There are cleaner origin stories than Paul Brodie’s. More planned ones, too.
His starts with a cab.
“I was driving a cab from 79 to 83,” Brodie said. “When I started, I only thought I’d drive a cab for six months and it’s one of those things that you kind of get hooked into because it’s quite a bit of freedom once you’re in the car.”
Then a trip to a bike shop changed everything.
“I bought a bicycle and I went back to the bike shop to get some parts and no one was at the counter so I left,” he said. The owner stopped him on the way out. Brodie told him the shop needed to hire somebody. “So I got hired.”
That job at The Peddler on Broadway turned him into what he calls the handyman in the shop. He assembled cheap bikes, made ads and gradually drifted into the back rooms where a young company called Rocky Mountain was renting space.
That was where things got interesting.
Learning the hard way
Rocky had acquired a framebuilding operation in Steveston, but they needed a painter. Brodie got the job, then sensed another opening.
“I convinced them to hire me as the mountain bike frame builder,” he said.
There was one problem. He had never built a frame.
And the man already there was not interested in helping.
“The first thing Derek Bailey says to me is I’m not gonna show you anything,” Brodie said. “I mean there was no internet then. There was no framebuilding schools.”
Instead, he went to the library, looked for books and more or less taught himself. That willingness to figure things out on the fly would define pretty much everything that came after.
The bike that started it
Brodie still remembers the moment mountain bikes first grabbed him. A red Ritchey Team Comp rolled into the shop and stopped him cold.
“It had the bilaminate lugs and it was, I couldn’t believe that someone had made a frame and fork and handlebar so beautiful,” he said. “It was incredible, you know, for me looking at it. I just couldn’t stop looking at it.”
He couldn’t afford one, so he made his own.
“I went to the dumpster behind the bicycle shop and I pulled out a 25 inch Sakai road bike frame,” he said. “I took it home to my shop because I had oxyacetylene and basic hand tools and I cut it all up and I made my own version of a mountain bike.”
It was far from perfect.
“The head angle was too steep and the bottom bracket was too low,” he said.
But it…
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