Double Down

People who have known me long enough will remember The Beard, which I started as my college days came to a close, wore overseas for a year and after I came home, and continued to nurture through a year of grad school and into my first years of gainful adult employment.

I don’t know what happened to The Beard after we parted ways. It had its own personality, its own fragrance, its own ecosystem and self-sustaining food supply, plus quite possibly an internal heat source separate from whatever I was providing. With a little help from a friend who was trimming my hair one February day, I cut off The Beard and set it free. I did get a postcard once a few years later from wartorn Afghanistan, where it had fallen in with a ragtag band of fighters on one side or another. But no other word since then.

The Beard inspired artistic depictions back then. Maybe it’s time for another type of inspiration.

My brother has had a tame, civilized beard for decades now. He’s been fighting to keep any kind of color in it, but even he admits it’s starting to look a little gray and, um, distinguished. (He’s my younger brother. No way he looks old.)

My brother has announced he may shave his beard.

My brother’s nice, well-mannered beard

In early August, he’s expecting to ride 190 miles in two days to raise money to fight cancer. He has posted a challenge for the month of June: If he can raise $2,000 during June, my brother will shave his beard.

In early August, I fully expect to be sitting on my butt at home. I would love to ride with my brother, but I decided early on that the best way for me to support him in his fight against cancer—which I do support, in full, and proudly—was to take the money I would have spent to fly there, with a bike, and stay in hotels and rent a car and so on, and put that money instead into funding my brother and the organization he’s riding for.

So I won’t be riding with him. But that doesn’t mean I can’t have some skin in the game.


So here’s the deal: Want to see The Beard come back? One good beard deserves another: If my brother raises $2,000 for his cancer-fighting ride in the month of June, after he shaves his face for the first time in decades, I will not shave my face during the month of July.

And I’ll post pictures.

So it’s your call: What’s it worth to see me sprout an embarrassing curly shrub under my chin? $20? What’s it worth to know that as summer starts to warm on up, I’ll be scratchy, hot, and uncomfortable? $50? What’s it worth to know that when I spill soup, I’ll have to shower? $75? What’s it worth to know that every time I ride, the strap on my bike helmet is getting tangled up in long whiskers? $100? What’s it worth to know that all month long, my friends and co-workers will be offering me free razors, asking when I’m going to scrape that nasty growth off my face? $200? What’s it worth to imagine myself explaining this half-grown mess on my chin when I have to dress up for a friend’s wedding on the 17th? What’s it worth?

What’s it worth to know that you’ve done something meaningful to help people fighting to reclaim their lives from a diagnosis we all hope never to hear? What’s it worth to know that you have given someone hope?

The time to give is now. The clock is running. For July, if you give now, I won’t shave.

(After July, no promises. But if you can raise my brother’s $2,000 in June, watch this space for further developments.)

Point of clarification: As of June 1, my brother had raised $2,945 toward his goal of $6,000, so $2,000 during the month of June would put him at $4,945 by June 30. That’s the amount it will take to start The Beard growing again. As of this posting, you have 8 days to raise $1,550. Good luck!

The place to give is at http://www.pmc.org/profile/FB0028. Or, if you want to fight cancer but hate whiskers, you can always send him some Clif Bars to help him train.

About That Technical Glitch

About five miles before the end of the Breakaway Ride in Santa Rosa last weekend, I ran into what I described later as “one little hitch.” I never did provide further detail on that. Here, then, is the rest of the story.

I haven’t had time to put this together in a proper account. What follows is a rather rushed e-mail I sent my brother describing the ride, very lightly edited.

Wow. I finally really got the whole thing of riding in the pocket, letting everyone around you push the wind off the group. I’ve known it in principle for years, but I mostly train alone, so I’d never had a chance to see the difference it makes.

We had a steady headwind in the outbound miles, maybe the first 10-15 miles of the course before we came into our first range of hills. Started out in a good spot behind the first bunch of let’s say 150 riders, all bunched up behind the motorcycle cop in front. When he peeled off, things stretched out a bit, and that front group tugged away; let’s say I was in the second group of several dozen riders. It was early in the ride, with some late starters still advancing from the rear toward the front, a few hot starters from the front already dropping back, but mostly all of us riding forward together with some decent speed.

