Above: Ken Russell receives his belated BR&K Bike Hero prize, a Phat Cycles Chopper. Ken, left, is personally presented with his Chopper by Gary Silva, who designed the machine. BR&K Contributing Editor Keith Moss is seen behind Gary, in Hollywood, Fl, during Gary's Dealer Tour of the USA. |
Return Of The Hero: In Which The Great Ken Russell/Reecycles Mystery Is Solved! |
One of the seminal events in the history of BikeRod&Kustom was when we first heard from Ken Russell, who was running an operation with his sons in Longview, WA, called Reecycles. He sent us photos of their amazing KustomBikes, along with press clippings to do with their civic and charitable activities. It was such a fantastic story that we told it in the form of a pastiche of Broadway Musicals called "The Bicycle Man: the musical", and it worked perfectly in that form. Along with portfolios of their stretched cruisers and moto-kustoms, we ran separate pieces on their Yellowbike and Earn-a-Bike, Learn-a-Bike programs. It was the first time we had devoted more than one page to any subject, and the reader reaction was most gratifying. A message from Fred Hajny summed it up nicely: "Where do you find these people?" I replied that they just walk through the door, so to speak I knew at that point that BR&K had arrived, as we no longer had to scrape and research to come up with great bikes for the gallery, and interesting stories from people. |
Above: Ken Russell receives his belated BR&K Bike Hero prize, a Phat Cycles Chopper. Ken, left, is personally presented with his Chopper by Gary Silva, who designed the machine. BR&K Contributing Editor Keith Moss is seen behind Gary, in Hollywood, Fl, during Gary's Dealer Tour of the USA. |
The Reecycles story just kept on being interesting: Due to the death of their landlord, the Russells lost the shop building they had brought back from dereliction. Then they found another place- a former drive-in theater, on a temporary basis; but they were looking forward to having fun with it. On 4/24/99, Ken wrote that they had been approached by a Taiwanese manufacturer about a deal to use their stretch moto designs for a product line, and they were quite excited about the prospect. Shortly thereafter, we heard from Ken that he was coming east to visit his mother in Boston, and he was planning to come to NYC for a visit at BR&K World HQ. He never arrived. After a while, we began to be concerned. E-messages bounced back, and the Reecycles phone line was disconnected. It was as though the Russells had vanished from the face of the earth. We began to get messages from people wanting bikes made, and from people wanting to donate piles of bikes for the Reecycles programs. We had no information to give them- until now. We recently heard from Ken Russell again. He hadn't been chained to a drawing board in a Taiwanese dungeon after all. (That was one of our more interesting theories.) As Ken was the inspiration for our Bike Hero Award, we decided to belatedly present him with with it, and use the accompanying interview to get the story as to what happened to him, and his plans for the future of Reecycles. B I K E H E R O K E N R U S S E L L : T H E I N T E R V I E W Q: Welcome back Ken! So, what happened? And where have you been? A: My sons closed down the Reecycles shop while I was back in Boston taking care of my ailing mother in 1999, she passed away last year on the 8th of October. My sons have been in school getting certified as welders, and will graduate at the end of this quarter. I have been at a loss since then,and am now just getting back to be "almost normal"; HA!; I feel good about you still being there and doing your thing with bikes. To answer your question, I will be going to Miami, where I was invited to stay with a friend for as long as I want. He has offered me work and a place to live and that sounds good to me right now. I would love to open a shop again and work with the kids; they can always learn something from an old-timer like me. I should be here in Washington (state) for another two or three weeks and then on to Miami. I have not forgotten all of the great things we were doing back then, and am looking forward to the time when we will once again be creating eye stoppers!!! Q: Ken, BR&K is for and about KustomBike designers. Whether most of us admit it or not, there's always a fantasy lurking there, about being discovered by a bike manufacturer and becoming the next Aaron Bethlenfalvy, Gary Silva, or Robert Egger. We presume that the Asian manufacturing deal went south, as do so many things like that, which seem too good to be true at the time. But, one always has hopes. What can you tell us about the history of that deal? A: To answer about the "deal" with the Koreans; My sons and I went to Salt Lake to bring and show our motorized bike to a company that was manufacturing and selling motorized scooters, so it could be test driven and looked at from one end to the other. We were asked if we would like to sell the prototype or if we would like to own part of the bike once it was in production, if we sold it we would be paid a lump sum on the spot of x amount of dollars and that would be the end of it, BUT if we were to give them the bike we would receive xxx amount of dollars every time the bikes were produced. Our labor of producing the prototype would be our investment and they would put up the cost of having the bike manufactured in Korea. Supposedly there was going to be a bike built of aluminum and we would get this bike to put it through a series of rigorous test to check out its durability and road-worthiness and to make any changes we deemed necessary. