Bicycles built by two
For the record, there is no Dad working at Dad’s Bike Barn.
Nor has there ever been an official Dad, either up front or behind-the-scenes as a silent partner.
Dad’s is just a cool, down-home, comfort-food name that owner Gary Ogier’s mother came up with back in 1975 when she started the little bike-shop-in-a-strip-mall on West 190th Street, near Anza just over the Hermosa/Redondo border.
And the name is such a natural fit — it looks and feels like your dad’s old work shop in the family garage — that people assume Dad must exist.
“I’ve had to answer that question a million times over the years,” Ogier said. “It seems like everyone who comes in wants to meet Dad… but there is no Dad.”
While there is no official Dad, Dad’s Bike Barn is run by two guys who look like The Dads from Central Casting. They’re both middle-aged Vietnam War veterans who have been friends since they met at Hoover High School in Glendale in the 1960s.
Today they work side by side in what could pass for a cool Disney movie about a little pa-and-pa bike shop that beats the big chains the old fashioned way: by working harder, working smarter and becoming an integral part of the local biking community.
The bad guys would be the suits, the corporate climbers who manage the local franchise bike-store and their minimum-wage staff of texting-teenagers who don’t know a Raleigh from a Rottweiler.
In this feel-good bike story, Ogier is the self-taught mechanical wizard who can fix anything on two wheels. Rick (no last name please, like Madonna or Kobe) plays the role of a cranky-but-kindhearted shop manager who usually manages to find some kind of unadvertised discount when it’s time to ring up the bill.
Odd couple
That mix of Rick’s business savvy and Gary’s mechanical savvy has helped Dad’s Bike Barn survive and even prosper in a dangerous world of bike store franchises, big-box discounts on cheap knockoffs and large chains absorbing the old village bike shop.
“There are fewer than 5,000 bike shops in this country, and the number’s declining every year, according to the trade publications,” Ogier said. “Sometimes it feels like most of them are right here within a 20-mile radius of our shop.”
Despite the intense competition, however, over the last three decades — without really intending to and without a business plan — Dad’s has carved out a Beach City niche as the place to go for smart shoppers who don’t have the need, the desire or the cash for a $2,500 carbon-chromium 50-speed bike built in Italy by old-school craftsmen who take an oath of excellence.
“We get a lot of customers by word of mouth, just locals talking to each other about getting good value for their money,” Ogier said. “And we also get a surprising number of customers sent here by some of the high-end bike shops in the area… They only want to sell new bikes.”
Dad’s, however, is pushing high-quality used bikes sold by two old-school American craftsmen who have taken an oath of excellent work at fair prices backed up by their personal warranty. If Gary or Rick tells you that your new derailleur should work just fine and then you come in a week later with a sob story and a busted gear, they’ll fix it — no charge, no questions asked and no need to check with headquarters, consult the policy manual or get a written estimate.
“I just love the way they back up their work. And I love their high level of service and personal attention to your problem, whatever it is,” said Cathy Behrens of Redondo Beach. “It’s the exact opposite of buying a bike at K-Mart or Wal Mart.”
Today’s special
In the wake of $4-a-gallon gas, a cratering economy and a tipping-point cultural shift to greener lifestyles, Dad’s has been jammed from morning to night with people cruising its two little aisles literally stacked from floor to ceiling with new and used bikes.
Whether they were looking for a ready-to-rumble mountain bike, a big-old Strand cruiser with the high-wide check-me-out handlebars or something in between, they had plenty to choose from.
Other customers were looking for a mechanic to get their old bike back in shape.
On one recent Saturday morning, a half-dozen customers were waiting just for a chance to talk to Gary about their particular problem. Some hung onto sick bikes clearly in need of a bike doctor, while others had bikes that were DOA and just needed to be put out of their misery by someone like Gary who will tell their owners the hard truth.
“One of the great things about Dad’s is knowing that you can trust them and not worry about them trying to rip you off by selling you a new bike or expensive parts you don’t really need,” said Kim Hughes, who lives in the Hollywood Riviera section of Redondo and frequently bikes on the Strand. “They’ll tell you if it’s worth saving or not. That trust is so important when you’re making decisions about a new part.” (Reference: differences between yakima and thule cargo boxes)
As he spoke, customers with an itch to buy and cash to spend milled around outside the front of the store, eyeballing the handful of ON SALE previously owned bikes set outside every day after Gary deems them good-to-go.
Locals know to look outside first for the latest bike bargains. The rules are simple: First come, first served. You snooze, you lose. If you like it, grab it. Then get Rick to unlock it for you — yes, several low-lifes have tried to steal bikes over the years, none successfully — and take it for a test ride around the back parking lot of the strip mall.
