If you ride with Chuck Schmidt and friends, it's best to bring a bicycle built before Greg LeMond won the Tour de France.
"Anything before click shifting or click-in pedals," Schmidt says, explaining the accepted ground rules for the small group of retro-bike fanatics who meet every first Sunday of the month at the Rose Bowl.
It's not that the last good bicycle was made in the mid-'80s. And Schmidt, a graphic designer and teacher, quickly dispels the notion that he's a Luddite. But to his artistically tuned eye, and to the hearts, legs and bottoms of an increasing number of cycling fans, something got lost in the sprint toward the 16-pound bicycle that began roughly when LeMond lifted his arms on the Champs-Elysees.
With even the storied Italian frame makers -- Faliero Masi, Ugo De Rosa, Ernesto Colnago -- giving in to aluminum, carbon and titanium frames, the craft of welding steel-alloy tubes into ornately cut lugs to form the ruggedly elegant geometry of a bicycle frame survives mostly in a niche of custom frame builders.
But there is more than grumpy nostalgia for bygone days driving serious racers back to their first love. "The thing that has people coming back to lugged-steel frames is that they ride nice, they look neat," says Schmidt. And for all but the most serious riders, Schmidt insists, a few extra pounds of bicycle frame don't make much difference.
A robust 60-year-old with a tanned Jack La Lanne build and youthful grin, Schmidt often chooses to lead the Sunday ride on his fixed-gear 1959 Mercian, a delightfully spare bike with no derailleur or brakes. He restored the Key-lime frame and outfitted it with rare GB parts made by Gerald Burgess, a postwar British manufacturer whose family now makes furniture.
By coincidence, Greg Townsend, 45, pulls up with a red Mercian that he dates to 1962 or 1963. A skeptical Schmidt silently looks it over, then suggests it's from the 1970s -- a suspicion confirmed when Townsend flips it over and finds a 73 in the serial number.
Townsend, who still races on a thoroughly modern bike, says he fell in with the retro crowd by accident of time. "It turns out that I just got old and still have lots of parts," he explains.
Another rider interrupts: "Gosh, those hubs are great, are they Campagnolo?"
"No, they're Airlites," Townsend says.
A British transplant who grew up in the Midwest, he recalls going to races where riders who had been extras in the 1979 movie "Breaking Away" were introduced at the starting line as if they were stars.