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months etc. then came the punch- Salt lake had decided that they wanted twenty-five thousand U.S. DOLLARS from us to do the tooling of the first bike or it was no deal!!!!! What a letdown! We had heard all the wonderful stories of how rich we would be and that they would take care of us. My main concern at the time was the health of my mother;I gave up the hopes, wishes, and dreams and paid attention to the most important thing in my life at that time, My Mother. I got to spend one more year of my life taking care of her, being with her and enjoing her. and that was more valuable than all the money that could have come from Salt Lake or the Koreans. My mom lived another year after I left and We lost her on October the 8th 2000. Q: Our condolences to you and your family, Ken. We've been there. You're certainly in a good location for cycle action now. What about your sons? When they get their welding certifications, are there any plans for their joining you in Florida; or are they settled into the NorthWest? A: Tim and Chris are going to graduate in April from Lower Columbia College there in Longview, Wa, and their intention is to come to Florida for work. It seems as though all the jobs are shifting from the Northwest to the Florida area. We have talked about the possibilities of another Reecycles and dreams of using our passions once again. I,in the meantime, am just working and waiting for something to happen. I find myself looking around every day in expectation, of what, I don't know, YET! When I see it I'll know. Something good is going to happen! Q: BR&K's original coverage of Reecycles was based upon second-hand information, pretty much. It was done from newspaper clippings and the like. As it appeared in BR&K, the saga was presented as the synopsis of a Broadway Musical. Cute, but not exactly hard-edged journalism. If it's not too much trouble, our readership having never seen the newspaper clips, could you tell us, briefly, how it actually came about, with an approximate timeline of the events? A: As far as a time-line for Reecycles, it began for me as a young boy with no money and a curiosity to see if I could make something rideable out of the junque that was hanging in and around my grandmother's garage, hence the first encounter with skip-tooth chain and what we now know as BMX chain; what a dilemma for a young boy with no knowledge of any kind. Figuring out how to get the chains apart and then get them back together again- that they don't just fall apart and to have them the right length and the sprockets had to be the same type of teeth, limited by the tools I had available to me at the time and the parts that I could put together, left hand threads-right hand threads, who would have ever thought that someone would put one pedal on the opposite way of the other. WOW! Such great challenges for a young boy of nine years old. Some forty years later: Spring of 1996 I was visiting my children in Longview, Washington and involved in a production of the play Oedipus the King at the local community college and met a wonderful lady who had three children. We began to live together and I became Mr. Mom. I took care of Ryan-16 yrs. old (with Down syndrome), Brody-7 yrs. and Cohby-5 yrs. Lynda worked at an office as manager for a family-owned business. One day the boys and I took a trip to the local dump to discard some unwanted junque from spring cleaning, (which by the way is a very hard thing for me to do) when we were at the dump the boys and I did what every young boy wants to do, EXPLORE! While in this state of exploration we came across the most beautiful pile of old used bicycles, the boys with their walking sticks or poking sticks were pointing out different bicycles in the pile and asking questions about them, we had a great time discusing the diffrent types and styles of bikes, THEN! came up the conversation about CHOPPERS. Well, once we got into that conversation it wasn't long before we were putting that pile of old bikes in our pickup truck to take them home and make something, anything, our own design created by us from junque. We were on our way to REECYCLES. We started in Lynda's one-car garage and it wasn't long before we had to take stuff outside so we could work. By fall we had to rent a shop to fit all the bikes and tools we had accumulated over the summer. My sons, Tim and Chris, came to work with us from the beginning, when they saw the pile of bikes we brought home from the dump. ( I'm sure the conversation between them was "Dad's gone krazy again; let's join in and keep him out of trouble" Hah!). To Be Continued... |
BikeRod&Kustom Update Interview by Jim Wilson |
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