next day. Did you hang around for that?

BB: Probably yeah. I saw in the blog that you did. I don’t remember that. Yeah, I mean I probably did but I don’t remember it.

AM: Okay. Actually there is one surviving picture that I have. It’s a panorama shot. You know, it was shot on film and apparently Tom took the images and tried to overlay these 2.5×4 inch print photographs of the people who were there at the ceremony. [AM: It was probably MJ, not Tom who did this part of the album.] Of the course you can’t see everybody’s faces because of the way it’s cut and people are standing behind other people and I looked through that group and I tried to see your face and I didn’t see it. [AM: I overlooked Bob. He is actually in the photograph.] And it wouldn’t surprise me if you had decided, like you had done the ride and you were gonna go home.

BB: Yeah, ‘cause I really don’t remember how the hell I got home. I know that I didn’t ride my bike. I know that much.

AM: [laughs]. So Timmy [AM: Bob’s late partner] didn’t pick you up, you have no recollection of that or?

BB: I don’t remember that.

AM: Okay. They were gonna bring people back from Guerneville.

BB: Right, yeah, right. I saw that you mentioned that and…I mean it’s possible. You know what? It’s probably more likely that I met Tim up there and that we peeled off. That’s probably much more likely although I don’t remember it clearly because whenever we would go places that’s typically what we would do is, you know, I’d bring my bike and we’d drive and we’d get a certain distance from whatever our destination was and he’d stop and I’d get my bike out and I’d ride the rest of the way. That was pretty typical.

AM: Okay. Do you remember what it was like to get pledges and raise funds?

BB: [laughs] I don’t remember that part at all!

AM: Okay. And you didn’t do any preparation or training for the ride. You did it. But you were already in pretty good shape.

BB: Yep.

AM: Okay, well that pretty much ends all the standard questions that I have here. I’m just wondering if you have any other recollections or musings on BAT.

BB: No, I was hoping that as you described more that it would spark more memories. But I’ve given you the only ones that I really have. [laughs]

AM: Okay, well you’re the first I’ve interviewed, and I suspect that a lot of people are going to be in that position because going back 30 years to this event [AM: It’s now 40 years.] is—unless it had a really profound impact, you know “the event that changed my life”—the recollections are probably going to be mushed up with all the other things that were going on at the time.

BB: Right exactly, yeah yeah, I think that’s exactly right because as I said for probably the first…I would say from about 1982, which was when I really first started seeing [AIDS] patients in my practice- I mean I had seen a few people before that time who were sick but we didn’t know what they had yet. But from about 1982 through probably 1988 or so, it was- that six years was just a blur. It was just awful and you know there was very little uplifting during that time. I mean it was just meeting after meeting after meeting, disaster after disaster, patient dying after patient dying. It was an awful time. And so it’s hard to have any really strikingly good memories come out of that.

AM: Yeah, well you were unusual because you were really on the front lines. In terms of people who were involved in BAT, you were really on the front lines. You were in the foxhole.

BB: Yep, I was in the foxhole, definitely.

AM: I guess that’s about it. I really don’t- I can’t think of anything else that I wanted to ask people about the event.

BB: Well, if I think of anything else, I’ll shoot you an email.

AM: Surely, you know if something comes to you later either a memory or something you wanted to share with people about the whole experience of having done the BAT, please let me know. But it sounds like the main thing I got from everything you said was that particularly for a person in your position that it was the one positive experience where you felt empowered because of the collective action of the group, to do something positive- I mean it didn’t end AIDS but it was something you could do that, a group of you could do, as opposed to just you alone were doing in your practice.

BB: Yeah, exactly.

AM: Okay, well Bob thank you very much. I very much appreciate you giving me your time.

BB: Well thank you. Oh yeah thank you for doing this. It was fun. It was really, really good talking to you.

Bob and I at Hibernia Beach for the 40th Anniversary ride in 2022.

Epilogue.
Bob’s narrative show how stressful it was to be a doctor during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. This was all pre-AZT, meaning that there were only palliative and experimental treatments of unknown efficacy; AZT, the first pharmaceutical that dulled the impact of the HIV, wasn’t approved for treatment until March 1987. Along with his private practice Bob was involved with the creation of the SF AIDS Foundation while simultaneously involved with BAPHR. How distressing it must have been to feel helpless every day in the face of an onslaught of burgeoning illness and death. Cycling became his primary release valve for all that stress and he channeled that energy into becoming an even stronger cyclist. Cycling like other endurance sports is an endeavor in which diligence and hard work do lead to improvement in bitter contrast to the early days of the epidemic when everyone, doctors included, were at a loss about how to stem the flood that was coming. Every day was a rearguard retreat in a battle when you had no ammunition. When Bob and I started to ride the tandem together, which was probably around 1988, we would often ride to Marin across the Golden Gate Bridge and he was so agitated/aggressive/angry from his work that when we went around the towers he barely slowed down. He steered the bike like we were slaloming around the tower and I recall at least two times when he nearly scraped me off the back of the bike because he didn’t slow. We were going so fast that he had to lean the bike over to round the towers forgetting that he needed to turn wide in order for the back of the bike to make it through the curve! One year at the Tierra Bella century in Gilroy on the descent of Hecker Pass Road he had us going so fast that in a righthand curve he couldn’t keep our line and we bounced across the oncoming lane into the opposite dirt shoulder. Fortunately there wasn’t a car coming and we didn’t crash. Every ride with Bob was at 110% That certainly helped me be a better cyclist in order to keep up with him! Not long after, Bob was doing intervals on the Marin bike path and popped a vessel in his brain and ended up in the hospital: a stroke caused by insanely high blood pressure during an interval. Only then did Bob finally start to slow down (at least on the bike!) A little. Maybe that experience helped him see that his work albeit meaningful was also such a psychological stressor that it could kill him.

The other notable point of Bob’s story is how that first BAT—as I’m sure it was for many other riders—had a positive impact on collective helplessness. It was collective group action to do something about AIDS that gave so many people a path out of despair; it certainly strengthened many people’s resolve to get involved and do something! When you are alone, despair comes easily; but when you’re fighting together, hope returns and inspires resolve in the face of a seemingly hopeless situation.

Conversation with Jim King: The First AIDS Bike-A-Thon and How the Bike-A-Thon Became A Club Project [revised 7/30/25]

Jim King at the Great Western Bike Rally in 1989

Introduction.
Jim King was a very early member of Different Spokes and served as the club treasurer in 1985 and 1989. He was also one of the 63 riders who rode the first AIDS Bike-A-Thon, “Pedaling for Pride in ’85” in 1985. He was the Bike-A-Thon Coordinator for the subsequent year 1986, the first of nine that the club did on its own. Afterwards Jim served on the AIDS Bike-A-Thon for seven years organizing the accounting of all the pledge checks that riders had collected. By his count the Bike-A-Thon (BAT) tallied $1.25 million dollars in donations during his tenure.

This interview took place on May 6 at Jim’s place. He and I had a wide-ranging conversation—what else happens when two old farts get together to reminisce about the early days? Perhaps unfortunately I talk almost as much as Jim did. But I hope my comments add to his remembrances. Jim talks about his recollections of the first BAT and provides some interesting history about how the second BAT came to be. Much of our conversation has been edited out because we talked about many members from the early days that were tangential to the main topic. Even so it’s long!

Several names come up repeatedly. Bob Humason was the club’s third president and just after he took office he was approached by the nascent San Francisco AIDS Foundation about helping out with a “bike-a-thon” it wanted to run to raise money. He was also the BAT Coordinator in 1989. Bob later died of AIDS that same year. Michael John, or MJ as he was always called, was the club’s second president as well as newsletter editor for several years. You can read his recollections about the first BAT here. He and Bob were instrumental in organizing the club to assist with that first BAT. They both rode in the first BAT as well as having organized it.(!) He currently lives in Asheville, NC. Tom Walther, another early member, was the ChainLetter newsletter editor after Michael John and did publicity for subsequent BATs. He was the BAT Coordinator in 1987. Tom and Jim were very close friends and rode the first BAT together. (Tom was also my partner and later died in 1994 due to a car accident.) Bob Munk also rode in the first BAT and later may have worked on the subsequent BATs but I’m not sure in what capacity. Bob died in 2015. Charlene O’Neil was involved year after year in organizing BATs by coordinating logistics. Mike Voight was the BAT Coordinator in 1990. Karry Kelley held various positions in the club and was president one year. He’s still a member. Matt O’Grady was the BAT Coordinator in 1988. Jerry Walker was a longtime member and was the president one year in the late ‘80s. He was also the owner of the Freewheel Bike Shop on Hayes St. and did repairs for the first BAT. He died of AIDS in 1993.

The video mentioned in our conversation is a short video of unknown origin about the AIDS Bike-A-Thon in which several of these people appear and/or talk. It appears to have been shot in 1988. After being sequestered for decades in my basement after inheriting it from Tom Walther, it was revealed at the 40th Anniversary banquet in September 2022. You can view this video here.

AM: So were you a member of Different Spokes before you did the ’85 Bike-A-Thon (BAT)?

JK: Yes.

AM: Presumably you heard about the BAT through the club.

JK: Yes. I just remember the AIDS Foundation came to the club and said “We’d like you to ride for us”, and we started asking them questions like, “What’s the route gonna be?” “Well, you’re gonna ride from the Castro Theatre to Guerneville up Highway 1.” We said, “Well, where are the rest stops and the lunch stop gonna be?” And they said, “What’s that?” And we said, “What about sag support?” and they said, “What’s that?” So we had to tell them what they had to provide the riders and we said, “How are the riders going to get home the next day?” and they said “Well, we figured they’d just ride back to San Francisco.” [laughs] And we said, “No, they’re not gonna ride a hundred miles the next day! And they’re gonna have to stay overnight up there and are you gonna help with that?” “Uh, no.” So basically they hadn’t really thought this thing through. So I’m not sure who but I’m sure people from the club [AM: It was MJ and Bob Humason.] sat down with people from the Foundation and helped educate them about what they would have to do on the road to support riders so they could make it up there. I was watching the video [AM: The video of the 1988 BAT first shown at the 40th Anniversary celebration.] where somebody [AM: Mike Voight.] was talking about that first BAT and they said they thought there were ten riders. I think there were more like 30 to 50 riders.

