Aug
4
The Early Days: Chants, Bo Diddley, and Ms. Efficiency
Filed Under Interbike, Interbike's 25th Anniversary
If you didn’t know it, our team that puts on Interbike also produces another trade show for the retail fitness industry every year, the Health+Fitness Business Expo and Conference. Instead of bikes, the booths are filled with fitness gear like treadmills, stationary bikes and barbells. There’s actually alot of crossover with the bike industry. I actually saw Chris Kegel of the Wheel & Sprocket shops in Wisconsin sitting in on some seminars and walking the aisles yesterday. It was good to see a familiar face while here at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. HFB has kept me from posting for a little while, so I’ll try to make up for it with a good one.
Just before the 4th of July we had a post that we were able to track down the now retired founder of Interbike, Steve Ready, up in Washington State and that he was willing to share some of his memories of starting and attending Interbike 25 years ago. He’s actually a very entertaining writer and writes occasionally for a few magazines in his retirement. He’s got some great stories about the early days. The following is his letter in it’s entirety.
“Ten years after leaving and twenty-five after starting, I still miss it. I miss Interbike and all that it came to represent. I miss the industry, the travel, the sense of purpose, the excitement and even the anxiety. Most of all, I miss the people.
“When Herb Wetenkamp and I started planning the first Interbike show in 1981 we had a lot of youthful optimism, somewhat less common sense, and almost no money. The money declined at a steady rate while the optimism needle swung wildly in direct correlation to the daily output of our P.O. Box. In those days before e-mail and fax, the P.O. Box was our oracle and lifeline. Some days it would yield up good omens for the future in the form of a deposit check or two. On those blessed days we would reward ourselves by stopping at Carl’s Jr. for hamburgers on the way back to the office.
“At other times it was not so kind. One hot summer day it gave us three registered letters with similarly worded cancellation notices from our three biggest exhibitors. We didn’t have the stomach for hamburgers that day. In fact, neither one of us was man enough to face the P.O. Box again for several days. Finally, Herb, who was always the braver and more creative one, made the trip alone. He appeased the P.O. Box by uttering an elaborate chant as he approached it, then rattling the keys and dropping to his knees before opening it. There were no cancellations that day and the P.O. Box chant became an Interbike ritual. If you want to survive in the trade show business, we learned, you have to be willing to look foolish. In the years to come, fate would afford us many more opportunities to do so.
“In another spasm of creative fervor, Herb gave us the unknown show producer bag. A plain, brown paper grocery bag with two eye holes cut out and a cheesy jack-o-lantern grin drawn on it with a marking pen, the unknown show producer bag was to be carried in the producer’s briefcase and donned in case of a low attendance emergency. This was most likely to occur on a Tuesday afternoon. In those days the show opened on Sunday and closed on Tuesday. The idea was to open with a bang and try to hang on and close with something stronger than a whimper. I still have the unknown show producer bag and Lance Camisasca is welcome to borrow it, though from the looks of things, he’ll probably never need it.
“The first Interbike show took place in September of 1982 at the Las Vegas Convention Center with neither a bang nor a whimper, just a fairly steady hum of activity which trailed off by about noon on Tuesday. We sold 450 booth spaces to 135 exhibitors and dealer attendance was solid. At that time there were four other established shows for dealers to choose from, the NBDA show, The BDS Expo, The New York International Show and CABDA, so we were very grateful for their support. Our survival depended almost entirely on dealer support. The industry’s survival does too, although not everyone wants to admit it. The other four shows all took place between January and March. We positioned Interbike in the Fall, hoping that dealer input could be more meaningful earlier in the production cycle.
Our second show was somewhat bigger, 520 booths and 150 exhibitors, but we were in a larger exhibit hall and, to our astonishment, everyone thought the show had shrunk. This taught us another important lesson. In the trade show business perception trumps reality every time. A trade show is a temporary village and, like any small town, it can be a rumor mill. Over the course of three or four days the prevailing perception gains a momentum of its own and becomes the reality that will be remembered and reported.
I’m getting to an age where my own memory might be questioned, but following are a few of the more persistent memories and images that come to me as I look back on twenty-five years of Interbike. I remember the searing desert heat as MaryAnn and I drove to Las Vegas in the summer of ‘81 in my un-airconditioned VW pickup hoping to secure exhibit hall dates and room blocks for the first show. We drove most of the way with the windows open and wet towels around our necks. The ride home two days later, after securing the requisite rooms and dates, seemed a lot cooler and shorter.
I remember the empty feeling I had after selling my cherished ‘55 Chevy to pay the print bill for our first big dealer registration mailer. However, the exhilaration we all felt a few weeks later when those dealer registration cards started pouring back in, filled out in the dealers’ own handwriting, was indescribable. We handled them as if they were gold. They made it all real. They validated us. We’d count them, read them, copy them, sort them and stack them.
We hired a sweet and lovely woman, who we came to know as Ms. Efficiency to input them into our crude database. Ms. Efficiency could make the keyboard smoke with her blazing fingers. She probably typed 120 words per minute. After the first print run of badges, however, we discovered that she made about 90 mistakes per minute. Each badge showed the registrant’s first name in huge block type on the top line. Chuck Hooper, of Seattle Bike Supply, got a badge that said CHUNK. Fortunately, he has a sense of humor. I’m afraid we put it to the test more than once. Over the years we gained valuable experience. Experience, of course, is the ability to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
I remember the parties and the great entertainers like Jerry Lee Lewis, David Lindley, Bo Diddley, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and my hero, the great Merle Haggard. I’ll never forget presenting Merle with a beautiful Yeti mountain bike custom built by John Parker. John was inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame at Interbike a couple of years later.
Like a lot of the mountain bike pioneers, John was a bit of a rebel, an unconventional and independent thinker. Looking back, I believe that energy, that spirit has been behind all the best things to happen in this industry. In the seventies it was independent thinkers like Skip Hess Sr., Chuck Robinson, Scot Breithaupt and the Cook brothers, who encouraged and developed BMX. In the eighties Tom Ritchey, Gary Fisher, Mike Sinyard, Jacob Heilbron, and numerous others redefined the bicycle and the industry by bringing their entrepreneurial, engineering and design talents to bear on the mountain bike. From the mid nineties to the present a prodigiously courageous and talented former triathlete from Texas showed us that it’s “Not About The Bike.” It’s not, and it never really was. It’s about the people, and there has never been an industry comprised of a finer group of men and women than ours. In our industry, the name on the badge is very often the same as the name on the product. That encourages a deep and personal commitment, whether you?e Joe Breeze or Yoshi Shimano.
Early on, Kathy Newkirk said… “When people return to their stores after Interbike, we want them to feel a little better about the business they’ve chosen to be in.” Twenty-five years after kneeling before the P.O. Box, I’m still grateful to have been in the bicycle business. And it is immensely satisfying to know that Interbike still brings all those great people together every year.
Steve Ready
Retired
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