Wind was coming from off the starboard bow. There was some room to pass on the right, so I edged over and started inching forward past a rider, then another rider, then another rider. Still plenty of room over in that lane to pass. I was happy not to be stuck behind these riders. But boy, was it windy! When I had been in the group, I had plenty of juice to push ahead past these riders, but now that I was out in the wind, I was working my tail off just to keep up. When I was ready to fall back into the group and let them protect me, I couldn’t get between these guys (and women) with a putty knife. They were all too happy to let me ride forward and catch the wind for them, but I had to drop back several lengths before I could get in again.

This is what it looks like when the real pros are in the same situation. Wind in the picture above is coming from the left-hand side of the frame. Nobody wants to ride over there. They all are ducking further and further off to the right, behind other riders, to the point of riding on the shoulder, just so they don’t have to be the one riding right out there in the teeth of the wind. They have miles to go yet in this day, and riding in the front is exhausting. That poor guy riding out by the center line is in the thick of it; he’s carrying everyone else, and by the end of the day he’ll be feeling it. His team captain is probably back in the pack somewhere, saving his energy for the sprint at the end of the stage. Everyone on the team knows his job for the day. (Picture from Tour of the Gila 2010, Stage 2, from the Team Radio Shack page: http://www.livestrong.com/teamradioshack/news_photos-tour-gila-stage-2/ )

I’m sure the difference was at least 10 bpm on my heart-rate monitor. Might have even been 15 bpm. It was the difference between going uphill and going downhill. It was the difference between being in the red zone and riding at a pace I could maintain. In the group, I was pedaling to keep up, but I wasn't pedaling always. I'd pause, then pedal again. (That was the frustration that led me to want to pass. I had the legs to go faster, as long as I was still in the protected windspace.)

And the speed I was going, in that sheltered position, was probably a notch faster than I’d normally do on one of my own training rides, even though I wasn't working so hard. When I look at the time stamp on photos, I raise my eyebrows, because I know how fast I must have been riding. Never could have kept up that pace for so long on a solo ride.

Later on I got dropped out the back of that group for some reason. Lost contact going around a corner? Someone in front of me dropped speed and let the group get away from us? I forget. I wanted to catch them again. And I could just about hear the classic TV cycling commentator Phil Liggett narrating, as he always does, how hard it is to bridge the gap. And once again I felt the difference between riding protected and riding naked to the wind out in no-man’s-land. It was really hard work to get back into the tailwind of that group. But so worth it. Even though we were on the flat, it was like riding to a summit, then (as I finally caught up with the rear of the group) getting a break as the slope starts leaning downhill. Great fun. Incredible.

It was well worth it, particularly to get through what would have been a lousy wind that would have smashed the start of the day and left me wrung out for the rest of the ride. And I took my pulls near the front of the group too, once I had caught my breath from the effort of catching them. Everyone rides in the front some, then eases back and lets someone else take the fore. But I suspect that accelerated speed was what led to my cramping a little bit later. My legs weren’t in the habit of going around so fast for so far. Even though it was relatively light effort, my legs were doing all they could to keep fluid and flowing.

By the time I ran into any cramping, I was past the windy portion, so I didn’t mind letting the group I’d been with pull ahead. After I drank about half an ocean at the next rest stop, I didn’t have any real problem with cramping for the rest of the day. Here and there a twinge from tiredness, but not the same constant griping. I made it over the rest of the hills. Just.

To finish the story: Blew a tire on the final flat into town, about 5 miles from the finish. A tire, not a tube. One minute I’m whipping along easy on my way in. Then I noticed one of those bump-bump-bump rhythms where you ask yourself whether that’s the pavement or the equipment. Just about when I’d decided it might could be something on a wheel, I got a bang like a car backfiring and the front wheel went all silly. Didn’t take three strokes to figure out it was time to stop. This is my Specialized bike, which I’ve been riding for about three years; I replaced the rear tire a few months back, but this is the original front tire.

In retrospect, the bump-bump-bump had been the tire giving way and bulging; the blowout was just that: the much softer inner tube couldn’t hold the air in without the tougher tire to contain it, so it poked through the weak point in the outer tire and popped like bubble gum. But here am I, five miles from the end, with a blowout. The folks who had been trailing me since the last rest stop whizzed by, checking to be sure I was O.K. Well, yeah, I was O.K. Have pump, have spare tube, already within walking distance, dead flat to the end; I’m already in town and could probably find a beer within a few blocks and relax if it came to that.

