By Doug Mager
The invention of the modern U.S. mountain bike was one of those accidental inventions that doesn’t seem significant at the time. As its inventor, Rodney Rom of Butler, MO, can vouch for that.
Rodney learned to ride a bicycle at the age of five, and has been riding regularly ever since. First around his yard at home, then around the neighborhood, and finally all over southwest Ohio. Shortly after he graduated high school, he purchased a new 10-speed Schwinn Varsity Tourist “road racer.” The Varsity was basically a good highway bike, allowing him to travel greater distances using less time and effort. Its only two drawbacks for him were the woefully-inadequate-when-wet rim-grab brakes and the skinny wheels and tires, since not all of its use was pavement mileage.
At the time, he also rode quite a bit in the woods and hills of our eastern-Cincinnati suburbs with two other Varsity-equipped friends. Their main off-road challenge was “Suicide Hill” in a wooded area in the eastern suburbs.
The tires and wheels were a liability because they could never enjoy the full potential of the many gears, as there was fear of blowing a tire or bending a rim. The final straw, however, came not on the trails but on a city street one unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon in early April of 1966 about a half block from his home. There had just had a rain shower. Rodney was going down a slight grade and approaching a green traffic light when the light changed. He grabbed both brakes – and rolled right through the red light! Fortunately, there was no cross traffic, so he lived to tell the story. But the next afternoon, he was back at the bike shop to see what could be done to improve the Varsity – and his longevity.
As it turned out, Schwinn had, at that time, brought out their 5-speed, drum-brake-equipped Paramount tandem. Upon seeing that, he made out his wish list: Imported German Union drum brakes, front and rear; 26x2.125 heavyweight rear tire with S-7 rim; 26x1.75 middleweight front tire with S-7 rim; heavy-duty .105”-diameter spokes, front and rear; and rear sprockets #1 & 2 with two and one extra teeth, respectively. The bike shop did an excellent job of assembling and setting-up the special-ordered components in short order so he could finish his project.
The only item lacking was a suspension system. He thought about the coil-spring front fork from the old Schwinn “tanks”, but his Varsity was the tall-frame model to accommodate his long inseam, and the tank’s fork stem tube was too short to fit through the frame tube. Since he would have had to do major re-engineering for the suspension – engineering which, at that time, was beyond his capabilities or budget – he chose to leave it rigid-framed.
Even though the middleweight front tire had adequate clearance in the stock fork, he did have to cut, widen, and re-weld the rear frame to accept the balloon tire. After widening the frame, the original blue paint needed a refinish in the welded areas. None of the local body shops could guarantee a spot match and, because of the modification, the Schwinn factory’s legal department notified him in a letter that they wouldn’t allow him to ship the frame back to them for a complete re-do, so he stripped off the rest of the paint and had the frame chromed! It looked great when it was new.
During the construction phase of the project, most folks called him “crazy for cutting up a brand-new, expensive bicycle.” The comments were quite different, however, once the bike was completed. Total expenditure on this project came to approximately $250.00. Unfortunately, he neglected to save the modification receipts for the parts — he only has the frame-chrome receipt. The net weight of the completed bike turned out to be 43.0 lbs. He called the bike ChROMer, a nickname based on his own surname.
May 30, 1966, was the date he completed ChROMer’s assembly and took his first ride. After using it that summer, he did have plans to duplicate and market the favorably-commented-on bike (the bike-shop owner can verify this) but, unfortunately, Ho Chi Minh and Lyndon Johnson had different ideas as to how he should spend his next few years.
Rodney and his wife bought their first house in 1980, a mere 1-1/4 miles from Riehle’s Machine Shop in Fairfax, just east of Cincinnati, where he was employed as a welder-fabricator. From this time on, until they sold the Cincinnati house and moved to Missouri in early 1982, he regularly used ChROMer to commute. It was great not having to fill the car’s gas tank, and it kept him fit and healthy as well! He even rode it in the snow during the winter just to prove to doubters that the bike was truly a multi-purpose vehicle.
Shortly after their son was born in 1978, he was able to use Riehle’s shop facilities to engineer a very effective aluminum-tube swivel-and-lean trailer hitch and tongue for their children’s wagon. Their “Berlin Flyer” wagon, by the way, was one of the first to have automotive Ackermann-style individually-steered front wheels instead of the typical horizontally-pivoting straight axle. This feature greatly aided stability and safety while towing their young daughter and son. They used the bike on family outings at Cincinnati’s Lunken Airport bike path in the summers. Their daughter and son enjoyed every mile (they didn’t have to pedal!).
Being a Midwestern mountain-bike pioneer, Rodney was distanced from the information available during the mountain bike’s “mid-to-late 1970s” gestation period concerning the Marin County, California, developments and claims. (In mountain biking’s infancy, not many Midwestern newsstands carried mountain bike magazines.) Only in the 1990s and later did he discover books such as Mountain Biking by Bill Gutman, All-Terrain Bikes “by the Editors of Mountain Bike magazine,” and the most-authoritative, best-researched-but-territorially-prejudiced mountain-bike history to date, Frank J. Berto’s The Birth Of Dirt and its subsequent revisions, The Birth of Dirt II and The Birth of Dirt III. However, his Ohio creation significantly pre-dated these published west-coast developments.
As Frank Berto states in his book, “...the mountain bike was more than just a downhill racer:” The hill-climbing modifications Rodney made to his bike also improved its rideability in all areas of 2-wheeling. He even had some military adventures with ChROMer which included an occasional ride in European and South American liberty ports as well as cruising around the Norfolk, Virginia/northern North Carolina homeport area. Aircraft carriers do have some odd-shaped inner-hull voids unusable for anything but storage. He had to sign a release drawn up by the ship’s Legal Officer to be allowed to have it on board ship with him. (As a lowly E-3, he had one benefit not even the officers enjoyed! How many other mountain bikes can claim to be approved by the U.S. military?) Unfortunately, the salt air almost totally ruined the chrome finish and gave the bike a heavy patina of rust – damage he has yet to repair.
Is ChROMer still around and operational? Yes, it is. Rodney still owns it, along with the original Owner’s Manual and all the supporting documentation — receipts, correspondence and dated photographs. He also has a photo of him that was taken in the summer of 2008 sitting behind the bike, next to his shop. The items taped to the wall behind him and the bike are the originals of the documentation copies, as well as the Owner’s Manual. ChROMer is no longer used as a daily driver, being saved instead for special occasions like parade duty. One 1999 photo shows his new custom heavy-duty wagon hitched to ChROMer in preparation for a local high-school homecoming parade, and his preschool grandsons got to ride in the wagon that day.
Marin County’s Joe Breeze has been credited in the past as being “The Father of the Mountain Bike” for his mid-’70s effort. He is even erroneously listed in Wikipedia with this honor. Rodney does not deny that Joe and other Marinites were instrumental in inventing and popularizing the sport of mountain biking. But if Joe or any other Marin Countian from the mid-1970s are going to be given credit for being “The Father of the Mountain Bike,” does this make Rodney the Grandfather or the Godfather?
Missouri now has the Katy Trail, a walking and biking path crossing most of the state, and most of the bikes used on the trail are mountain bikes. Who could have guessed?
So many bike-magazine stories emphasize the camaraderie aspect of the sport during biking events. Why, then, is this friendliness replaced with antagonism by Left-Coasters off-court when our sport’s early contributors are made aware of even earlier accomplishments by those outside Marin County’s borders? It would be truly regrettable for mountain-bike history if the recognition of the Vietnam War-era Navy-veteran inventor of the modern U.S. mountain bike became one more casualty of the Vietnam War, don’t you agree?