“If you don’t like what they have then come back the next day and they’ll usually have something different out front,” said Hughes, who was there to get a new chain for his 12-speed mountain bike that he bought at Dad’s three years ago. “I’ve been coming to Dad’s ever since I was a kid but I’ve never seen anything like the kinds of crowds I see now. And it’s not just beach people anymore…I seen brothers from the hood and old rich guys from Hollywood buying wheels for their trophy girlfriends. Everyone wants to save a couple bucks these days.”
Hughes pointed out another reason he favors used bikes in the $100-200 range.
“You buy one of those $1,500 to two grand bikes with all the high-tech stuff, and you got to worry about that beauty every second, like a hot girlfriend that everyone’s hitting on 24/7,” he said.
Finally, in this age of everyone’s-a-victim legal liability there’s always the issue of insurance in case of an accident or theft.
“Who can afford bike insurance? Not me,” he said. “It’s better to just go with a hundred dollar special that Dad’s put out here. It’s always worked for me… The trick is to keep coming back till you find the right bike at the right price.”
Indeed, most of the customers that day were recreational riders sidewalk surfing for a safe, affordable and reliable used bike they can start riding on the many bike paths in the area.
The most prominent, of course, is the ocean-front Strand bike path that runs from Redondo Beach all the way to Santa Monica in one form or another, at one point even detouring through a Marina Del Rey parking lot. The best, most scenic Strand stretch, however, is right here in the Beach Cities, from the Redondo flats right through Hermosa’s Pier Central and on to the immaculately groomed beaches and towering cliffside mansions of Manhattan Beach.
Ogier, like thousands of other local bikers, enjoys riding on the Strand after work and on the weekends.
“It’s the most beautiful path you can imagine,” he said. “I love that ride.”
But eventually his Strand excursions became a victim of his professional success.
“It got so I couldn’t go more than 10 feet on the Redondo Strand without someone stopping me and asking for help with this or that problem on their bike,” he said. “So I finally had to stop riding the Strand….I like to help people, but 10, 12 hours a day with a wrench in my hand is enough.”
Fourteen bikes
Many years ago Jose Casillas was driving down the Hermosa-Redondo flats on 190th St. when he saw a beefy, gray-haired guy with a cigarette in his mouth come out of a hole-in-the-wall bike store and get on a little girl’s pink bike.
“I saw the guy — I now know it was Rick — throw his leg over the bike and ride off around this little strip mall, like he was testing the bike,” Casillas said. “I said to myself that looks like my kind of bike shop.”
The Redondo Beach banker, who rides 12-miles, roundtrip to work every day, stopped, parked and walked into Dad’s.
“It was like taking a step back in time, like being back in the 1950’s,” Casillas said. “Bikes and tires and spare parts everywhere, tubes hanging from the ceiling, and a couple of guys sitting around discussing what was wrong with a bike and how it could be fixed.”
As the proud owner of 14 bikes, Casillas has a keen interest in high-quality, low-cost work done by local mechanics. Now he felt like a prospector striking gold.
“I just knew it was the place for me,” he said. “I could tell right away that they’re honest and they’re good at what they do. And I’ve learned over the years that they’re funny and they’re good people.”
Today he’s a devout member of the ever-expanding Dad’s Bike Barn fan club.
“They’ve worked on every one of my 14 bikes,” he said. “I just bring it in and say here’s the problem. You guys figure it out.”
He even offered Dad’s the ultimate in trust and respect a few years ago when he asked Dad’s to disassemble several of his bikes and pack them for a trip to Europe in such a way that he could easily reassemble them on the other side of the pond.
“It took me almost two hours each to put them back together,” he said. “I gotta admit I was starting to get worried that I couldn’t do it, but then I said to myself that Gary would never do that to me. And it turned out that he didn’t…it just took me a little longer than I expected.”
Like many of Dad’s customers, Casillas has become a student of the shop’s inter-personal dynamics, paying close attention to the way the two men split up their duties.
“Gary is a mechanical genius, the guy who is going to fix your bike no matter how big the problem is. If it can be fixed, he’ll find a way,” he said. “And Rick — once you get past his grumpiness — runs the shop like a crusty old father. He has a great sense of humor, is very helpful and knows a lot about bikes. He knows what he’s talking about.”
Another loyal customer, Alan Shemetz of La Mirada, grew up in Palos Verdes and started going to Dad’s as a kid. He continues to make the 25-mile trek from his current home rather than find a new bike shop.
Shemetz, a project manager for Boeing, said he decided to stick with Dad’s because he knows and trusts Gary and Rick in a way that he might not be able to develop at some new shop.
