Referee Skip Obermeyer prepares the USCF Midgets (looks like three of 'em) for the start of a race on a rainy day in April of 1978. (Or perhaps 1979.)
I joined the Kalamazoo Bicycle Club in September of 1973, and attended my first club meeting a few days later. That meeting was dominated by a proposal from T.J. (Jeff) Smith that the club join the Amateur Bicycle League of America (ABLA--later the United States Cycling Federation) and begin promoting races. The issue was not decided at that meeting, but in the spring of 1975 the club hosted an early-season racing series at Kalamazoo's Spring Valley Park. The series would continue for several years; for most of those years I was the race promoter. Our role on the Michigan USCF schedule was to provide early-season racing opportunities for the state's racers; our objective in Kalamazoo was, of course, to introduce the sport to the community. It was fun, and the riders seemed to enjoy the event, but staging four early-season races can be pretty hard on your volunteers.
My notes say the rider in the middle is a very young Frankie Andreu, who'd go on to bigger races as a member of Lance Armstrong's Posties. Spring Valley Park, Kalamazoo.
Camera: Minolta Zoom 110 SLR
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Sculpture by Kirk Newman, in Kalamazoo's Bronson Park.
My friend Skip Greene just posted a memory on Facebook from forty years back, when he was part of an Air Force performance group called Tops in Blue. On Bicentennial Day they performed in Minot, North Dakota.
This sculpture was dedicated the same weekend, as part of a larger celebration featuring the Kalamazoo Symphony and a community choir. I was part of that choir; we did patriotic songs, heard speeches by prominent locals, and watched the unveiling of these youngsters.
This was pretty much our view from the bandstand, except the KSO was between us and Newman's sculpture. And it was sunny; I took this photo on a typically-dull November day.
More, perhaps better, pix of this work of art.
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Kalamazoo.
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Kalamazoo's Milham Park is really a rather small place--less than 50 acres of park on the winding Portage Creek. But I first encountered it when I was small, and in my memory it's simply enormous.
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Dad took this gorgeous photo, apparently at Milham Park, sometime in 1957. Judging by other photographs in the set, my Uncle Russ and Aunt Charlotte were vacationing at our place; presumably we gave them a tour of the town.
Roger Dinda photo, taken with his Argus C3 and scanned from a Kodachrome slide processed by Kodak in March of 1958.
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