Eric Boutte and I had no idea what we were getting into one day in the Spring of 1978 when we visited a small but new bike shop near my house. The bike shop was called the Recycled Bicycle, and Eric and I really hit it off with Don Cage, its very overweight proprietor. He said that he was wondering if we could help him find a couple of guys who could run his store. When Eric's eyes met mine, it was as if each of us had said, "Well, why the hell not? Let's go for it!" We were both going to reach the ripe old age of 17 that summer, and we felt that we were the right couple of guys being sought by Mr. Cage.
As soon as the school year was finished, we were on full-time. Towards the end of the first full day, Don asked Eric and I about our bike racing, and then told us some of his own bike racing exploits from the early 70's including a placing at the Flying Wheels Criterium. Being a couple of 140 pound pencil-necks, it was hard for Eric and I to imagine this 350 pound guy ever riding a bike. Two days later, Don announced that he was going to the hospital for an extended period of time. He said that he had gotten bitten by a mosquito, then had gone wading in Oakland's brackish Lake Temescal, and had subsequently gotten blood poisoning. He also expressed full faith and confidence in our abilities to manage the store in his absence. The next week, he called us from the hospital, and after making sure that all was well with the shop, he said "The nurses here are taking really, really good care of me. I think you know what I mean." We weren't really sure just what he meant but answered in agreement.
As the weeks wore on, we found that Don had left a mind boggling array of creditors in the dust. Surely, a guy nice enough to trust a couple of teenagers with his store would never do such a thing! Don became incommunicado, so we began paying the store's bills out of its receipts. This was becoming an education as more and more of Don's former business acquaintances streamed by to complain about being stiffed by him. Eric and I continued to be his loyal servants, even when the police came by to "inventory some of the bikes" (read: search for stolen property).
In spite of these stresses, Eric and I had a great time that summer. We treated our customers very well, and established a clientele with repeat business. We made the shop look really nice (Eric had more of a knack for aesthetics than I), got it well organized so that we could be productive, and even built a really cool shop bike out of junk box parts. The bike shop didn't have a bathroom, so you can guess what we did with our used milk cartons. The strangest darn thing was that if we put the (refilled) milk cartons just outside the front door as we left for the day, by the next morning, the cartons would be gone, not just kicked down the street, but truly gone! Eric and I really had a lot in common; we enjoyed the same music (that summer Joe Walsh sang "I live in hotels and tear up the walls..."), loved everything to do with bikes, were both born in June of 1961, we even had short girlfriends with large breasts!
Sadly, all good things must come to an end. September brought bad weather, school, and a gentle man named Richard Marsh bought the bike shop from Don Cage. Richard couldn't afford to have any employees, was new to bicycles, lacked our boyish enthusiasm, but decided to go it alone. The result was predictable, and sadly, the Recycled Bicycle was no more.