AM: You watched Mike Voight talking, the ’88? Okay.

JK: Yeah. It was more like 30 to 50 riders, maybe closer to 50.

AM: So the BAR said 62 and that’s the count I have. But in club newsletters it says 63. So I’m not sure. When I wrote an article about the first BAT I quoted 63. But then I was on the phone talking with MJ, it only added up to 62. [AM: There were in fact 63 who started the ride.]

JK: That’s much closer than what Mike had said in the video and my recollection is that we raised about $33,000. They took our pledge forms that day and we said, “What are you doing?” and they said, “Well, we’re going to collect the money”, and then three months passed and they never collected a dime. So I believe Tom Walther and somebody else [AM: Probably Bob Humason] marched into the AIDS Foundation offices, found the desk where all the pledge forms were, and picked them up and took them. And somebody at the AIDS Foundation said, “You can’t take those. Those are ours.” and they said, “No, we’re gonna take them and we’re gonna collect the money and we’re gonna give it to you. You guys are obviously too busy to do this and you have more important things to do.” So we ended up going back and collecting our pledges several months after the BAT happened.

AM: Wow! I did notice that in the ChainLetter, like in September there was a short article about that, about that there was a certain amount of pledge money that hasn’t been collected. And I was thinking, well that was like four months after the BAT and it sounds like the AIDS Foundation per your recollection really made very little or no effort to collect the pledges.

JK: Yeah. They clearly didn’t have the personnel to do these things and they had more important things to do, and all of that is what led Different Spokes as a group to decide that we were gonna do the BAT the next year and we would make the Foundation a beneficiary.

AM: So basically offloading that from the Foundation.

JK: Yeah, we said let us do this—and I think Tom was a big driver—I’m not sure who else, and I was more than happy to support what Tom wanted to do. [laughs] So somebody told the Foundation that we were gonna do that. Their response was, “No, you can’t do that, it’s ours.” And we said, “No no no, we’ll do it. You’ll be the beneficiary. But you clearly don’t have the bandwidth to do these things, you have other things that were more important to do.”

AM: Yeah, they were pretty new at that time.

JK: Yeah, they were pretty young. I don’t know who was the executive director at that time. Was it Tim Wolfred back then?

AM: It might have been Tim, yeah. [AM: Jim Ferrels was the executive director when the SFAF formed but Tim Wolfred replaced him sometime in 1985. Jim was probably the ED at the time of the first BAT.]

JK: It might have been Tim. So I don’t know if he would remember anything about this. I do remember that the Foundation was not initially [laughs] embracing the concept that we were just gonna take it over. But we promised them that they would be a beneficiary, and I don’t know if they remained the sole beneficiary for more than one year. But then eventually we decided that we wanted to incorporate other beneficiaries.

AM: No, there were eight beneficiaries the second year of which the AIDS Foundation was one of them. There were eight. In that discussion I’m really curious as to how that happened. Maybe you’re not aware of this: the club put on an event for about three years called Double Bay Double [AM: It was four years, not three.]. This was like around 2015 or so [AM: It was 2011-12, 2014-15.]. It was really the project of a member named Chris Thomas, who was a rabid ALC rider. And he decided we’re gonna put on an event that’s gonna be a loop in the Bay Area and it’s gonna be totally under the radar because we don’t want to do permits or anything, and we’ll recruit ALC riders to do this and they’ll collect money, and the AIDS Foundation doesn’t have to do anything. We’ll just show up at the door with-

JK: This was around 2015? So after we stopped doing the BAT.

AM: Oh yeah, long after we stopped doing the BAT. And he did it for like three years and then he moved to Nevada [AM: Utah]. Apparently it was quite successful. It was much lower cost—really low cost, like hardly anything at all. Of course the amount of money they collected was much less. It might have been on the order of maybe $50,000 each year. Very much like the first BAT. But the AIDS Foundation had to do nothing other than receive a check from Different Spokes. So after BAT 1 it sounds like, “You don’t have to do that stuff. We’ll do it.”

JK: Yeah, and they weren’t happy about it but then we were kinda like you don’t really have a choice because we’re your riders and we’re gonna do this BAT and you’re gonna be the beneficiary. [laughs]

AM: And apparently they were okay with that at some point.

JK: They could have tried to sue us and said that we were stealing something that probably wasn’t trademarked in any way.

AM: The club had the DBA for BAT.

JK: Eventually yeah. Then maybe we pulled something.

AM: Yeah. I only know this because Tom was concerned that Bob Munk or Mike Voight were gonna try and pull a coup to take BAT away and the DBA had expired. So he and I went down to city hall and refiled it to make sure that the club had the DBA for AIDS BAT.

JK: Yeah, at some point Bob Munk started documenting the whole BAT, how it was done, each committee, what the committees did. He sat down with everybody and he documented all of this. But then we found out that he took it and he started selling his services to other cities to put on a bike-a-thon using our documentation with no acknowledgements. We found out that while he was doing it- when he was doing it we thought well this was great. We’re gonna have all this documentation pulled together. But then we figured out that he was doing it so that he could use it to be a consultant to other cities and charge them a fee and help them put on a bike-a-thon using everything he learned from us and we were a little miffed by that and he kinda left the organization at that point. But at some point he had some level of documentation more than anybody else had ever done.

AM: Interesting. That’s too bad. You know he’s dead.

JK: Is he?

AM: Yeah, he died in, I think, Santa Fe like around the beginning of the Pandemic, not because of the Pandemic but around the time of the Pandemic, like 2019 or 2020 [AM: He died in 2015.]. He passed away and I read his obituary and it was published- he had moved to Santa Fe at that point.

JK: Did it say what he had died from?

AM: I don’t remember. It was some time ago that I read the obituary.

JK: He must have been only about 60 or something ‘cause he was probably my age or younger.

AM: Yeah, I don’t know. I’m sure I could find the obituary again. If you just search online for Bob. That’s why I did. I’m not sure why I was looking for Bob Munk’s obituary. But I came across it and sure enough, it sounded like the Bob Munk that had lived in San Francisco. He was gay and had done AIDS work blahblahblahblah, so this must have been the right Bob Munk. That’s too bad because that would have been wonderful to get that documentation because that’s actually one of the questions I had: how the committees formed and how that came about.

JK: Yeah, I don’t know…I don’t even remember what year I became in charge of the thing. [laughs] Was it year 2?

AM: Yeah, it was year 2. You’re listed in the ChainLetter as the Bike-A-Thon person! [laughs]

JK: We ran it out of my living room for seven years.

AM: Oh my god!

JK: And after seven years I kinda burned out and I gave them a year’s notice that when we finish collecting the pledges this year, I’m out. I rode the first one with Tom [Walther]. We were two of the last bikers to come in. [laughs]

AM: So that’s the story that Tom had told me, that the two of you were riding together and that Tom told me he was concerned that Gene was going to beat the two of you into Molly Brown’s! [laughs] I don’t know if that’s your recollection.

JK: [laughs] Yeah, well my recollection is that I could have ridden a little faster but I wanted to ride with Tom so I didn’t want to leave him behind. So yeah I dunno. I don’t remember him saying anything about Gene but I guess maybe we came in before Gene. But Gene was like 70 or 80, right?

AM: He was the last in. At the time he rode? I think he was 65.

JK: 65, he was much older than we were. So yeah, so we rode in together and I think we stayed at my friends’ house and we used them help us to get our bikes back to the City the next day.

AM: So you didn’t use the buses to get back?

JK: No, we did not take the buses back. I did not. I came back with my friends because I had friends who had a house in Guerneville. So I’m pretty sure Tom and I stayed with them.

AM: Do you have a recollection of whether you stayed to greet Gene when he arrived?

JK: I don’t really remember but I would guess we did.

AM: Especially if you weren’t that far ahead of him! [laughs]

JK: We wouldn’t have left a rider out there on their own. I’m sure that we knew that there was sag support keeping an eye on him. But I’m almost sure we would have stayed.

AM: What MJ told me that was at some point they knew Gene was the last rider and that they had a sag wagon behind him and when it got dark, they turned the headlights on so that he could see and be safely escorted into Guerneville.

JK: Yeah, I think we stayed until after dark so I’m sure we stayed for Gene to come in.

AM: MJ also told me that apparently the Foundation had a huge spread of food at Molly Brown’s and that everybody had their dinner. Well, Michael John and Bob had their dinner there and then they went up to Elfen Lodge and crashed. So they had no dinner up at the accommodations where they were staying. It was just at Molly Brown’s. Is that your recollection?

JK: Yeah, I’m sure we ate there when we got in especially if we were waiting for Gene. I probably had a beer!

AM: Do you remember much about the ride itself?

JK: Um…I know I had never ridden a hundred miles before in my life. So I wasn’t sure I could do it when we set off on this thing. I had never ridden up Highway One so I didn’t know how much climbing there was going to be. But I did know there was climbing. I also knew that there was kind of a steady climb about 12 miles from Jenner into Guerneville basically. That last leg is about 12 miles on River Road. I do know that part of River Road well and it’s a gentle climb all the way.

AM: If it’s a climb, it’s a gentle because it goes down to the mouth of the river.

JK: Right. I really don’t remember much else about the ride itself.

AM: What about the start? Do you remember much about the start in the Castro?

JK: Did we start in front of the Castro Theatre? I think we started in front of the Castro Theatre. In subsequent years we started at Collingwood Park right behind Most Holy Redeemer, yeah. I don’t remember much. The number 62, 63 rings a bell. I know it wasn’t 10 when I was looking at the video and what Mike said. I have a very firm recollection that what we raised was $33,000. I don’t remember much about the morning but we probably started about 6 AM. [AM: It was 6:45 AM.]

AM: I think MJ quoted a time.

JK: When was it, early June that we did it?

