VCU news

By Brian McNeill

While studying English at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond resident Jesse McCauley rode his bicycle all over the city and commuted back and forth to his job at Diversity Thrift, as his car at the time frequently broke down.

"After one trip to [to the bike repair shop], I realized I wasn't going to be able to afford to keep my bicycle going if I was going to ride it every day," McCauley said. "I saw a lot of things get thrown away, and I just started keeping an eye out for bicycles and parts I could use to repair my bike."

I've always loved bicycles. There's almost nothing about them that I don't really enjoy.

Then, one day, McCauley came across a 1960s-era Raleigh three-speed bicycle and he decided that he couldn't let it go to scrap.

"It was just a little bit too small for me, but was in phenomenal condition under many, many layers of grease and gross," he recalled. "That was the first bicycle that I spent probably five or six hours on, cleaning it up, degreasing, removing all the crap and stuff. Underneath, I found a really nice bicycle."

"Since then," he said, "I've never really stopped looking for bicycles out in the world."

That bike was the first of many to be repaired in McCauley's garage, and now, 10 years later, McCauley has gained a reputation across Richmond as the go-to guy for the restoration of antique, rare and fascinating bicycles.

"I've always loved bicycles. There's almost nothing about them that I don't really enjoy," McCauley said. "Bicycles tap into the phenomenal history of man-made human-powered objects."

Exhibits around Richmond

As the 2015 UCI World Road Cycling Championships approach, a number of institutions around Richmond have tapped McCauley's expertise to help assemble bicycle-themed exhibits and displays.

The Branch Museum of Architecture and Design, for example, brought McCauley on as a guest curator for its current exhibit, "Balance in Motion: The Evolution of Cycling in America."

The exhibit, which runs at the center's headquarters at 2501 Monument Ave. through Oct. 18, explores the use of cycling in arts and advertising, the evolution of the bicycle in terms of materials and design, and the important role women have played in the history of the bicycle.  

As a local antique bike restorer, McCauley was a perfect fit to help the museum examine the history of bicycles dating back to the 1880s, said Marshall Dreiling, education manager at the Branch Museum of Architecture and Design. McCauley pulled together information featured in the exhibition and loaned some of the bicycles put on display.

McCauley's knowledge of bicycling history proved invaluable, Dreiling said.

"I could not have put this exhibition together without him in all honesty," Dreiling said. "He's really brought a historical knowledge of how the bike has changed over time. And he's really excited about it. To me, before this, a bike was a bike. But Jesse's excitement about bikes and how they've changed over time has been infectious and it's been just a joy to work with him."

Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden reached out to McCauley in April to see if he could fix up a Brewster 1890s lady's bicycle that had been donated by Thomas Houff, author of "On Richmond's Wheel: A Celebration of Cycling," which tells the story of the history of cycling in Richmond.

The garden was interested in acquiring a bicycle from the 1890s because the property is home to a building built in 1895 that was the home of the Lakeside Wheel Club, a gathering place for bicyclists and the epicenter of Richmond's early bicycling culture.

Houff donated a men's and a women's bicycle from that era, allowing the garden to give visitors a glimpse into the days of the Lakeside Wheel Club, said Janet Woody, librarian of Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden.

"We made an exhibit here at the garden about the Wheel Club and about the effect that bicycling had on women … it gave women freedom that they did not have prior to the advent of the safety bike, which is like the bikes that we ride today," she said. "When the safety bike came out, anybody could ride a bike. The angle of our exhibit is about the Wheel Club itself and the way that the safety bike gave women freedom."

The men's bike Houff donated was in decent shape, but the women's bike needed work, McCauley said. It was missing components and had been spray painted.

When the safety bike came out, anybody could ride a bike. The angle of our exhibit is about the Wheel Club itself and the way that the safety bike gave women freedom.

"It resembled a poorly treated modern bicycle more than what it was really was," he said. "When you're working on these bicycles, you have to account for the unknown. You don't know what you're really getting into until you actually remove the thread and see what is happening on the inside of the piece of hardware."

