I was with Stan for a while, and then I was at a couple of other places before I opened my own shop, Frank's Bike Shop, in 1976. I think it was meant to be because this place was a bakery before I got here and the sign said "BAKE SHOP" and I didn't switch signs. I just exchanged an "I" for the "A" so it says "BIKE SHOP" (laughs).

I live across the street from my store. I've been here in the Lower East Side of New York since my family moved down from the South Bronx in 1955. I try and hire people from the neighborhood--certain kids. But young kids here are always a problem. They got too many friends hanging around. So I'm very careful. I have three people working for me, including my old friend Tommy--Stan's son. I hope I'm a fair boss. But if I feel that a person is not being honest, or if they have a problem they can't deal with, I don't want it around me. You know young kids are going to have problems, you know they're going to steal, they're going to use drugs. I don't want that around me. That I cannot tolerate. So normally I look at it like this: I want a kid who would be working on his own bike even if he wasn't working here. I want a kid that knows how to do something from wanting to do it. You know? That's how I pick my kids and I think I pick well because I've never had to fire anybody (laughs). And everybody says I'm a pushover.

I open the store myself at 9:00 am every day. Then I have a kid who comes by and gives me a hand taking the old bikes for sale out on the street and then we get to work fixing what we didn't get to the day before. And as customers come in, we help them one by one. The customers are the beauty of this business. There's no sex, no age, no nationality to the bike business. It's an everybody business. My mother came here one day and says to me, "Oh you got good customers: the priest comes here; the rabbi comes here." It's one of the few businesses I can think of that has that variety. It's because a bike is a way of being able to do everything: transportation, exercise, pleasure, you name it.

People are working on their bikes--I got a little old lady who does dog grooming; she couldn't get a job other than that, so she travels from one place to another taking care of people's dogs and she carries all her equipment on her bicycle. This is her means of being able to make a living--on her bike. And I think a lot of people, sometimes when things get tough, they find out that they have to cycle instead of spending the money in the cab or the subway. And why not use a bicycle? It's a nice ride.

I try not to remember the bad customers. I mean, you know you get people with other problems, personal problems that are out there and they're so frustrated that they're not looking to understand anybody else's. They can be very bad and you'd be surprised how much someone can yell at you about their bicycle. They want things immediately, they just expect things. I guess they come from a demanding family, or maybe they're a boss or something, or maybe they just get things done in that way. I got a psychiatrist coming in here who thinks his time is worth more than anybody else's. That's an insult. A real mean psychiatrist. Rude to me, rude to the other customers. I try to forget about him.

Sometimes the kids are easier than the adults. I get along really well with them, which makes sense I guess, because kids love bikes. And I like to think of myself as a role model--depending on the child. Like I says, some you can help and some you can't. Some are just too messed up. Unfortunately, it becomes that way because of their background. A lot of them come from broken homes. I sponsor the neighborhood baseball team because if somebody starts them off in the right direction, maybe they learn how to maintain their body and their minds. So maybe I help a bit. I know I have had many young kids walk back in here after twenty years, they say, oh, I remember when my father bought my bike from you, or I used to bother you all the time with my little bike, or something. And now today they're businessmen or whatever. My own brother, I brought him into the store when he was eleven years old. Today he's a doctor.

The hardest part of this business is that there's no time to yourself. It takes you a year to fix your own bike because you can't get around to it. Everyday it's another thing--nothing's too hard, but there's always some complication. I'm not into computers. I still go by the old school on things like that. Everybody tells me, computerize your store so you don't have all them papers; there's even computers on bicycles today with all the little digitals and everything else. Everybody today is always in a hurry, they all want to know how fast, how far, that's the way we live today.

Bicycles has changed. When I started working on them, it was a foot brake bike with a coaster brake, then along came a three-speed, and today you got twenty-four speeds on bicycles. I've seen everything, I grew up around it all. And repairs are kind of generational. I mean certain repairs go out as new things come in. For instance, I think I'm the only guy left in the city who can still fix the sewn tires. And I like to do the dinosaur repairs like that. But unfortunately, the amount of money you make on some of the things, it doesn't carry you for the expenses of today's fast world that we're in. Everybody thinks a nut is a nut. They don't realize that the older nuts all have different numbers of threads per inch than some of the newer nuts. And it's not cost conscious sometimes to go chasing down some of these old nuts just to do a small repair job. But I still do it. I can't turn work down and I love the old bikes. I know that in some ways the newer bikes have improvements over the older ones. Just like automobiles and everything else, these days you get a more efficient product. I mean, look at what the shocks have done for bikes. And the multiple gear system? It's a huge improvement, now anybody can shift like twenty-one speeds easily. But not everything that's new is actually an improvement. People like gadgets--it's a way of life today. Do you really need a computer on a bicycle? Do you really need to know that it took you "x" amount of time to get uptown? If it motivates them, and it makes them happy about riding a bicycle, that's fine. That's good for me. But a computer on a bicycle is not an improvement. I guess I have a thing about computers. I say I don't need a computer, but maybe I do. I don't really want to think about it.

Our lives are so influenced by technology. Jobs that require physical work, actually using your hands, are diminishing. It's making people lazy. Everybody's letting the machine do everything for them. I think we should be going back to the basic needs more. I think teachers in school should go back and teach the kids how to read and write and in arithmetic, because not everyone is going to become a scientist and not everyone is going to be a boss. I have always related to things mechanically--that's how I am. And there's always going to have be workers in this world, and they're going to have to know it. If your strength is your mechanical ability, you shouldn't just go and try to get into something else. A lot of kids get into trouble because they go out and they try to make that fast buck when they are not capable of being able to do that. I don't expect to drive around a BMW, I'm happy with my Chevy Van. That's where I feel comfortable in and that's what I like.

I'm old-fashioned. Old school. I don't want to open other stores. I don't want to be the Dunkin' Donuts of bike shops. I want to remain as I am. I've been working from word-of-mouth for the last thirty years. I had a following from the shop where I previously worked; the people came down this way. I didn't force them to, but they were following me. So I must be doing something right. And at this point of my life, what else can I go out there to do? Like I said, I'm not into computers, I'm not a doctor, my younger brother is a doctor. I never had the head for it. I feel that I can make the best living that I can make working with my hands. This is what I know. This is what I can make money in. This is what I like doing, and this is what I do.

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