AM: Oh, it was April 6th, so it was probably still spring-ish and the days aren’t that long. So it was probably a bit early but I don’t think it was 6. That would have been too early; the sun would barely be up. It’s probably in the old ChainLetters when the start would take place. What he had told me was that…based on what he had told me I thought, “you guys didn’t ride right? because you were organizing all this stuff.” He said, “No no no, Bob and I both rode. We thought we had things pretty much under control by the day of event and we had pledges and we were gonna ride” and he said that at the start he was talking about, “Look at all these people!” He couldn’t believe he got over 60 people to ride. It wasn’t just 60 riders, it was a mass of publicity. There was TV stations, Supervisor Louise Renne was there to wish people “bon voyage” and the event apparently caused a stir, a good stir.

JK: Right.

AM: And so they were both quite happy that it had turned into an event that had publicity and it wasn’t just like this little thing happened to raise money. But in fact it had gotten some press.

JK: It was probably one of the first big AIDS fundraisers.

AM: Yeah, probably.

JK: ’85 was very early in the epidemic.

AM: So you rode up with Tom and you don’t have any other distinct recollections. What about the food stops along the way?

JK: Yeah, I don’t remember the rest stops. Yeah, I don’t remember any.

AM: What about the effort, you had never done a hundred miles before.

JK: [laughs] Well, Tom helped pace me because Tom was riding slower than I was.

AM: [laughs] Yeah, Tom rode quite slowly!

JK: There were times that I backed off and just rode with him and that was probably a good thing because it probably helped pace me. I think it was almost dark when we rode in. We might have been the last two riders before Gene. [laughs] But I think Gene was quite a bit after us and yeah, you’re right—it was dark by then. I think we kind of rode in at dusk. I was happy that we finished it.

AM: Okay. You had never done a hundred miles. What kind of riding had you been doing? What was your typical ride?

JK: Club rides that were probably 20 miles, maybe 25 miles. Some of them up in Marin where it was hilly. But I don’t even recall getting out there and doing any training rides. [laughs]

AM: [laughs] Hmm, so how did you prepare for this?

JK: I’m not sure I did! I think I just tried to go on club rides every week to make sure that I was in shape and the bike I was riding is probably the bike that’s downstairs in the garage right now, a Fuji that I bought in the ‘80s, an 18-speed touring bike that didn’t have toe clips. I wasn’t wearing clip shoes or anything. I couldn’t tell you for sure that it didn’t- it’s an 18-speed Fuji that I still have.

AM: Oh boy! Oh boy. Let’s see…so I’m thinking here you are, you’re kind of a recreational cyclist and admittedly it was a club project. But…I’m thinking for myself there’s no way if I hadn’t been riding regularly there’s no way I would have done a hundred miles [laughs] and yet you said “I’m gonna do this!”

JK: You know, people we know are dying. Jerry Basso, his family taking him down to Atherton or wherever they lived and we never say him again. Those things were happening way too frequently. So…

AM: That was one of my questions: did you know people who had AIDS or had died of AIDS at that time?

JK: At that time? I’m not sure if Jerry had been diagnosed already at that point.

AM: I don’t think so. [AM: Jerry rode in the first BAT and was healthy at that point.] I think it was after, like ’86.

JK: Yeah probably after. Let me see, ’85…I think after. I’m trying to think…my old landlord, he wasn’t diagnosed ’til after ’86 ‘cause I lived in that house until ’86.

AM: The one person that MJ mentioned was Hal Baughman. I don’t know if you knew Hal Baughman.

JK: Uh-uh. I didn’t know him.

AM: He was the club librarian and he was a cycle tourist. He liked to do those overnight trips that Bob Krumm and Shay Huston and some others liked to do. He was also a smoker. There are pictures of him smoking after a ride! [laughs] That first gay pride that the club did, he had a broken leg and he’s sitting in the back of Richard Palmer’s truck and I remember in a ChainLetter people referring to him as “Marian the librarian” and it’s because he was the club librarian at the time. And in the subsequent gay pride there’s a picture of him riding his bike and he’s really gaunt and he’s got a sign saying “I have AIDS and I’m riding my bike” or “I have HIV”—one or the other—”I have AIDS and I’m still riding my bike”. Although I didn’t know Hal personally I knew people outside of the club, a guy I knew from some political work who was a wonderful organizer and was a good dancer too, he got sick and died really quickly.

JK: The ones I can think of right now, the close friends that died in the late 80s or early 90s that I can remember. I have a photo album in the back with several pages, all of obits of people I knew, some well some not so well, that I found in the BAR and kept them all and put them all in an album.

AM: I have a similar collection too. Okay, well I was just wondering to what extent that may have motivated you to do the BAT.

JK: Yeah, obviously. Well, the federal government’s inaction, the president who wouldn’t say the word AIDS.

AM: Were you doing any other AIDS work or AIDS advocacy at that point?

JK: No, eventually I went to Washington twice though to open the Quilt in later years. Probably late 80s was the first time. I went with Karry Kelley once or both times.

AM: He’s gone on some club rides. He was at the 40th anniversary too.

JK: Yeah, and I was out of town or I would have been there. But yeah, I was traveling.

AM: He was really struck by that video. I was going to ask you: do you know the origin of that video?

JK: No! I was wondering. I’d never seen it before.

AM: You hadn’t?

JK: No.

AM: So, it was shot on, I think, one-inch video. It’s studio- in other words, it was shot on a studio camera. It wasn’t shot like a handheld, y’know consumer. It was clearly shot by somebody who was in the TV industry and I have only the vaguest recollection why Tom had it is that it was made for PR purposes although it was never got used for anything.

JK: Or they did a news segment on it and he managed to get a hold of a copy of it.

AM: Yes. I knew this video was somewhere and when I moved in with Roger I knew I hadn’t thrown it away and it took me forever to find this video because I wanted to show it at the 40th. And so it had it digitized. But I never had the complete story on, “Now, why was this video made?”, who was responsible for making this video. So it’s just going to be a bit of lost history, I think.

JK: It looks like a news segment but there’s nothing on it to indicate what news channel had done this.

AM: I’m thinking that Tom knew somebody in publicity through his publicity work, in the TV industry to get them to basically freelance to make this video and edit it down and so forth. But nothing seems to have been done with it. Anyway I’m glad it’s revived. Anyway I showed that video- and I’m trying to think, Bob Bolan was there…there were a fair number of early club people—Bob Gilchrist, Tim Shea—but I remember Karry being like almost in tears. It just… and him making the comment to me that the club was—there were people there that had died and the club was such an important part of coming out as a gay person and I was like I completely understand where you’re coming from because I had that reaction too. Anyway the video has been preserved and we now have it on our Flickr site. The Foundation actually asked for a copy. There were people from ALC who were there and in the organizing end of ALC with the Foundation, they said we would like a copy of that video because we need to think about what we’re gonna do— this was two years ago—about what we’re gonna do about AIDS Lifecycle and of course they’re gonna end it. This is the last year of AIDS Lifecycle. I don’t know if you knew that or not.

JK: Yeah, I know that ‘cause I sponsor a couple of people. Yeah.

AM: Okay, that was just another question because I was curious as to what you knew about the video. Do you remember anything being especially difficult or positive about the ride that day? Anything that struck you?

JK: No. It struck me that I was amazed that I was able to do it, the whole thing because it was my first ever century! [laughs]

AM: Do you remember how you felt at the end? Were you like wasted or?

JK: [laughs] Probably wasted and exhilarated that I had done it. It was something to celebrate clearly.

AM: Do you remember anything about the next day, the Sunday volunteer appreciation event, the thank- you that the AIDS Foundation put on at Molly Brown’s? [AM: The event was at the Woods, probably the original location near Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve, not at Molly Brown’s]

JK: Was it at Molly Brown’s again on the Sunday? [AM: Jim was right to question this.]

AM: Yeah. It was the next day.

JK: I don’t recall that. I’m sure that I stayed at my friends John, Paul and Ray’s house and that was before John was diagnosed with AIDS ‘cause he died in the early 90s. And I stayed at their house I would have been brought back for that event the next day and then I would have ridden back with them.

AM: How did you get pledges? Do you remember anything about getting money?

JK: I just started asking friends. They were probably all friends. I probably didn’t ask anybody from work. I was at that point theoretically still closeted.

AM: Okay. So then they probably would have known about HIV/AIDS at that point since they were mostly friends?

JK: ‘Cause they were friends, so they would have been mostly gay men.

AM: Did you ride any subsequent BATs?

JK: Once. In one other year could I make the time to ride, and I managed to get friends to take over the accounting that day so that I could actually ride again.

AM: Okay, so that’s pretty much—unless you have anything else that strikes you about that first BAT, that you can remember.. If something comes to you later, just shoot me an email.

JK: No. No. Okay. Nothing.

AM: Okay, so then the other topic is this transition from BAT 1 to BAT 2. So I think at the beginning, although there’s nothing the ChainLetter that says it, that this was a one-off.

JK: Yeah, when they came to us, they said we’re going to have a bike-a-thon for AIDS and we need you to ride.

AM: Yeah, and I didn’t know about the case of the pledges not being taken care of and that that somehow played into the club, you and Tom, saying you guys can’t do this so we’re gonna do it.

JK: Uh-huh, Yeah.

AM: So do you remember anything about how it is that the second BAT-?

JK: I think- well, I know that some time in late summer or fall we realized that none of the pledges had been collected because my pledges were all from friends of mine and they never heard a word from the Foundation. There was never any effort to reach out to them, and I don’t know what we had provided on the pledge form, whether it was their address or their phone number or what. But none of my pledgers had heard anything and had made their donation. So I think Tom went into the AIDS Foundation office with somebody else from the club and found out where the pledge forms were and took them. [laughs]

AM: That sounds like Tom! [laughs]

JK: And then we started collecting- then we went and collected our own pledges. I don’t know if we reached out to all the cyclists or we just started collecting for other cyclists too. But we sat down and started collecting the pledges. And somewhere after that we decided that the next year we would hold the BAT, and there was a lot of discussion in the club about whether the club had the bandwidth to take on something like this. But that we had to do something and obviously there were enough people in the club who felt that we had to do something about the AIDS epidemic and it was something we all wanted to do and we decided that we would hold the next BAT. And somebody at some point told the AIDS Foundation and they were not immediately receptive to the concept! [laughs] and we were kinda like, well, you need us to ride [laughs] and we’re gonna do it and you’re gonna be a beneficiary, just let us do it. And eventually they y’know didn’t try to stop us. So I didn’t think that we expanded to other beneficiaries on year two. I thought it took a couple of years. But if you can find documentation that says we did-

AM: There were eight beneficiaries for that year. I think it was AIDS Emergency Fund and-

JK: Okay. Open Hand-

AM: -Open Hand, the Foundation and-

JK: Project Inform if it was already around? if it was around yet but it may not have been.

