Our parents planted the seed of the Road Runner Bike Shop in the late 1960 when both mom and dad where involved in our continued growth and their efforts to contour our character. This particular arm of our upbringing manifested from our parents idea that keeping kids busy with activities such as yard work, homework, sports, scouts, paper routes, hanging off the roof of the house scraping and painting and hanging gutters etc. would keep us out of trouble. These activities and more, all occurred while growing up on E. 98th St. This belief and practice ultimately extended outward and included the neighborhood kids too.

Mom, being a work at home mother was available more often and on a regular basis and her interest in athletics was evident in the way she played with us kids. Nobody could throw a curve or fast ball like mom! It is said and is still thought to be true that our mother (Gwendolyn C. Pickett, nee Morgan) may STILL hold school records at her high school. I will endeavor to substantiate this, but for now…

Anyway, as the story goes, in order for the kids to play league hardball, there needed to be a team coach… Our mother became that coach and developed a team comprised of my older brothers and a good number of the kids in the neighborhood.

Mom became coach and trainer and subsequently the need for transportation for all of the kids became the issue and bicycles became the answer.

Gordon’s Bike Shop was the shop that served the greater Glenville area. Mrs. Gordon and her sons where, I believed, first generation immigrants from Germany, however, I recently discovered that the family immigrated from Russia. The Gordons operated a wholesale warehouse with a retail store front, servicing the community at large, and shipping bicycles and parts to other businesses. Gordon’s would become a life source for the Road Runner Bike Shop (and consequently our family) for the entire span of our bike shop up to and including 1985, when our mother passed.

So it began. Mom and dad began purchasing bike parts and began repairing and teaching the kids to repair their bikes. Our backyard and the the garage was our “shop”. It wasn’t log before our parents were salvaging bikes, painting and rebuilding them, each kid had to invest their own time, energy and sometimes money in their own bicycle projects.

The summer league baseball was a success! The bike ride to the Dupont field was made by many kids from the neighborhood and the bicycle maintenance project began to take on a life or its own. Soon, getting kids to the baseball park was no longer the goal. Kids like myself who were too young to play ball with the big kids wanted bikes too! Mom knew that she had found her “sweet spot”. She found a niche that met what seems retrospectively, to be the perfect place for her to satisfy, combine and apply her primary character needs which were to be around and help people, to nurture family and friend and to perform a service that she could see a measurable affect in people and therefore the community. If I could only pin one defining character title on mom it would be compassionate. And she would often show compassion at such a cost to herself that I would also choose “compassion” as her major fault. Our mother would sacrifice everything for someone in need, and she in fact did just that.

If you read the “memory” on dad that describes His influence on us, you will learn a bit about how we survived the riots of the late 60’s – early 70’s and that during that time our garage had been burglarized, bikes were stolen, what was done about it, etc.

The idea of growing the bike shop in earnest was decidedly one that was not held by dad… this was strictly a mom thing. Zoning laws made it not possible to have a the business continue from our home. I’m not aware of her actual thought process that led her to the non-traditional business plan of a mobile bike shop but you can be sure that the need to have low overhead and the desire to be able to deal with and relate directly with kids was at the foundation of this idea. You see, a store front somewhere would make the bike shop only available to adults who had the wherewithal to drive… a mobil store could reach out to all manner of people and it allowed her to serve all areas of the city.

One day, and without any fanfare that I can recall, mom came home with a van that she had purchased at auction from the telephone company. The van was equipped with steal mesh gate separating the drivers compartment from the rear of the van. The van was also similarly equipped with shelves and drawers. Mom decided on the name “Road Runner”, had the van painted a light blue and had a large image of what appeared to be the famous and well known to kids and adults alike… the Warner Brothers Road Runner. Unable to find an adequate horn that could “bebeep”, she chose the “Ahooga Car” horn. Who would have guessed that our lives would be forever transformed through this vision that was founded initially by both parents in their quest for keeping kids occupied and then carried to an entirely different level by our mother. Perhaps having a successful and famous entrepreneur Great Uncle Named Garrett A. Morgan may have influenced her!

As businesswoman, mom would likely be listed as being unsuccessful by those who strictly adhere to the idea that a business’ success is measured by profit.

But if “profit” is in turn the measure of success, then our mothers success would be measured in the “profit” that others received in their lives for having done “business” with our mother, the “Pied Piper” of the 2 wheeler!

-Lamont