Sheldon Brown

After graduation I spent a year at Berkshire Community College in Pittsfield. I then ran out of money and worked a series of retail jobs in Boston and Cambridge through the mid '60s.

Around 1967, I took Timothy Leary's advice and "dropped out" supporting myself driving a taxi.

I worked witht he Gene McCarthy campaign in '68, in Boston and Indianapolis, then went out to Chicago for the demonstrations centering on the Democratic National Convention...got tear gassed in the streets of Chicago along with a lot of other peaceful demonstrators.

As some of you may remember, I was always into tinkering with bicycles, and in the early '70s I turned "pro" starting with a Cambridge bike shop called the Bicycle Revival. Before long I was top mechanic there, and as the early '70s Bike Boom progressed I found myself the head mechanic for a chain of 15 Bicycle Revivals scattered around eastern Massachusetts (there was even one in Marblehead for a while.)

I joined with 4 of my Bicycle Revival colleagues to leave and start our own repair shop, the Bicycle Repair Collective, on Broadway, in Cambridge. I was there for a year or so, until I got thrown out for not being a good Communist.

I had also become interested in photography, and, being a cheapskate/tinkerer, I found tha broken cameras were cheap, and I could fix them. I went to work for S. K. Grimes Camera Repair, and worked for Steve Grimes until the mid 1980s. The camera-repair trade fell on hard times, as increasingly electronified cameras became harder to fix and cheaper to replace, so I returned to my first love, bicycles.

I worked for Wheelworks in Belmont, then later for Frank's Spoke 'n Wheel in Waltham.

In 1993 I moved to Harris Cyclery in West Newton, a mile from my Newtonville home, where I am still employed.

I also started writing for various bicycle magazines during this period. It's a funny thing, 'cause I actually flunked English in high school! My problem was terrible writers' block, due mainly to the mechanics of putting my thoughts on paper. It turned out that I was born just a bit too early...when computers and word processors became available, my writers' block disappeared since it became so easy to make corrections and modifications!

In 1979, I met Harriet Fell, a Northeastern University mathematics professor, on a Charles River Wheelmen ride. We fell in love and married in December of that year.

Our daughter Tova was born in 1981, our son George in 1983. They're both currently graduate students in mathematics, Tova at M.I.T. and George at Madison.

Both kids are doing great, Harriet and I are still very much in love, and life is good!

In the late '80s, Harriet switched from the Math department at Northeastern to the newly created College of Computer Science. One of the results of this was that I had access to computer equipment before it became widely available to the general public.

I put up a Website for Harris Cyclery in 1994, probably the second U.S. bike shop to have a Website. It started with a simple home page and half-a-dozen of my magazine articles recycled into HTML format.

Since then I've become something of a world-famous bicycle expert. There are other folks who know as much or more about bikes than I do, but I also have writing, photography and computer skills that have enabled me to share this knowledge. The fact that I was one of the first out of the gate helps too. Currently, mhy site is getting about 18,000 visitors per day.

All is not rosy with me, however, as I have recently been crippled by a mysterious neurological ailment. I can just barely walk, using a cane, and can no longer ride my bikes.