AM: I have those ChainLetters here. I can pull them up if you’re-

JK: So my recollection is that the next seven years we basically ran it out of my living room. And we figured out how to set up committees that would do things. Char ran logistics, different people ran different committees…

AM: [laughs] This is January ’86 ChainLetter and this is an interview with… Jim King! about how the ’86-

JK: -Wow. Okay we set up three groups to focus on the big areas, fundraising, promotion, post-event celebration. Bob Munk, my god- I guess I should go through it and read all that. So I will have to read all that if you could give me access somehow.

AM: Yeah, I can. It says here that Jerry Walker and Nadav Aharonov were responsible for post-event celebration. I’m thinking, “Really, Jerry Walker?” Like he’s so [x]- he was so in the ozone. [laughs] How did anything ever get done with Jerry?

JK: [laughs] Well, it was a party though! It might have been up his alley. And the other thing I specifically remember is that in the seven years we raised one and a quarter million dollars ‘cause I kept a tally.

AM: Yeah um…Matt O’Grady gave me a figure. Or maybe it was Karry. He said I think $2.3 million from beginning to end.

JK: Oh, during the seven years- and probably the first year was $33,000.

AM: We ran it for ten.

JK: What’s that?

AM: We did it for ten years and then the eleventh year was Project Open Hand.

JK: Okay. Including the first year the Foundation did it?

AM: Yeah, altogether there were eleven BATs, Pedaling for Pride, nine that the club did just by itself, and then the eleventh one was we’re burned out and Project Open Hand wanted to take it over. So we don’t know what they collected but they only did it for one year and that was that.

JK: So I think I was involved in seven of those nine and then I decided- told the guys- like I said I gave them a year notice that next year I’m not gonna run this thing ‘cause I’m burned out.

AM: Yeah, understandably.

JK: During my time my tally had come to one and a quarter million dollars. I don’t have any boxes of records or anything from those days. But I remember the whole process we had set up of batching checks and all the checks went straight to the beneficiaries. They were never written to the BAT; they were always written out to a beneficiary, and we ran like adding machine tapes on every batch and delivered them to the beneficiaries every week or two. And it took months to collect pledges after the BAT. We collected a lot of them the day of.

AM: Yeah. Here they are. These are the beneficiaries of ’86.

JK: Okay. Hospice of SF, wow. Oh, the Pacific Center in Berkeley.

AM: There was a previous article saying that to try to get- expand beyond SF, to get more people involved so people would be willing to collect pledges or ride if the services were from their county rather than just being in San Francisco.

JK: Yeah right, so we had Sonoma, we had Berkeley.. were was ARIS? ARIS sounds familiar but I’m blanking out on what Aris Project was. [AM: ARIS was AIDS Resources, Information and Services in Santa Clara County.] I knew Shanti obviously. The AIDS Fund, which eventually became…

AM: Wasn’t that the same as the AIDS Emergency Fund?

JK: Yeah, I think it became the AIDS Emergency Fund, and then that got folded into…a lot of these organizations have been folded into other things.

AM: Yeah, they’ve all vanished.

JK: I don’t know the People With AIDS, PWA…

AM: There were so many small ones. They didn’t last for very many years.

JK: Yeah. Well, we stuck with the model that we raised, begged, borrowed, and stole everything…to put on the event so that the checks never went to the event, not one dime that the riders collected. I think we encouraged the riders to collect their pledges and send them in to us, send the checks in to us because that just made more sense. And then we would tally them. But the day of the event a lot of riders turned in their pledges because a lot of them just brought pledges with them, and I had a bank of accountants every day sitting in the basement of Most Holy Redeemer Church- or the Rec Center. But I think they were at the Most Holy Redeemer basement on adding machines and I was there every day, except for the year that I rode, running tapes and sorting checks by beneficiary and by the end of the day we had the first set of pledges ready to go to whoever the beneficiaries were that year.

AM: Wow! That’s amazing.

JK: And I conned a lot of my friends who were accountants into doing that and so one year I felt like I had a good enough team to handle that that I decided I was gonna ride again. And then one of the big things I remember is year…3, I think? when that straight man took a fall in the rain and a truck ran over his helmet-

AM: Oh, I remember that!

JK: -Gene somebody.

AM: Yes, oh my god I remember that.

JK: -and it was a straight man. We were shocked. The first thing we did was pull his waiver and lock it up somewhere, in somebody’s safe deposit box in case we ever needed it. We didn’t really know if our waivers were legally sound because we couldn’t afford legal advice. And people went to see him. I think Tom went to see him in the hospital, a group of people from the AIDS BAT went to see him and we was like, “It was my own fault. I know better. I caused this. Don’t worry about it.” We were all worried that he was going to sue us and that was gonna be the end of the AIDS BAT. And he was a straight man, he was riding because he had friends that had AIDS and it was wet that morning, it was raining, and he took a turn too tight and slid, skidded his bike and went into oncoming traffic and went under a truck. And we were all like in shock ‘cause somehow word got back to us. I don’t think we had cell phones back there. I don’t know how we knew. We knew on the ground back at the Rec Center.

AM: Probably because the police. There was probably an ambulance and police were there.

JK: Yeah. Word got back to us that this had happened, who it was. We found his rider waiver and put it away and sat around waiting for the news.

AM: I had completely forgotten about that! But I remember that now, yeah.

JK: Gene somebody, Gene Franco I wanna say was his name. But we were all super impressed that this was some straight man and he wasn’t- he was taking responsibility for the accident.

AM: Whew, amazing, yeah.

JK: But in the end he was okay. He was very lucky. Thank god he was wearing a helmet when he went under that truck. That was one of the more dramatic days of the BAT, for me. [laughs]

AM: So you were the coordinator for that second year. Was that thrust upon you or is this something like you stepped forward and said I wanna do this?

JK: It was probably a little bit of both! [laughs] It was probably Tom telling me I could do it!

AM: Oh okay [laughs] “But I’ll help you!”

JK: -“You’re very organized”. Yeah, “But I’ll help you!”

AM: That sounds like Tom! [laughs]

JK: Yeah, I don’t remember- y’know looking at that article, I don’t remember that those were our committees because it didn’t talk about logistics. It talked about promotion and fundraising and-

AM: It looked a bit impoverished to me, that list. [laughs]

JK: Yeah, yeah. But I mean obviously we had people in charge of logistics pretty quickly. The route, we decided that we would do concentric loops that- my recollection is that the second year we did a 62-mile, 100 kilometers, to China Camp.

AM: That’s my recollection.

JK: And then we had smaller loops trying to encourage, trying to teach people that anybody can ride 20 miles. And a lot of people were like oh my god I couldn’t ride this, like I couldn’t do 20 miles y’know ‘cause they don’t have a concept that-

AM: There was a 25-mile BAT route in SF and I remember the markers. For years they were on the roads here, these yellow markers. They were round with an arrow in them. [laughs] ‘Cause part of it was on my commute to San Francisco State and I’m going to work and I’d see those arrows! [laughs]

JK: So they didn’t wash away? [laughs]

AM: No, they were there for years, for ages. It seemed like the only time they ever went away was when they repaved the road. So I needed to know that route for the 40th anniversary because I thought oh I wanna do the 25-mile BAT route and I had to go strictly on memory because- Karry says that he has a map of it but it’s in the house and he doesn’t have access to the house [right now]. Okay, this is my last question. You were the BAT coordinator. What was it like? Were you like totally stressed or was it a joyful experience? [laughs] What do you remember?

JK: [laughs] I don’t remember being terribly stressed. I mean there were times where you can- you’re doing volunteer work and I’m working full time and my job involved working 60 hours a week in the winter, y’know as an accountant during the busy season I was working all the time so I hadn’t much tine. So I’m sure there were plenty of times where I was supposed to do this this week for the BAT but I hadn’t gotten around to it. So I’m sure there stress about all that. I don’t remember: did we always do the BAT in April? I don’t remember.

AM: No, it moved to May, thank god. Better weather.

JK: The weather’s really iffy and shorter days.

AM: Better in May!

JK: Yeah. Obviously I would just be coming out of busy season which pretty much didn’t end ’til April. So I was probably fairly stressed doing my part of the BAT. But the reality was that we had all these working groups that did logistics and other things. So I wasn’t doing any of that. I was just trying to coordinate the working groups and helping to make sure that they’re keeping up to speed, getting up to speed on what they need, figuring out the route, doing training rides, and organizing everything we’re gonna do the day of. Like I said, we went and begged, borrowed, and stole everything, all the food…I remember Walgreen’s became a big supporter. Of course they became rich off the AIDS epidemic but they became a big supporter. So I’ve always been a big supporter of Walgreen’s here in the Castro because they were one of the few companies that stepped forward early on and gave us stuff for free that we needed. We needed picnic supplies and all sorts of things like that to do the rest stops, and I can’t remember where we got the food donations, coffee donations, and beverages. I’m sure we went to the bike shops and things for support. But Char [AM: Char O’Neil] handled a lot of the logistics. She probably got a lot of those donations and she hopefully- she has a good memory and she could be a big help here. I’m trying to remember who else ran any other committees.

AM: Okay, I need to talk to Char. Well, Tom was doing publicity.

JK: What’s that?

AM: Tom was doing publicity.

JK: Yeah. I’m sure we got like the Walgreen’s window at times and we probably pressed the beneficiaries to provide volunteers for the day of event.