To get the bike into working condition, McCauley cleaned and re-greased the bike, rebuilt the front wheel, fabricated authentic handle grips, installed an 1890s bentwood chain guard, installed period iron block chain, and installed solid rubber "button" tread tires.

"Jesse fixed up the bike so it could be pushed around," Woody said. "We had an authentic costume made, using a pattern from the 1890s, and [a re-enactor] pushes the bike around the garden whenever we have a special event. She's dressed appropriately for the time period and the bike is authentic to the time period."

No stolen bikes

Over the years, McCauley's reputation as a bike repair guy has led to a number of connections with Richmond's community of "scrap men" interested in selling bikes or parts they've found.

"I've probably had 100 scrap men stop by here," he said. "Generally speaking, bicycles are worthless to scrap men. They get like 25 cents for a bike frame. But they run across them all the time because people are always throwing out bike frames. So I end up keeping in touch with a lot of these guys."

On several occasions, however, McCauley has encountered bikes that he suspects have been stolen.

"I started a Facebook group called the RVA Stolen Bicycle Forum because I found myself in a situation — so far, three times — where I've had to call the police on myself for buying a bicycle that I believe may have been stolen," he said. "At all cost, I don't want to participate in that market."

McCauley launched the forum, he said, because he wants to know if a bike is stolen if it arrives at his front door.

"If I suspect it's stolen, I end up keeping the bike until I can hear from the owner. With that forum, I've actually been able to return a bunch of bicycles to their rightful owners," he said. "I'll post a description, go to the local shops, and I've even gone so far as to pull serial numbers and call the manufacturers and distributors. That forum has about 300 members now, but that's just a tiny fraction of the people in Richmond having their bicycles stolen. So it requires a lot of communication and cooperation."

Bikes from Richmond's history

On an afternoon at McCauley's garage, which is packed high with bicycles, tools, spare tires and parts, McCauley showed off a few of the most interesting bicycles he'd recently restored.

One was a robin's egg blue 1903 Tribune that he acquired from a retired collector in Williamsburg.

"This bicycle can give you an idea of why I fell in love with this hobby," he said. "You can take something that looks like garbage and make it interesting, almost universally."

You can take something that looks like garbage and make it interesting, almost universally.

The bike's original blue color had been painted red, it was covered in grease and grime, and it looked "like it would never be a bike again."

"[Restoration] is a fascinating process because you really don't know what you're going to find," he said. "Starting at the surface, there could be any number of problems that could make it a damned project. You know, a seized bit of metal in the interior. Or even, in the case of this bicycle, it would have been very likely that the rust had eaten through the paint before it had been repainted."

But it was a fascinating find, he said, because the bike has an oddly complicated design that for some reason ignored the design efficiencies that had become standard by that time.

"These bicycles from this era are sort of a strange phenomenon because they had, by 1903, standardized a huge amount of the mechanics," he said. But companies, despite that standardization, were still exploring new methods. This bike, for instance, has a five-piece stem, which is just an unreasonably complicated design. They'd already figured out how to simplify the stem by 1903, but it was just a dig at the mechanics — it was an attempt at something strange."

McCauley also rolled out a red 1958 Newsboy Special bicycle from Pinnell's, a Harley Davidson dealership that operated on Broad Street from the 1940s through 1970s. The bike features a "badge" that designates it as a "Harley" from Pinnell's.

"This is the last generation of the Newsboy Special," McCauley said. "It was meant to be a newsboy's bike, so it has heavy duty spokes, heavy duty box bars, a heavy duty frame. It's meant to be a workhorse, to be able to carry 60 or 70 pounds of newspapers."

McCauley bought the bike out of a barn in Richmond's East End, where a tinkerer had operated a repair shop in the 1960s.

"This bicycle, really all I did was polish the chrome and take it apart and re-grease it," he said. "Overall, this bike is a survivor."

The Newsboy Special will be featured as part of an exhibit opening Aug. 27 at the Valentine called "In Gear: Richmond Cycles."

"As you can see," McCauley said, "my interest ranges from restoring turn-of-the-century bicycles to restoring the beat bicycles that you can find all across Richmond today."

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