I bet I wasn’t there five minutes before a guy in a beat-up Toyota pickup pulled up, a SAG wagon. Very friendly. Also had pump, a floor pump. But my tire—not the tube, but the tire—had a big old hole in it, a split about a half-inch long. Any new tube inside that tire would bulge through the split and blow out just like the first one had. Since Mr. SAG was there, I decided to try a Hail Mary; I popped open my patch kit and patched the inside of the tire. It only had to last for five miles. Put in new tube. Inflated. Dopey moi. I should have had him radically underinflate the tube, to maybe 75 or 80 psi, just enough to protect the rim while I limped in mostly flat. But I told him to go ahead to 120, not thinking, and while I held it there in my hand it blew again, just like a car backfiring. My ears rang. The blowout stung my palm.

Fine. I had another tube with me, but I had already proven my point with the hills, and it was the end of the day, and I said fine, let’s just get this sucker done, and I let him drive me in. I didn’t really feel I could call myself a finisher, but I felt no guilt taking an extra burrito from the stash at the bikefest.

It would have been interesting to see what the SRAM support cars that were pacing us on the course all day might have done for me if this had been 50 miles earlier. (I can just imagine some of the fun that blowout might have been on a downhill or an uphill or any of the other ratty pavement I was on that day. This was the most gracious possible point on the ride to get a blowout. I was already done with the course; this was just the fadeout as the needle swings into the inner groove.)

The SRAM cars had tires; they had tubes; they had wheels. Do they swap your rim out if you want them to, and take a credit-card deposit? Do they give tires? Sell tires? In that situation, in the middle of the course, I would have had no qualms about buying a new tire and getting going on the spot. My legs were still good. By five miles from the end, it wasn’t worth much production; fixing the tire would have taken longer than the ride to the finish. (I do kick myself a little: I should have re-patched the tire and put it together again with my other spare tube and had the SAG guy underinflate the tire. But I was oxygen deprived by then and tired, and that solution didn’t occur to me till I was already munching burrito. And even that might not have worked, though it had a better chance.)

And the great news from the whole episode was that as I sat there admiring my new bling (what? you thought I didn't grab a medal when I got to the finish line?), this woman walks by with about 10 Specialized tires over her shoulder, brand-new ones. I’m sure they were from SAG support somehow. Keep in mind that Specialized was a sponsor of the ride, and they had a bike tune-up booth at the start (and I think at the finish). “I’d buy one of those from you right now,” I told her. (I still had to get back to my car, and I still had a pump and one spare tube.) “Where are those going? I’ll buy one from the Specialized booth, if that’s where you’re taking them.” She was a little obscure about where exactly they were from. The SAG crew? A SRAM car? She said that Specialized was expecting to get them back.

I truly don’t know what arrangements they make mid-course; it makes sense to me that they’d charge you something for the tubes or tires or chains they provide. Or maybe the expendables are just a part of doing business for them, rolled into the fee they charge the ride organizers for showing up.

(The SAG teams make all the difference, by the way, even when they’re not pros driving shiny cars with logos. They and the folks who staff the refreshment tables at rest stops are the completely unsung heroes of any ride like this. I always try to thank them profusely as I snarf down my carb recharge on my way back to my bike.)

The woman with the tires over her shoulder wasn’t exactly walking around with a credit-card machine, and I got the impression she had no idea how much to charge for one of these if it came to it, and from how she was wandering around, I was also pretty sure she wasn’t sure exactly where the people were that she was supposed to return them to. After I offered her one more time to buy a tire from her right now, she just peeled one out of the bunch and handed it to me. Specialized Armadillo: Score!

That was even better than the medal I had been gloating over. I sat back down on the bench and quickly decided I was too tired to bother changing out the tube and tire; I was two blocks from my car, and I could walk that far. But that kinda made up for whatever gap I felt for not finishing. I didn’t at all feel bad about the part of the course I had skipped. I had done all the work to get there, muscling up over hill and dale, and all that was left was several blocks of flat suburban roads on the way into town. But if I was going to have a mechanical a stone’s throw from done, getting a free replacement tire out of it sure helped ice the sting.

Every ride is a training ride, and along with some muscle work, this one reminded me that you have to think about all your gear, not just the most common fail points. I check my chain regularly; I had just replaced brake pads; I twang my spokes; I check tube pressure. Here’s a new one to think about before going off on a long expedition on cobbles: How old are my tires?