AM: Oh for sure, yeah. Oh for sure, those tables were staffed by volunteers from the beneficiaries. They’re all wearing their beneficiary T-shirts. [laughs]

JK: Who did we have who did T-shirt printing? I think we knew somebody in town who did T-shirt printing and we were able to get a lot of the T-shirts and stuff for free. I mean we got everything for free or we raised some monies separately by going to our friends and asking for a donation to help put on the BAT [laughs] in order to pay for things we couldn’t actually get for free. We got use of the Eureka Valley playground for free from the City, I think. I don’t think we ever paid for that. I think at one point we used part of Most Holy Redeemer. But I think we used their basement that they used for bingo. I think we used that for the accounting the day of. But it was a huge volunteer effort. But for those people who worked on it there was a year-round commitment. We finished one year like Char said on the video, we finished one year and by like January or February we needed to get started on the next year even though we had just barely finished collecting pledges from the prior year.

AM: Okay, I think we can wrap this up.

JK: Yeah?

AM: Thank you very much, Jim.

Epilogue.
Several things struck me about Jim’s recollections. First, Jim like many of the other riders had never ridden a hundred miles before. The BAT was their first century. Jim, Tom, Bob Humason, and many of the members probably didn’t do much more than light recreational cycling before the big day. The route to Guerneville isn’t mountainous but it has well over 6,000 vertical feet of climbing. Amazing!

Second, that the club ended up putting on the BAT for so many years could have been just an accident of timing. The new SFAF was undoubtedly swamped providing services to a burgeoning population of clients. The AIDS epidemic was still young but growing exponentially and the SFAF was newly formed and surely lacked funding to do much more than just part of its core mission. Contrast that with today where the SFAF is a large and mature bureaucracy with a developed fundraising arm. The SFAF if it had been more organized might have nixed the club doing those early BATs. It wasn’t until 1987 that the SFAF put on the AIDS Walk in San Francisco and clearly by that time it had enough resources to organize a major fundraising event. With the BAT offloaded to Different Spokes it benefitted from getting monies it didn’t need to work very hard for and with little financial investment, which was probably a godsend in those early days even if the BAT was run differently than they would have wanted. There is no doubt in my mind that SFAF would have preferred to be the sole beneficiary of all those BATs rather than share any largesse with other AIDS organizations—no non-profit wants to cede monies to others unless it has to. But the larger profile that having many beneficiaries provides—more outreach in more Bay Area counties—probably helped SFAF indirectly in raising their profile and fundraising.

Third, Jim mentioned that the ride waiver the BAT used in year 3 had not been vetted by legal counsel because the BAT couldn’t afford it. That seemed shocking until I remembered that our club waiver was in a similar same situation in those days. Different Spokes was a threadbare social club. (It still is, unfortunately.) We didn’t have liability insurance until years later when we were able to get a policy we could afford through the then League of American Wheelmen (now the League of American Bicyclists). The failure to have the waiver vetted by legal counsel was not due to a devil-may-care attitude but from BAT just not having any money. That the logistics committee was able to scrounge up almost everything it needed to put on a huge event like the BAT year after year just from begging for donations is amazing and almost surely was a headache and major stressor for the organizers. No wonder they burned out. Money isn’t everything but it does help.

Fourth, Jim’s burnout after seven years illustrates pretty clearly the downside of this model of fundraising. There is a moral purity about being a 100% volunteer effort. But the volunteers on the BAT committees had real lives as well and so BAT, albeit a job of the heart, was still a job that you have to squeeze into your existing employment, your family, and just finding time to relax and unwind. The other model—having professional fundraisers or paid staff—comes literally at a cost. Staff cost money and professional fundraisers keep their eye on the profit margin. The California AIDS Ride and AIDS Lifecycle without doubt have raised a lot more money than the BAT ever did or ever could do. And in real life moral purity is always second (or third or fourth) to the bottom line. Ironic as it may be, if Bob Munk had succeeded in selling his services so early on, perhaps even more money would have been raised in the early days to help with the epidemic albeit for other cities. But that was part of the zeitgeist of the time coming out of the counterculture: follow your heart and give to your community, help each other out. That the BAT went on for so long on volunteers is a testimony of every volunteer’s dedication and perhaps that is what is most praiseworthy and should be remembered. Behind the BAT Coordinator were equally dedicated committee chairs and their volunteers working daily up to the event and well beyond its aftermath.

The 40th Anniversary of the first AIDS Bike-A-Thon: Interview with Michael John [revised 7/30/25]

Michael John, Gay Freedom Day,June 26, 1983, DSSF Parade contingent

Michael John was one of the early members of the club and served as the ChainLetter editor as well as the club’s second president. He was instrumental in the creation, production, and execution of the first AIDS Bike-A-Thon in 1985. In addition he was a prolific ride leader, created many of the club’s early iconic rides, and led several long distance tours. He currently lives in North Carolina with his husband. In this interview he talks about being a member of the club, the origin of the first AIDS Bike-A-Thon, and how both indelibly affected his life.

HOW THE FIRST AIDS BIKE-A-THON CAME TO BE

AM: My understanding is that the club was approached by the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, which was fairly new at the time, and they wanted help with an event and that you and Bob Humason were the leads or somehow the two of you were critically involved in negotiating with the AIDS Foundation.

MJ: Well, I have a very vivid recollection of the whole thing. My memory usually isn’t this good but I believe I have a really good recollection of it and I’ve never lost it because it was such a monumental event for us.

AM: Yeah, and the club was new.

MJ: It was new and we had to do a lot fast, as you know. I remember even where I was when Bob Humason gave me that phone call. So let me start from the beginning. What I have in front of me is the original article in the Bay Area Reporter, which they wrote a really good article. I know you’ve seen it numerous times. So anyways I thought it was early March, it could have been late February [when the SFAF contacted the club]. The BAR article says that they thought it was about a six-week period between when Bob was contacted and we actually had the event. So I’ll go with late February. And I received a phone call from Bob Humason. It was in the middle of the afternoon and he told me the whole idea. He told me first he got a call from who I believe was Ken Jones of the SFAF.

Now, the two people from the Foundation that were key to us were Ken Jones and Ricky Johnson. So evidently I think someone from the AIDS Foundation must have written this article with the BAR because it went into the following issue. It seems that Ricky Johnson or Ken Jones called Bob Humason and I believe it was Ken Jones; he was the Volunteer Coordinator. Ricky Johnson was connected to the Foundation. He was like the nurse. The article says that Ricky Johnson came up with the idea, that he would organize the bike-a-thon to raise money for AIDS, for the fight for AIDS, and Ken Jones told Ricky to organize the whole thing and get back to him.

So I bet it was Ricky who called Bob Humason, and Bob Humason took the whole information down and called me right away because I had just given up the president role to him. So he wanted to ask my opinion of all this. He said, “I don’t know if we should take this whole thing on or not”, and I, the eternal optimist and cheerleader, said “Of course we’re gonna do this because this will be fantastic for the club because we will get so much publicity and we’ll get a lot of new members!” That’s all I cared about, I guess, and so we agreed after our conversation that we would go with it. He and I basically split the whole task of working with the Foundation about 50-50. He was the main contact of course because he was president and he was the one running the show. But I was like his right-hand man. I would be the one who would do things like make up the maps, contact and organize the sag wagons, and come up with the plan of what the route would be like, and I think we had already done a 100-mile route to Guerneville and back with the club. You would have to check again the ChainLetters to see when the actual first ride all the way to Fife’s was. [AM: It was July 15-17, 1983.] I organized the very first Fife’s camping trip as well as the Apple Blossom ride, by the way, and so it was kind of a given that we knew already it was exactly 100 miles from the Castro to Fife’s. It was uncanny. We already knew that. So it was a given that we would use that route for the Bike-A-Thon. We wouldn’t have to come up with anything new.

So, we got the wheels in motion, the Foundation was all excited, very good communication between us, the club was gungho. But we had to work really fast: we had the route in order and we had plenty of volunteers outside and within the club, and there were all kinds of organizations who the Foundation had to give us a hand, like sag wagons and setting up food tables and so on. Laurie McBride is in the article as someone who drove one of the vans. [AM: Who was Laurie McBride?] There were people from all over the city who helped with this. It was a big event. It was so new.

Ken Jones, SFAF, with Bob Humason and Michael John.

AM: That was one of my questions. It was only two months and I know that subsequent Bike-A-Thons took almost a year to pull together. And it’s always amazed me: how did this happen that you got the logistics all organized in such a short period of time—food, and tables, the sag wagons, and the First Aids stations? It was like it all magically came together so quickly and it sounds like you guys were able to tap into a preexisting network or set of services that were out there that were willing to volunteer.

MJ: It is a good question. How did we pull it off within like six to eight weeks? I think it was closer to six weeks. I just think it was youthful ambition. I was very motivated, Bob Humason was very motivated, and we got motivation from our club. I remember we had a lot of people, just helping out as much as they could and so for however we pulled it off we did things like organize where the food stops were going to be along the way. We suggested where we should end the route and the original concept was Fife’s. [AM: Fife’s is now Dawn Ranch.] You brought this up in one of your questions. I even have it on the original notes that I made for the riders that we crossed out Fife’s and put in Molly Brown’s. [AM: Molly Brown’s is now the site of Autocamp.] So that must have been a kind of last-minute change. I don’t recall why we would jump from Fife’s to Molly Brown’s but Molly Brown’s had more of a facility for handling buses and running cars and bikes and all that stuff, a big parking lot in front. If I’m correct I think Fife’s was owned by Molly Brown’s or vice versa. So it was easy to do that. I believe the reason it shifted from Fife’s to Molly Brown’s was strictly logistics and if I’m not mistaken the two are owned by the same owners. It makes a lot more sense. It is very possible we had already planned- or I should say that the AIDS Foundation did all this: they planned the celebration the next day. They put that whole thing together, on Sunday. That was their deal. It was kinda like Different Spokes did Saturday along with their assistance and our direction, and they did everything on Sunday. Our job was done when we arrived in Guerneville.

AM: Okay. By the way I went though all the old ChainLetters and wrote down a list of all the rides and that first Guerneville Overnighter was on July 15th through 17th of 1983.