And as an added bonus, going to Dad’s reminds him of his childhood and what it was like growing up in a simpler era of local ownership and a fun-before-funds attitude that is disappearing year-by-year as a relentless tidal wave of money and development rolls over the Beach Cities.
“I spent a lot of time around the beach vibe growing up in PV,” he said. “To me, Dad’s Bike Barn is the essence of the old beach community vibe and that whole way of life.”
A lucky man
Not only does Dad’s Bike Barn not advertise anywhere, but both Gary and Rick spent most of the summer putting off requests for an interview for this story. “We’re just too busy right now,” was the standard answer.
But finally Gary, who just laughed when told he had been called a mechanical genius by several of his customers, agreed to answer a few questions while he gave a tune up to a Schwinn 10-speed cruiser.
“I check everything,” he said as he mounted the bike on the rack and spun the tires. “Tires, chains, brakes, cables — I check all the systems and fix whatever needs fixing.”
It was late on a busy Tuesday afternoon as the crowd thinned out and the 6:30 closing time approached. Rick handled the still-steady trickle of walk-in customers while Gary worked on the bike and gave his first-ever press interview.
He said that after graduating from Hoover High in 1964, he was drafted into the Army while his friend Rick, to avoid being drafted, enlisted in the Marine Corps.
They both served in Vietnam, and that was all he cared to say about that.
After being discharged in the early 1970s, he said, he took a stab at selling motor homes in San Diego. His mother, responding to the 1974 gas shortages and the ’70s bike boom, opened her little bike shop in 1975 and called it Dad’s.
It was first located across the street in the strip mall now anchored by a 99 Cents store. Dad’s moved to its current location at 2425 West 190th St. in1983 and has remained there ever since.
When Ogier’s motor home project faded away, he moved back home from San Diego. Soon the inevitable started.
“At first I just came in to help my mom a couple of days a week,” he said. “It wasn’t supposed to be full-time or permanent.”
But Ogier soon realized he was a lucky man: he had found what he was meant to do.
Over the next few months he got better and better at fixing bikes. He displayed a natural talent for figuring out what the mechanical problem was and — more important — what the solution was.
And long before recycling took hold as a national obsession, he noticed something wasteful that needed fixing: his mother would gladly take old bikes for trade-in value but then she would just toss them in the dumpster out back.
“She would always say what’s the point of keeping them?” he said. “This was before recycling took hold.”
So he asked her if he could try to rehabilitate the bikes that were salvageable. She said sure and thus was born the core of what became Dad’s primary business as it expanded over the years.
A few years later Rick was out of the military and looking for a new job. He came for a visit to see his old buddy and seemed to fit into the shop naturally. When he officially came aboard to manage the business it freed up Ogier to concentrate on the mechanical side and Dad’s began to find its true identity as a used bike center.
Days of whine and wisdom
Several feet away from where Ogier spoke is a prominently posed “No Whining” sign that both Ogier and Rick take great pride in.
Now, make no mistake: they love all their customers.
But after three decades of listening to people complain about their bike problems they love some customers more than others.
“I like customers who just tell us what the problem is,” Ogier said. “But other people, like some 37-year-old kids I know, it’s always ‘I was just riding along when this happened…And I say no you weren’t just riding along. Or they say ‘I just got it fixed and now this tire is flat…”
He admitted that he liked the No Whining sign and defended its sentiments by noting: “Parents always say, ‘I want that sign.’”
Ogier also shared several nuggets of bicycling wisdom culled from more than 30 years of selling and fixing bikes.
First, know your market.
“Most people don’t want to spend more than $150 for a used bike,” he said.
“That’s why the high-end shops send people here — because you don’t make nearly as much money on used bikes as you do on new bikes.”
Second: know when to expect the highs and lows of your market.
“It’s always very busy in the summer, sometimes to where we can’t keep up, like it has been all this summer,” he said. “And then on Oct. 1 it just slows down…we don’t know if that will happen this year.”
Predictably, business picks up again right after January 1.
“People always come in every new year. Usually it’s guys who are talking about going riding and losing weight,” he said. “They buy a bike, then they ride it two, three times on hot summer nights and come back next New Years and say the same thing.”
Another predictable customer base: ex-runners.
“Guys come in all torn up with bum knees and torn cartilage from running,” he said. “They know they have to stop pounding the pavement, but they want to keep fit.”
And he said he is content concentrating on the low end of the increasingly lucrative bike market.
“People always ask how we can stay in business with these prices, but we do all right and I’m not planning on retiring any time soon,” he said. “I hope I die right here in the shop.”
Writer Paul Teetor can be reached at paulteetor@verizon.net. B