Anyhow, that’s the rest of the saga.

Oh, and of course, the first thing I thought when I blew was that I had to put the picture on Facebook. Got out the phone, but the battery had had a long day already. It turned on, then immediately (when it saw what I wanted to take a picture of) turned off. So at that point I knew two things for sure: 1) No Facebook pix, which was a daunting loss; 2) I wasn’t going to phone for help, which didn’t bother me, because I knew I could walk in from here. Oh, and 3) No GPS guidance if I did decide to walk it in. Which I would still consider to be officially finishing.

But the SAG truck was a much better alternative.

I had miles to drive before I would be back in Long Beach.

It was a great day.

A postscript, about flats: On May 2, a week later, Mick Rogers in the 5th stage of the Tour of Romandie flatted 4 km from the finish line. He had barely been clinging to the overall lead in the race up to that point. That close to the end, there’s no time to change a tire. He rode in on his flat (but not fast enough to keep the race lead). He’s a pro rider, and if he ruins a rim, there’s another waiting for him before the next stage. Me, if I trash a rim, I get to pay cold hard cash for the new one.

If you want a real story about riding in on a flat, ask Lance Armstrong sometime about Leadville 2009, or better yet, see Race Across the Sky. But that’s mountain biking. This was a road ride.

Team Support

I train solo, but when I go on a ride like the one I’m doing Sunday, it’s what’s called a supported ride.

That means that along the way we’ll have rest stops stocked with food and drink, and volunteers to cheer us on. It means we’ll have a route sheet, and turns along the way will be marked with bright arrows so we don’t get lost. It means we will be passed at several points along the way by a “sag wagon,” a vehicle that patrols the course carrying spare inner tubes, a tire pump, and some basic tools for field repair, plus a first aid kit and a radio to relay messages back to ride HQ. It means that at the end of the ride there’ll be a fat lunch, and on nine out of ten supported rides a crowd of people right at the finish line to cheer you on and congratulate you just as if they knew you and had watched you train. Sometimes they hand out medals to the finishers.

I could ride that far by myself (and sometimes have), but it’s a lot nicer to do it supported.

In life, there are solo rides and supported rides. Sometimes you get to pick which way you ride. Sometimes life picks the ride for you.

For folks who have sat in a paper gown in a sterile office to hear a doctor pronounce a diagnosis of cancer, the uphills are steeper, the descents more treacherous, and the ride a lot longer than any I’ve ever had to put up with on two wheels.

The least we can do for them is to give them a supported ride.

Cancer is a lot more than pills and prevention and physicians, treatments and therapies and tests. It's not all research and remissions and recovery rates. Those are all fine things too, and I’m on their side. But outside of the clinic, there’s life to get on with.

People who happen to have cancer don’t stop having families who love them (and look to them for support); they don’t stop needing to pay the rent or grocery bills; they don’t stop loving baseball games and milkshakes. People with cancer are often treated to mountains of paperwork and fights with insurance companies.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a course sheet, some markers along the way to help you decide which way to turn, waystations stocked with food and refreshments and people to cheer you along? A cancer-fighting sag wagon?

Along with many great organizations that are searching the roots of cancer’s causes and trying to find therapies that knock out cancer without taking down the patient in the process, you can find groups that offer non-medical help: patient advocacy, family support, financial aid, counseling, information services, education.

When I ride out of Davis on Sunday, on a 107-mile road to Santa Rosa, over hill and dale and through Napa Valley—mostly upwind—I will be riding to support four nonprofit groups that provide some of these services to folks with cancer and their families. I’ll be on a supported ride, but I’m hoping my ride makes it easier for some other people to find the support they need on their roads.

When I make a pitch for donations, I always try to calibrate the seriousness of my request. I’m not going to make this out to be some life-or-death thing, for me. To be plain about it, I would have gone on this ride whether it was to help out against cancer or not. And when I signed up for the ride, my registration fee already covered the cost of the ride—the support teams—plus a contribution to the cause. So I’ve already got some skin in the game, and I’m not under any obligation to raise more just so I can ride.