MJ: Okay, so that was the year I started with the club and I would have organized that. So you’re right: we had that route under our belt already. So anyways- oh and another thing we did: I remember a couple of days before the ride like a Wednesday or Thursday before the ride, I can remember a crew of us going on the entire hundred-mile route and spraypainting the road with arrows, with markers. So we had that all together because we wanted to make sure we didn’t lose anybody. We didn’t lose anyone. So there was only one route that year, it was the one-hundred mile route and it was marked and we told the Foundation where to station the vans for food. They organized all the food. So they were the ones who fed us. That was not a Different Spokes thing if I remember correctly. I’m sure it was not. They were so grateful to us for actually being able to pull the logistics of the ride off, they were bending over backwards to make sure that the riders had everything that we needed. And I will never forget that. Ricky Johnson and Ken Jones especially, those two were the two people from the Foundation we were in contact with all the time, and they made sure that we had everything that we thought we would need for this ride.

Jerry Walker, center, Mrs. Field’s Cookie Ride, September 4, 1983

AM: Also it was my understanding that Jerry Walker [Club member and original owner of the Freewheel Bike Shop on Hayes] was providing repairs or some kind of bike maintenance service for people. Do you recall if he was traveling along the road or was he stationed in one place or were there were other bike shops involved or how did the mechanical assistance thing work on that ride?

MJ: I think he was the only person available for that kind of thing, for bike repairs and bike needs. I don’t recall— it was Jerry, right? Okay, so Jerry Walker was the one who must have come up to us and said, “I’ll have this repair station.” I’m sure that’s right. Or he could have been in a mobile van but I doubt it because we had no communication.

AM: Ah, okay no radio.

MJ: No radios. As far as I remember we had no communication: it was just us. We were on the road and we were going from point A to point B and that was it. It’s hard to believe I’m sure. A lot of people say, “How did you do this with no cell phones et cetera?” How we could do this without being able to talk to each other? Well, we did it all the time.

AM: Well, in those days you know the centuries that were being put on by bicycle clubs they did have radio support. But it was always from getting help from some ham radio group that was in the town or community that these clubs existed in. But there were no cells phones then.

MJ: Right, there was nothing like that, not that I can remember. No one would have owned one. I think the guy I worked for at the time he had one of those big shoe box sized cell phones. But we were pretty much on our own.

AM: What about the publicity? The club decides to do this thing and I know that the club had a table in front of Hibernia Beach to recruit people and I guess you were going around with flyers to bike shops. Bob Krumm had mentioned to me that he recruited members for the club by putting little flyers on bikes whenever he saw one in the Castro, “Hey, there’s this new gay bike club starting up!” I’m wondering how did the word get out about the ride.

MJ: Well, I’m looking at the list: we had 62 riders. [AM: There were actually 63 riders who started and 57 completed the ride. The BAR was incorrect.] Most of those people were probably Spokers and we just talked it up. I think the word just spread like wildfire within the bike club because we had only a monthly newsletter if that, and we just would get on the phone. I guess Bob and I decided that for this to be a success for the Foundation—because it was all for them, it wasn’t for us—we would have to do our best to recruit as many bicyclists as we could and I can kinda remember when we reached the 62 point total number, we were pretty floored that there were that many people who were gonna try and do this. So we somehow got that word out; we probably had a table but to be honest if we had any promotion at all it was probably just a table at Hibernia Beach. We just didn’t have the mechanics and the stuff to do much more than that. [AM: Two-thirds of the riders were club members.]

AM: It’s also my understanding that when the riders got to Guerneville they were provided lodging. Was that true?

MJ: Oh yes! That was another thing that the AIDS Foundation did for us. Again that was something that we needed. We said we’re gonna need accommodations and the Foundation was able to contact enough guest houses for everyone to have a place and I’m not talking about camping at Fife’s! I’m talking about cabins, inns, or guest houses. I was one of the lucky ones who stayed up at the Elfen Lodge. There were about six or eight of us who stayed up there. But the Foundation, being who they were, had a lot of pull and all they had to do was make some phone calls and I guess there were a lot of inns who just donated a number of rooms. People bunked up in them and I don’t recall anyone who stayed in any place other than the ones we stayed in. So I can’t vouch for any of that stuff. But I do remember I stayed with Bob Humason and a few other people, maybe Tom Walther, at Elfen Lodge, which was a real- one of these fairy places. It was very cute. I have some pictures of us staying there.

MJ at the Elfen Lodge after the Bike-A-Thon

They were very accommodating. We were tired as all get-out. By the time we got up to Elfen we were so tired. When we got to Molly Brown’s, the Foundation did have a spread for us and then we just went up to Elfen and crashed. Then we got up the next morning and we were just kind of leisurely relaxing, and there was a time when we were supposed to get to Molly Brown’s to start the thank-you event. It was the appreciation event. And that’s how the Foundation billed it: as an appreciation event. They not only arranged to have accommodations for all the riders—comfortable accommodations!—they also provided buses for all the riders to get back to the city with their bikes.

AM: That was my other question. I know there was some way that people were brought back from Guerneville. So it was buses and that was organized by the AIDS Foundation?

MJ: Yes, again everything that happened on Sunday was the AIDS Foundation thing. All we did was hang out in our Speedos and just have a good time. [laughs] So again I remember everyone getting on a bus and heading back. It wasn’t until mid to late afternoon that that all happened. It was a number of hours of appreciation, talks, just good time stuff and we just kinda hung out. It was great!

AM: Now you didn’t ride on Saturday? You were obviously doing logistical type stuff and zooming around on the road in a car or something. Is that correct?

MJ: No, I was riding ‘cause I had pledges! I actually rode that day and Bob did too. We had the act all together. We were so confident, I guess. We had all of our ducks in order, the riders, that we felt comfortable enough taking our pledges and joining in and being two of the 62 riders. No, both of us rode up ‘cause I remember getting there. I remember getting there around 5 o’clock. The Foundation’s name for the ride, the original name, was “Pedaling for Pride in ’85” and it became the Bike-A-Thon, in fact the event was a generic bike-a-thon. We called it the Bike-A-Thon. I don’t remember how it all happened but their original name for it was called the Pedaling for Pride event, the entire weekend Saturday and Sunday.

BEING A MEMBER OF DIFFERENT SPOKES

AM: I also have just a few questions about you personally. How did you get involved with Different Spokes?

MJ: I decided to go from solo bicycling in San Francisco to a club and when I found out that this club existed—and I wasn’t a club joiner at the time. It was 1983, I believe. I remember going to my first club meeting and saying, “These are my soulmates here! My people!” I used to do everything on my own, ride a bicycle, but I thought it would be a lot more fun to do it with a lot more people and it just became a big deal for me personally. I was a real developmental thing for myself personally. I changed a lot and as you can imagine I really got into it. Bob Krumm was president at the time, I made a lot of friends in the club, I organized a number of rides that kept me involved and by the end of the year I was approached to run for president, president for ’84.

AM: But you were the ChainLetter editor at some point too. Was that before or after you were president?

MJ: That was probably before ‘cause I was working in a situation where I could take that over. I don’t think I took it over while I was president, I was doing plenty then. [AM: MJ actually was the ChainLetter Editor and President concurrently.] I think I had already started doing it. Someone else was doing the ChainLetter. Peter Renteria I think was doing the ChainLetter before I did. One question after another and before you know it the club is saying, “Well, you can take it over if you want!” This was before I was involved with desktop publishing as it was known at the time and I loved graphics design and layout. So it was natural for me to take on the newsletter project. It was all typewritten and then xeroxed or mimeographed or however we did it back then, it was amazing, and then I had my hands on a Macintosh computer around 1985—I think it was around then— and that’s when I could do it on the computer by using Pagemaker. Wow. And so that was kind of a fun thing for me. That was my kind of extracurricular activity for Different Spokes, was editing the ChainLetter.

AM: At some point you left the club. Do you remember when that was?

MJ: Yeah, I did three long distance rides and the last one was ’87 so I was involved with the club at least through the fall of ’87. Now in 1988 was when I started living with somebody who needed my personal attention because he was sick. We were dating. I had lost my partner and he had lost his and we met up at a Shanti grievance group. Remember those things? And we fell together as a couple, Lee and I did, in 1988. So when I was with Lee for four years, ’88 to ’92, that’s when I didn’t make as much time for the bike club. I spent very little time with the club. Here and there I would take a ride with the club and I pretty much being less involved starting around 1988.

AM: Okay. That’s sort of my general recollection. I left the club in ’94 [AM: It was 1992, not 1994.] and my recollection was that you weren’t around a whole lot in that period before.

MJ: No, by ’94 I had bought a house in Petaluma and moved. So I was pretty much out of the Bay Area directly. I was leading bike rides on my own or some friends at AAA where I was working at the time. Like, I did an Apple Blossom Ride with them, that sort of thing. So yeah, It was for about four or five years. And also I was into the Rawhide [2] scene. I was hanging out at the Rawhide a lot. This was probably starting around ’85 or ’86 and so I was splitting my social time between the bike club and the Rawhide, and I can even remember organizing a couple of benefits for Bike-A-Thons, for Different Spokes at the Rawhide. It’s kind of a funny thing! [laughs]

AM: Combining both interests!

MJ: Yeah. All that ended about 1989, yeah around then.

AM: Okay, so besides the very first Bike-A-Thon were you involved in subsequent Bike-A-Thons or were you just moving away from that?

MJ: No, I did not take part in future Bike-A-Thons. After the first BAT I’m not sure but I think the next one was the one we did without the AIDS Foundation.

AM: I’d have to go look at the beneficiary list. [AM: in 1986 SFAF was one of the eight beneficiaries.]

MJ: Yeah, we probably did it to benefit the Foundation but I don’t think the AIDS Foundation was involved anymore [with organizing the event.]

AM: Oh no, they weren’t involved in subsequent- because it went from being a benefit for the AIDS Foundation to a benefit for beneficiaries that the club selected. And usually the AIDS Foundation was one of those.

MJ: Right, and I think there was probably some discussion do we want to spread our good will amongst other beneficiaries. So I believe it would have been the ’86 BAT—you can correct me—but this one was organized strictly by Different Spokes.

AM: I’m pretty sure that’s correct.

MJ: And it really started ramping up. Now, the people in the club who did the ’86 BAT as far as I recall were Tom Walther and Jim King.

