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stark's faders

When I was a junior at East Noble High School in Kendallville, Indiana, some of the guys I hung around with decided to enter a bicycle race hosted by the school. Dubbed the "Little 500", it was a race around the school's parking lot (50 laps maybe?) that was held in May to celebrate the Indianapolis 500.

Four high school guys standing behind a bicycle in a parking lot, one guy kneeling in front holding up four fingers. All are geeks and/or minor-level jocks.

We tended more toward the geek than the jock, but a couple of the guys were in track. So even though a few of us smoked cigarettes, and none of us were above drinking a beer, we figured we wouldn't come in last. Our one goal was to beat a specific team of seniors, composed of "real" jocks of the type that end up at frat houses that are forbidden to be on campus because of drunken debaucheries.

The team was called "Stark's Faders"... (From left to right: Jeff Stayner, Joe Hornet, Leonard Clevenger, Mike Carroll, Regan Ford. God, we were skinny. Check out the stylish station wagon in the background!)

In the 70's, you had to be 21 to drink beer in Indiana – but only 18 in Ohio. It was 3.2 beer, but it was beer. As you can guess, there were a lot of bars just across the state line. (And there were just as many cops on the other side at closing time. More than one underage drinker learned how to drive at high speed on back roads in the dark while returning from a night at his cups. Or so I heard. I wouldn't know about it directly, of course.)

Anyway, "Stark's" because it was one of the more well-known Ohio bars, and a cool sort of high-school reference. And "Faders" to poke fun at ourselves and our supposed heavy partying. (Only in our dreams and fertile imaginations.)

I was the mechanic, because I'd worked as a bicycle repairman for the local Western Auto during junior high. The other guys were the riders because, well, because they said they would be.

Before the race I taught the guys the fastest way to get the chain back on the sprockets, should it come off. A couple of the other teams overheard and carried back the secret to their own riders. Just like the "Big 500", there's always inter-team espionage.

Four guys standing behind a bicycle in a parking lot and one guy kneeling in front. All have their backs to the camera to show the rider numbers and nicknames that are on their shirts.

I remember the race being uneventful. No chains coming off. No crashes. You know, boring. Just the huffing and puffing of Stark's Faders as they circled the black top.

We finished fourth, out of ten I think. (I'm holding up 4 fingers in the first photo.)

And we beat the senior team.

The shirts are labeled with iron-on patch material that I cut into the desired shapes. The lettering is mushroom-like, reflecting the early 70's focus (well, in small, late blooming Indiana towns anyway) on psychedelics. I can't imagine that there's any particular reason for the numbers. No hidden cabalistic signals to the Weatherman, no clandestine semaphores to the local narc, no underwear-on-the-clothesline signal to the secret lover.

Jeff, number 7, is "Stroh's". Joe, number 8, is "Aco-Gold". Mike, Stroh's Pit, is "hobbitt". Leonard, number 6, is "Bennie". And Regan, number 5, is "Fader".

I have no idea who took the photos.