Having said that, I’ll add: I’ve got six easy names that I can write on the dedication wall at the start of the ride—an uncle, a friend, a friend of my brother’s, a couple of people I have worked with, and, reaching all the way back to my college days, Dad. That’s six people off the top of my head who have needed the support of a strong team as they fought cancer—six people in my immediate circle, without trying too hard to remember others, without having to name celebrities or friends of friends. I’m more than happy to support this cause.

(I bet you know someone too who has been able to benefit from some support against cancer.)

And: You don’t have to give any money. I always feel with events like this that half the goal is raising funds, but the other half is raising awareness—not talking people into thinking they should drop everything and take this up as their life’s prime purpose, but reminding them in some small way of the good that goes on around all of us, mostly unnoticed, while we go through our daily routines. Sometimes when a lot of people do some easy, small things, the effect is better than when only a few people strain and struggle to do huge, difficult things. If you have read this far, whether you give any money to the campaign or not, you have helped me raise consciousness, and I thank you.

If this is a campaign you can believe in, I would be honored if you made a donation. You can add money in my name at http://www.active.com/donate/breakawayride1/DBradle101, or you’re welcome to give on the campaign’s generic donation page. (Like I said, and I will emphasize: I don’t owe them any more money. I’m not working on commission.)

While I’m at it, I also have to give a plug for an even longer ride my brother’s going to be doing this summer, a two-day ride that stretches to nearly 200 miles. This ride is also for a very good cause. In 30 years, putting together a lot of small donations from folks like you and me, the Pan-Mass Challenge has raised $270 million to help fight cancer. If you’re looking for a place to send some money, you don’t have to give anything for my ride at all. Try giving to his: http://www.pmc.org/profile/FB0028

(There are many other fronts in the fight against cancer. I’m not promoting this one or that one as the only important way to engage. These are just two I happen to be connected to.)

It will be my pleasure to ride this Sunday—although around Mile 70, I may be rethinking that platform—and after riding part of this route solo a few weeks ago, I’ll be glad that this time I’m on a supported ride. As I ride, please feel welcome to help me support others.

Many Thanks!

Autograph Hound

This camera dates to about 1925, which would make it my grandfather’s—one he would have used as a young man.

The camera came fully loaded. It uses large film (116 size), so you get good resolution. And you can manually set focus, aperture, and shutter speed, so you don’t have to rely on a computer to pick automatic settings that can come out wrong and ruin a good picture.

The little hole in the front cover is a tripod mount for when you’re taking a vertical-frame picture. Later on I figured out why “Kodak” is upside-down here, although I might have designed it differently.

Notice the little widget up and to the left of the main lens. More on that in a minute.

Once you have picked your subject, you’ll want to focus on it. This is accomplished by setting the catch into the correct notch on the focusing scale.

The Ilex f/7.7 Anastigmat lens indicates the age of the camera. Kodak used a series of different lenses on the same basic camera model, and they were using these lenses in the mid-1920s. (Anastigmat indicates that a certain lens distortion has been corrected with advanced optics.) The little lever with a knob at the end of it in about the 8:00 position on the lens is the shutter release.

You can set shutter speeds from permanently open to as fast as 1/100th of a second. The shutter is tripped and timed mechanically, with springs and bearings. With this camera, you’ll never need to replace a battery.

I haven’t tested it, but I suspect the threaded fitting next to the manual shutter release is a receptacle for a cable release, similar to what you’ll find on more recent Kodak models.

The lens is wide open at f/7.7, and it tightens down to f/45.

(That’s focal length ÷ x , for those who aren’t familiar with the terminology. It describes how wide the lens opens—how much light gets in—and determines how forgiving your focus will be. This lens has a 130mm focal length—i.e., the front part of the lens sits 130mm in front of the film—so f/45 means your lens aperture will be a little less than 3mm in diameter. At f/7.7, the opening will be nearly 17mm wide, or .66 inch. More light will get in, but your foreground and background will be less clearly focused than when you use a tighter aperture. With a modern compact camera that uses—let’s say—a 35mm lens, the same f/45 would be less than a millimeter across, but its characteristics, both for focus and exposure length, would be roughly the same as they are for the identical f-stop on any other lens, long or short. A “fast” lens today might open up as wide as f/2.8 or even f/1.4, letting in a lot of light so you can take really fast shots, letting you freeze motion. The great landscape photographers of yesteryear had a little clique they called the f/64 club, because when you shoot with such a tiny aperture, your focus is brilliantly clear. You wanted to know all this, right?)