AM: Yeah, I think Jim was the BAT Coordinator that year.

MJ: Yeah, and Tom Walther was really close to him and I think the two of them pulled it off. I don’t remember the politics behind it. I do remember there was just a tiny, tiny bit of bad blood. [AM: You will get an explanation about the “bad blood” between the SFAF and Different Spokes in the future interview with Jim King.]

AM: Yeah, well I know that [laughs]—Tom was my partner for several years. Did you know that?

MJ: No, I didn’t know that.

AM: Yeah, he and I got together in ’89. So Bob was dying. We were dating when Bob was dying and in fact I remember Harry and Jean, Bob’s parents, came up from San Diego to take care of him, and it was in that building on 14th Street, and Tom was often over there with them. Little did I know that one of the reasons why he liked to go there was that both he and Jean were “ex-smokers” and they were smoking up a storm there because they were so stressed [laughs]!

MJ: There were quite a few “ex-smokers” who smoked.

AM: Yeah, I noticed that there were a whole lot of people in the club who smoked, like Mark Reverdy and Dennis [Westler] and Luis [Dufau]. Luis smoked a lot! And these are all strong riders! It was totally freaking me out. I remember ending a ride in Orinda and they all went to their cars and whipped out cigarettes and started smoking [laughs].

MJ: Going back to BAT ’86 briefly, like I was saying about transition between Bob and me on the first one and Tom and Jim King for the second one, I just remember emotionally and it really wasn’t a big departure for us to say, “You guys do it, it’s fine with us.” It took a lot of energy to pull the first one off and it was gonna take a lot of energy to do it again, a second time, because now we were on a roll. We had to do everything the Foundation did, part of Saturday and all of Sunday. It probably changed a little bit. I don’t know if we did the overnight thing on Sunday. [AM: Subsequent BATs were loop rides starting in the Castro.] I don’t think I rode it that year. I think in fact ’85, the first one, was the only one I actually rode. So there was a pretty quick transition in the organization of the Different Spokes Bike-A-Thon.

AM: Well, actually Jim King is on my list of people to reach out to. I originally was going to interview him as part of this because he was in the first BAT as well. But he was also the BAT Coordinator for the second BAT and I wanted to talk to him since he had been involved in both, what that was like to change from being a rider to being one of the principal organizers of that ride. But that’ll be another day.

MJ: Also he should have a really good recollection of how it transitioned from the first year to the second year organization-wise ‘cause I just don’t remember. It wasn’t that it was a bad episode or anything. I just remember kind of going, “Hey you guys have it”, y’know it was one of those things…”be my guest”. So yeah, see what Jim can tell you about that.

AM: What kind of a cyclist were you before you did the BAT? I know you were into bike touring ‘cause you led several tours and it sounds like you were into solo bike riding before you joined the club.

MJ: I was into solo bike riding before and I remember loving long distance cycling. And now the bike club gave me the reason to plan longer trips like the Guerneville ride, which was the longest, and then things like the Apple Blossom, which were outside of the City or Marin. I tried to pull people up into Sonoma County because I loved Sonoma County and so I was organizing numerous rides up there, I can remember, and down the Peninsula too somewhat. I loved going across the bridge on the bike and maybe taking the boat back, that kind of thing.

AM: In the early days of the club there were some pretty hardcore bike tourists, Bob Krumm, Shay Huston. There were some people who really liked to go overnight. They went to Pigeon Point, Tomales Bay, there were these places they liked to do these overnighters.

MJ: Yeah, I remember.

AM: Were you that kind of a cyclist too? Did you like to camp?

MJ: I did and I had the equipment. Like I said we were all camping at Fife’s on the first Fife’s trip up. That was all camping always. I remember Bob Krumm’s Pigeon Point overnighter. I remember doing that ride. I have photos of that one. Occasionally there were others but I don’t really remember many. Oh, I organized trips to Yosemite, Lake Tahoe with the club.

AM: Oh. I know there was the Lake Tahoe Spectacular. I thought Derek organized that. Was that you?

MJ: I don’t know if he did the first one of if I did the first one. But it probably became one of the annual events.

AM: It did.

MJ: Like Guerneville. I remember doing Yosemite a couple of times and so on.

AM: I remember Derek making a comment to me that the house that we used, the octagon house near Carnelian Bay, that he found that through the Sierra Club or through connections to the Sierra Club. So I just presumed that he had organized the first one but maybe not.

MJ (r) with Bob Munk (l), 1985 Lake Tahoe Spectacular Weekend

MJ: Yeah, I don’t remember that. I remember cycling on that ride but I don’t remember if I organized it. It could very well have been Derek. [AM: Derek organized the first “Lake Tahoe Weekend Spectacular held on September 27-29, 1985.] But I do remember I organized one or more Yosemite Valley rides. We would cycle up from probably from Mariposa or something like that. We went right up to the entrance of the park and then we’d stay—I don’t remember what the overnight accommodations were. I don’t think we were camping. It probably was Curry Village or something.

AM: Yeah, there are many places in the Valley, you can stay in the campgrounds, you can stay at Yosemite Lodge, you can stay in Curry Village. There are a bunch of options of where to stay.

MJ: Right. We just didn’t always have a lot of money, so I don’t know. I don’t recall where we spent the nights on those trips. Then I did three very long distance rides. The first one was Cape Cod and that one was ’84 and Bike-A-Thon was ’85, and ’86 was Expo ’86 in Vancouver. We cycled from Seattle to Vancouver and back. And then the last one I did was the year after in ’87 and that was the upper New England foliage ride.

AM: Right. I’m pretty sure Derek was on those rides.

MJ: He was on all three of them. He was the only one who was on all three.

AIDS AND THE CLUB

AM: Did you know anyone personally who had AIDS before you did the BAT?

MJ: Gosh, the first person I know who had AIDS and who died of AIDS was in our bike club, and you’d know his name too.

AM: Jerry Basso, was it Jerry Basso?

MJ: No, oh poor Jerry, we were such good friends. Um no, it was before him and I have a picture of him at one of the- I had his name in my head a couple of weeks ago. But anyways he was at one of the Pride parades. I have a photograph-

AM: Oh, Hal Baughman!

MJ: Hal Baughman, yes.

AM: Marian the librarian! [AM: Hal was the club librarian.]

MJ: I didn’t know him by “Marian the librarian” but I do remember he was the first person I knew who died from AIDS, probably the first person I knew who had it. Hal Baughman, he smoked too.

AM: Yes, he did!

MJ: Oh dear!

AM: Yeah, I thought of Jerry first because he was one of the first people I met in the club and I rode a fair amount with him and he just vanished. And the rumors were circulating. And then he reappeared and he mentioned that he was having vision problems and it was hard for him to ride and then he disappeared again and we never saw him again. And the next thing I knew- in a matter of two months I had heard he had died. It was really fast.

Jerry Basso (left) with Derek Liecty (right) at 1984 Gay Pride.

MJ: It happened really fast. He and I were very close. Like you said he vanished from the scene. I also heard his family did not want- they didn’t want to know about it. It was a bad family scene going on there.

AM: Exactly. Yeah, I’ve heard that too. Yeah, I heard that they refused to acknowledge or didn’t want to acknowledge that he had AIDS.

MJ: There was so many in the club— it may have been the time that the Quilt was happening and we wanted to do the quilt and they [Jerry’s family] said, “No, no, it was nothing”.

Hal Baughman with broken leg on back of the DSSF “float” at 1983 Pride Parade.

AM: I had forgotten about Hal. I have this picture in my mind of him with a broken leg on Richard Palmer’s pickup truck at the Pride Parade.

MJ: Right. Right, I’ve got that Polaroid. And I scanned that Polaroid again recently with all those films. Yeah, he was on the back of Dick Palmer’s truck.

AM: Did that in any way affect your decision to participate? I guess you had this ulterior motive which was to get more members in the club and I’m wondering to what extent your experience of AIDS in the community informed your decision to participate in BAT.

MJ: You were there and you remember how politically charged the whole thing was then and we were still in the middle of discovering what AIDS was all about. I don’t even think that at the time of the BAT it was confirmed how it was transmitted. So there was a lot of stuff up in the air and all we knew was we were young kids looking at weekly obituaries every week, of multiple people our age dying. Looking back it all these years later, so much of it was traumatic for so many people including myself. It’s just that we were so numb to it at the time. There were so many people dropping at the time that we were just all trying to do whatever we could. We didn’t have a lot of money to donate to these things. That wasn’t up to us to donate money to the Foundation, that was up to the rich people who they knew, who their board would snag for cash. Well, we would do things like volunteer for anything we could, and so I think that the BAT may have been part of our- gosh, what can I say? our San Francisco DNA. It just grew into us. And AIDS was a daily routine: AIDS, AIDS, AIDS all the time. I don’t think it was even known as HIV at the time. It was all AIDS-this-and-AIDS-that. You know, it was shellacking our community. So we were very honored, we were quite honored to be actually approached by the Foundation to take part in this activity that they came up with. This was their idea. I read in the story again in the BAR before I talked to you today how Ricky Johnson had the idea and approached the Foundation with it, and the Foundation told him go ahead, you put it together, and we’ll back it. And that’s when Ken Jones got involved as the volunteer coordinator for the Foundation and the two of them were the ones who we would approach with whatever we needed to make it happen.

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE RIDE

AM: Okay. Now onto the second part about the day of the ride. What sticks in your memory as memorable about that day?

MJ (l) and Bob Humason (r) gathering pledge forms at the start.

MJ: It was a chilly morning, as usual a San Francisco foggy morning in the Castro. I remember being at Hibernia Beach looking up the road to the intersection, 17th, and seeing a huge crowd of people at whatever time it was, 7:30 in the morning, quarter of 8, and I was so proud and I remember hugging Bob and I said, “Look, this thing is really happening!” [AM: The official start time was 6:30 AM.] It wasn’t just the riders assembling, it was all this publicity and all these fancy people like politicians. There’s a pretty picture of Supervisor Louise Renne, who came down to wish us well. There were other people too who just came down to be part of the story. That’s my recollection: the Foundation got on the megaphone, there were the cyclists at the bottom of Castro and 18th by Hibernia Beach, we were kinda all got into a big mass and then we all took off and of course you go up that hill at Divisadero and everybody thins out right there.

