I’m planning on building a trials course in my backyard. Don’t forget I have a dead end to annex. Blue Mountain Preserve is 1500 acres and is only two blocks away, but you know me, I’m a lazy slacker.
My Ti IBIS is likely a one-off prototype. Understand that Gary Helfrick was at IBIS at the time, and he is regarded of The Godfather of Titanium Bikes who gave away a full scholarship at MIT to go on the road with Aerosmith to do “sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
Next step was work at Fat Chance building mountain bikes, and then evolving into a Merlyn partnership to make what were the best Ti bikes of the day.
Then Gary went to work for/with IBIS To further the art of building titanium bikes. My bike features “Moron” tubing which is internally butted titanium tubing. This development was used on a bike known as the “Mojo” which is still regarded very highly, and my Ti IBIS basically utilized this development, but for a different style of bike that preceded the Mojo.
Don’t get confused, the name Mojo was used for a carbon fiber full suspension bike that IBIS created that is still available today.
Labor Day makes me think about being retired, the meaning of work which is now my past, and how did a misfit like me kinda adapt and fit in.
I know I have disappointed a lot of people who saw great promise in me. In college I stood out and since I was a liberal arts major all my professors from different disciplines tried to recruit me into majoring in their programs. Truth be told I was drawn into the art department because I found the girls more interesting. Know that I like/love crazy women for some reason.
When I was 15-16 I took the PSAT’s and scored remarkably high. I got an invite for a full scholarship to the Coast Guard Academy, an Ivy League education to basically get an engineering degree and become an officer. Of course I did not pursue that, I objected to getting my hair cut, and knew I would not fit in.
When I was perhaps 16-17 I did take the armed forces test, and then got hounded. Pretty much I could write my own ticket I was told. They wanted me badly.
So like Gary I figured I just wanted to have fun, do what I wanted, and pretty much be an underachiever.
Snarky Joe once told me I am the type of guy can do anything well, but that’s my problem along with having the short attention span of say an small annoying inbreed dog that barks for no reason.
My 17 years at Grumman, a Fortune 500 company, and at the time I worked there was the 4th largest military contractor in the U.S. that later merged into Northrop Grumman, eventually became an ideal job for me. I got to work on-on-one with PhD scientists and work with some of the best cherry picked engineers, had access to unlimited resources like a 500 acre aircraft factory that included a tool and die shop.
Basically I got a personalized education that exploited tax payer dollars where I had access to all this infrastructure. The street thug part of me allowed me to get jobs done fast because I was a workaholic who operated like a Navy SEAL. I was a ruthless thug back then, and I was kinda licensed to be an operator.
Work was fun and remained challenging. As an artist I was great at problem solving, and of course I did not follow rules. I was kinda rogue back then.
Then there was the field assignment at Los Alamos when Ronald Ray-Gun was President building a Neutral partial beam weapon to shoot down Intercontinental Ballistic Missles (ICM’s). That was like a 1 1/2 year vacation and was interesting Untill the end of the Cold War.
Then with Reaganomics the downsizing happened. Layoffs, and being a “distressed worker” was no fun. Grumman was the largest employer on Long Island employing 30K people. For about a year I was a holdout and was part of the 10K that remained, but if you do the math the same work had to be done with fewer people, and pretty much I could not sustain the workload. Pretty much sweatshop conditions.
There was rumor that the severance packages would be cut, part of Reaganomics, so I volunteered to get laid off so I could go to grad school and recover. I did a two year program in 1 1/2 years.
Then I got my old job back at Grumman, but got laid off again. The next job was was at Brookhaven National Labs building out a Superconductor Super Collider that involved acceleration gold ions to the speed of light to creat a Quark Gluon plasma to basically recreate the Big Bang And explore particle physics.
This was a decade long program and I got involved in the last 2 years where after prototypes were built out systems had to be built out.
Effectively I was working as a project manager but was getting paid as a technician doing my bosse’s job without the pay. Again this project was funded with taxpayer’s money…
I kinda knew that I would be working myself out of a job. Getting hired as staff was not looking good, and I was a “Term” employee that just had an annual contract.
That’s when I got the job at Sloan-Kettering as Cyclotron Engineer. Pretty much a boring job that was like being a bus driver following a schedule. A cyclotron is a particle beam accelerator that uses the same physics that spins an armature in an electric motor to accelerate charged particles. The idea is to add Protons or Deuterons to the nucleus of atoms to make them radioactive.
The isotopes I made were further processed into Radio Pharmecueticals for PET Imaging And for labeling Monoclonal Antibodies.
This was a mucho boring job where I day trade energy stocks using a margin account. I also got a MFA in Creative Writing, and I spent a lot of time on the Internet trying to stay awake. I was paid a lot for very little work, but I had to show up and put up with a somewhat hostile work environment. I survived there and of course I almost got fired a few times, but I managed to work there for 22 years earning a second pension.
So pretty much I am a lot like Gary Helfrick who did a lot of crazy things and had his fun.
Cal