Remember the doohickey attached to the upper corner of the lens? It took me a while to figure out. It’s the viewfinder, to let you see what the camera is pointed at. Here I’m looking into it at some objects on a table (a toy camera and the case for this camera), with a ceiling light hanging overhead. Everything is left-right reversed, or up-down, depending on how you prefer to understand it.

The round opening lets in light, which bounces off the back of (I presume) the prism at a 90° angle. You look into the +-shaped opening to see the image. It’s not a really exact way to frame your shots, but it’s better than a blind guess.

This is what the film sees.

A distinguishing feature of the Autographic cameras was this stylus and the special film rolls they used. The film itself is standard 116-size film, which you can still buy today, but it was wound in with carbon paper sandwiched between the film and the standard black-paper backer.

After you take a shot, you flip open a little door in the back of the camera and use the stylus to write on the heavy backing paper. That presses the carbon paper against the film, leaving a black mark on the film. When the negatives are printed, those words written in black show up in the prints as white lettering.

For its time, this was a convenient camera to carry on a trip, or to a family outing, or just about anywhere. It’s lightweight and can be carried in one hand, though it’s too big to slip into a pocket. It sets up fast and gives the photographer good control over exposure, but it doesn’t have a lot of fussy settings that will take forever to get right. And compared to making your exposures on eight-inch by ten-inch glass plates coated in light-sensitive gel, shooting on Kodak film is a snap.

(See how I did that?)

The Autographic was replaced later on by other similarly convenient collapsible cameras, like Mom’s Kodak Tourist from the late 1940s, each succeeding generation refining the mechanisms, improving the lenses, tightening up the machining standards. Keep in mind that a large part of Kodak’s mission in producing cameras was to sell lots of rolls of film.

And then in the 1950s Leica released the M3, a revolution in convenience: It used 35mm film, which meant the camera could be about a third the size and weight of one of these bellows-style cameras, and it featured interchangeable lenses to let photographers switch quickly to adapt to different shooting situations.

That pretty much was the end for medium-format cameras like this one, except for a small cadre of “serious” photographers who appreciated the larger frame size with its corresponding higher level of detail and resolution.

Frugal, Wealthy, and Great Beer-Drinkers

Back in the day—before the Internet, before radio, almost before photography, certainly before air travel—when you went on a trip overseas, you didn’t Tweet about it; you didn’t post a travelogue on Facebook; you didn’t put up a slew of pictures on Flickr or Pixagogo or your personal blog pages. You kept a diary—maybe, if you were diligent—and when you came back, you no doubt would chat about the trip with your friends and family. In your trunk you might have packed some souvenirs from exotic locales. Unless writing was your profession, that was about it for sharing.

For a few, however, there was a more permanent way to record impressions from overseas: If you could afford the cost of publishing your memoir, you could order up a private edition, not for general circulation but to pass around to entertain and edify your friends. It was the equivalent of a latter-day slide show, but more portable.

I come from wordy stock. My father’s middle name was Ormsby. His mother’s grandmother, Mary Amanda Bateman by name, was married to a fellow named Edwin Samuel Ormsby, my grandmother’s grandfather. They lived in Emmetsburg, Iowa, but in 1889 they took a five-month trip to Europe. [E.S. Ormsby, born in 1842, would have been 47 on this trip, a well-established citizen and sometime Mayor of Emmetsburg. I do not know the date of Mary A. Ormsby’s birth, but her eldest child was 26 by the time they took this trip.]

When they got back, she published her blog, to the tune of 113 pages of lively narrative, dotted with details about the places she had seen, the people she ran into along the way, some of the stories that today might be scribbled on the backs of postcards, and the other miscellaneous learning one acquires through travel.

Some of the details of specific places have evolved over time, but the experience is immediately familiar to anyone who has taken a long trip to a foreign land.

The following pages are chosen pretty much at random from her story.

A Little Pocket of Charm

Angel’s Flight, a charming tiny tramway near the heart of Los Angeles, recently reopened after a hiatus of several years. Looking back on a day when children played in neighborhoods lined with gingerbread houses—when every morning was summer vacation—here’s a book written to memorialize Bunker Hill back when Angel’s Flight closed the first time, in the 1960s.

Many of these illustrations will get richer when you click on them to have a look at the details painted into them by an artist who loved a neighborhood he knew was on the brink of vanishing forever.