AM: Yeah, steep!

MJ: It’s kinda steep. I just remember there being a lot of people and it wasn’t just riders. It was very exciting. Very exciting. And I really believed that Bob and I felt that it was going to be a success right then and there.

AM: Of course people spread out and rode at whatever pace they ride. Did you ride with anybody or did you end up riding by yourself?

MJ: I don’t recall. I’m someone who would always go my own pace. I might overtake somebody or pair up with somebody. But all I remember is checking in at each of the stops to make sure that everyone had what they needed and I remember spending a little time at two or three vans. There were vans set up with water and bananas and whatever we needed back then. And I remember spending a little extra time at those places to connect with the Foundation people and to make sure, just to check in with them because they had no clue what was going on. They didn’t have an idea what this was all about. They didn’t know what a bike ride with 60-some odd people going a hundred miles was going to be all about. We did. But they had no idea.

AM: Okay. I know that Tom Walther and Jim King rode together because Tom had told me that they were concerned that they were lagging and that Gene was gonna pass them. [laughs]

MJ: [laughs] That was not gonna happen!

AM: Yeah, so they hurried up and they got to Guerneville just before Gene got there!

MJ: Well, I think Gene got there after dark, if I’m not mistaken.

AM: I don’t know what time he arrived there but I know he was the last person. [laughs]

Gene Howard, last finisher at the first Bike-A-Thon 1985

MJ: He was the last person. I think it was about like 6:30 and I do remember that we were all concerned because it was dark and they were following him with headlights on. Yes, they knew where he was. They knew where every one of us was. And of course the sag wagons were following behind the last person. Gene ended up being the last person and somewhere around Bodega or maybe even closer to Guerneville Road or River Road, they escorted him up all the way with headlights because it was dark.

AM: Yeah, and it’s a dangerous road too.

MJ: Yeah yeah and we were all waiting for him. Everybody who rode was at Molly Brown’s hanging on. They had food for us. We were eating like crazy and we all knew that Gene was the last one. Somehow we got word and we just were in utter anticipation of welcoming Gene home and boy, I’ll never forget the look on his face.

AM: I’m sure it was the longest ride he had ever done.

MJ: He thought everyone was gonna be gone by the time he arrived!

AM: Was that a hard ride for you or was it just a walk in the park? What kind of a ride was that for you?

MJ: That ride was always long for me but I would always pace myself real well. I love that ride. I absolutely love cycling Route One and all that stuff, going up into the Headlands and coming down to Bolinas and all that. I loved that ride and so I would always get excited doing that. Now it’s a very long ride and I remember having to pace myself because I didn’t want to burn out and have someone drive me the rest of the way. I’ve never had that happen. But no, I loved that ride.

AM: Do you remember arriving at Molly Brown’s? What was that like?

MJ: Yes, I remember it being late afternoon, I remember it being 5 o’clock. I was not the first in nor anything close to it. [AM: Bruce Matasci was likely the first person.] I wouldn’t be anyway being on my own. I was trying to make sure everyone was doing well. So I would fall back, hang out with the vans, I would then catch up, I would then cycle with another group of people. It was kind of like I was being a den mother. So I arrived there I believe it was around 5 o’clock. It wasn’t dark. It wasn’t quite dark yet but it was the end of the afternoon and I just remember everyone there cheering everyone who arrived. Anyone who came up on a bicycle into Molly Brown’s there was cheering and then the next person there would be more cheering. It was a real social event at the end. Again the Foundation had set up lots of food for us to eat so basically we were having dinner. There was lots of food there and that was going to be food for the day. So they fed us at Molly Brown’s if I remember correctly, we picked our places to go to. I remember that Bob Humason and I, we tried to get one of the “good” places. We had heard that the Elfen Lodge was a little ways up into the mountain but it was a really nice spot. So we were able to get one of the spots up there. I have just a couple of photos of us hanging around the table and eating breakfast or whatever, coffee and donuts or something. And then [the next day] we all got our act together and headed down to Molly’s again for the volunteer appreciation event. [AM: MJ and I have had a discussion subsequent to this interview and we now believe the BAR article about the event was correct and the Sunday event was held at the Woods, not Molly Brown’s.]

SUNDAY

AM: So on Sunday what was that like, the experience of that ceremony?

MJ: Well it was a lot of fun. I know we were all hanging around in our skivvies, laying on blankets and sheets and we were just teaming up with our best pals. I’m sure I’m on a blanket with Jerry Basso and Bobby and Kevin Anderson and a few others. It was a very leisurely event. I think there were comedians-

AM: Oh, there was a program?

MJ: Yes, there was a program. This was all done by the Foundation. They had an event planned for us. Oh yeah, this was not just gathering for iced tea or whatever, hanging out with each other. No, there was an event, a schedule going on all day. I remember the AIDS Foundation was very appreciative of what we had done, and they were giving us a lot of thanks. So I remember the event being a lot of fun. We were all real happy that we didn’t have to get on our bikes again that day. What we had done the day before was plenty and we were looking forward to just hanging out with each other. There was a lot of laughing and a lot of fun.

GETTING PLEDGES

AM: What about fundraising? Nobody likes to do it. What was that experience like for you?

MJ: I really wasn’t into it either, to be honest. I wasn’t a big fan of it. So I had a handful of pledges from just people I knew. I didn’t really go out and solicit pledges from stores or other strangers. So no, it was very casual. I was busy enough that I didn’t want to go out and get more pledges too. I think Tom Walther was the top, wasn’t he?

AM: I don’t know but it wouldn’t surprise me if he had been. That would very much fit in with Tom’s ability to approach anybody and speak to them.

MJ: Here it is, Tony, the four top getters were Craig Schaffert for $2,230; BJ Irwin, $1,810; Tom Walther was $1,480 and Ron Henderson, $1365. I probably had a couple hundred.

AM: Tom had a lot of chutzpah. He would approach anybody.

MJ: He had a way of selling it!

AM: Yeah, very much so and he was very personable. It would have been very hard to say no to him.

MJ: He had a charming smile, I loved talking to him. He was a good bicyclist and good friend to be with. I enjoyed my time with him.

IMPACT OF BAT

AM: How did the Bike-A-Thon affect you? Do you feel in some way the BAT affected your subsequent life? Or you just went back to your regular life and it was just another thing that you did? Or did it somehow lodge in your brain somewhere that you were a changed person?

MJ: Yes. The answer to all that is yes and I’ll tell you what: it started when I first began with the club. Joining Different Spokes and being part of a group of people was a real game changer for me personally, and BAT was one of these culminations of self-confidence, knowing that there was self-worth in there somewhere, that I could actually pull this thing off. I didn’t doubt that this would be something that I could do. But after it was all over I really felt like, “Oh that was pretty good!” I was part of an organization, two organizations—that was a part of it—that not only raised a bunch of money for a great cause but we safely pulled off an event where no one got hurt.

AM: Yeah, that’s big.

MJ: And it could have been fraught with disaster. That hundred miles: no shoulders, creepy people, you name it. There could have been one disaster. One would have been too many. It’s one thing bringing a group of six or eight or ten people up to Fife’s for a camping trip or a Guerneville weekend trip. But it’s another for a rambling 62 riders and all the support stuff. And so if it affected my life in any way I would really attribute that to Different Spokes. Being part of that club was really, really important for me personally and it was a real confidence booster because I had never done anything like that in my life. I had never been a part of a group like that.

It was a good group of people in that club. There were very few- I didn’t feel there were a lot ego problems. When we were cycling everyone seemed to be on the same level even though, yeah sure, there were some people who could cycle faster than others. But other than that we were doing that 50% for the social and 50% for the exercise, the activity itself, bicycling. We weren’t showing off fancy bikes or fancy bike clothes. It was in the early days and those things barely existed. Plus we had our own fashion styles anyway. I just remember it being a real pleasant experience and I looked forward to each weekend’s bike ride and I tried to do as many as I possibly could when I was deeply involved in the club.

AM: You know Karry Kelley was pretty involved and he joined the club before I did or at least showed up on rides before I did and was pretty involved for roughly the same period that I was there in the late ’80s and early ‘90s and then he got a husband and moved to Alameda and had kids and dropped out of the club. Strangely enough when we led that Apple Blossom ride in 2012 he out of the absolute blue showed up. Like, dude where have you been all this time! He showed up on his ancient Klein bicycle. And it was, God, I missed you! Where have you been? That ride was over and he vanished again and just before or during the Pandemic he showed up. He was going through a divorce from his husband and he rejoined the club. Coincidentally in 2022 we put on the 40th anniversary banquet and I had this video that Tom had—I really don’t know the history of this video. But it’s a video of the ’89 BAT. I think it was made as a PR thing. In any case I rediscovered it in my pile of crap down in the storage room and I got it digitized.

MJ: Wow, that must be something to see!

AM: If you want watch it, it’s up on the Web. I can send you the URL too. It’s in our Flickr account and it’s a video up there. Anyway I revealed that video at the 40th banquet and Karry was there. And his reaction- he was just emotionally struck by this video because all these people that he knew who had died were in the video. Bob was in the video, Tom Walther was in the video…and I’m in the video too, which I thought, ”Really?!?” Anyway, he talked about the club being really important to him because he was coming out at that time and he said it was an important part of his social development to be involved with the club at that point and I could only nod and say I totally understand what you’re saying. I mean it was really true for me too. It was discovering a family of like-meets-like and it had that impact that here it is more than 40 years later and I’m still a member of the club, still involved in the club. I’m trying to make sure it survives. That’s always the issue that’s been on my mind is: can this club survive? People have to love it and put energy into it to make it continue.

MJ: You have to evangelize right from the very beginning.

AM: At this point there is a new cohort of people who have those feelings for the club. I think there’s a reasonable chance it will survive another ten years.

MJ: That’s good to hear. Well, maybe I’ll come to the 50th anniversary of the BAT!

AM: Well, we’re all going to be pretty decrepit, I’ll tell you!

MJ: Yeah, I’m not going to promise anything!