In Mill Valley they were the Larkspur Canyon Gang, teenagers buying curvy old Schwinn cruiser bikes with fat tyres, stripping them down, racing them down forest trails.

They called their bikes “beaters” or “ballooners”.

In Cupertino too they were the Morrow Dirt Club. The Morrow coaster brake held up longest.

Their bikes were “bombers”.

Each kid built his own bike.

In 1973 Russ Mahon put a rear wheel with a drum-brake hub and a five-sprocket freewheel on his old Ward Hawthorne bike. Then he added a Shimano rear derailleur, a double chainring crankset and SunTour thumb shifters.

It was a winner.

Now most of the Morrow Dirt Club kids were riding bikes with 10-speed derailleurs, mostly built by Russ.

Gary Fisher of San Anselmo started racing at the age of 12. In 1968 his club suspended him because his hair was too long. He and his friends set up an outlaw racing club, the Velo-Club Tamalpais.

Marc Vendetti from the Larkspur Gang raced with them one time and showed them his ballooner bike.

Gary Fisher, Joe Breeze and Charlie Kelly liked what they saw. They started to build their own bikes and  ride the trails of Mount Tamalpais. They called their bikes “clunkers”.

The craze caught on. Alan Bond, Fisher’s and Kelly’s housemate, went after caches of old bikes and bought them up and sandblasted  and painted them.

At the Mill Valley Cyclo-Cross Race, Gary Fisher and Charlie Kelly saw the Cupertino bikes with their derailleurs and thumb-shifters.

In 1976 Charlie Kelly asked Joe Breeze to build a custom frame. When the word got out Joe got nine more orders. Joe sold the finished bikes for $750. They were called Breezers.

Tom Ritchey said he could make  a lighter frame than the Breezer and Gary Fisher ordered 10 of them. Gary and Charlie pooled all the money they could spare, which was $300, and became business partners.

Sometime later that year they came up with the name Mountainbikes, later spelled MountainBikes. They sold the Ritchey bikes for $1300, payable in advance.

That was the year of the first Repack race down the Pine Mountain fire road. It was called Repack because the downhill course burned the grease out of the coaster brake and it had to be “repacked”.

John Finley Scott, a sociology professor at the University of California at Davis, had built fat-tyre bikes back in the 50’s to ride mountain trails. He knew Tom Ritchey and ordered 100 Ritchey frames.

Building and selling the bikes was harder than he’d thought, so he sold them back to MountainBikes on a pay-as-you-sell basis and loaned them $10000 to help finance their business as well.

Later Finley Scott bought the Cupertino Bike Shop and Gary Fisher paid off the loan with finished bikes which were sold there.

Mike Sinyard had formed Specialised Bicycle Imports after meeting the Cinelli family in Italy on vacation. He saw the growing demand for mountain bikes, so he took a Ritchey bike to Japan with this designer Tim Neenan and ordered copies from Toyo who made his road bikes. This bike was called the Stumpjumper.

In a few years mountain bikes became popular.

In 1983 Gary Fisher bought out Charlie Kelly for $2300 and an Apple Computer. Gary Fisher is now a senior executive with the Trek Company.

Charlie Kelly now runs a piano-moving business.

Tom Ritchey lives in La Honda and makes well-engineered components. He has got behind the scheme to build “coffee bikes” for small farmers in Africa to carry beans to the drying plants.

He just reintroduced his “bullmoose” bars. I saw one the other day.

John Finley Scott was murdered by his handyman and tree-trimmer in his home outside Davis in 2006. The man probably killed him to avoid going back to prison after Scott found he was embezzling him.

Joe Breeze is a campaigner for better conditions for bikes in American cities, and now builds bikes designed for everyday tasks.

Russ Mahon became a plasterer.

Together they made a bit of bicycle history.

I got all this from Frank Berto. After researching the history, he came to this conclusion: there was no inventor of the mountain bike.

They happened to be there. They did it for fun.