First Flight Bicycles-History:

 Since we are committed to preserving the history of bikes, I guess it is fitting that we should also have a history of how we got here?  Well, here is the long and convoluted story.

Back in 1979, when cavemen were carving bikes out of stone, I was given a couple of truck loads of bike junk.  One of the dads in our local Boy Scout troop had served as the local fix-it guy and had accumulated a pile of bike parts.  He figured the best way to not have to fix bikes was to have nothing to fix bikes with....so he gave it all to me.  I built a couple of bikes out of the mess and a dynasty was born.  I scoured local "recycling centers", then known as the dump and garage sales looking for raw materials.  I would take them apart, repaint them, fix them and sell them with help from the marketing department (aka a painted over real estate sign in the front yard).  One time, I got a really good deal on a case of medium blue spray paint which meant that ever bike I painted for about a year was the same color!  We would sometime drive into town and I could spot "my" bikes by that color of blue.  In the next couple of years, I became locally known and folks would drop off bikes to get fixed.  I distinctly remember a guy once coming by and asking for a 53 tooth Campagnolo chain ring.  Not knowing what that was at the time, I just replied "uh, no" and off he went.  I was selling my refurbished bikes for $25-$35 and I am sure the chain ring cost twice that at the time.  In three summers, I sold about 125 bikes but it was time to head to college which closed my first chapter in the bike industry.

Chapter two opens in Columbus, Ohio at The Ohio State University.  Needing book, well OK beer, money it was time to find gainful employment.  As with most recent high school grads, skills are in short supply.  Well, I figured three years of working on bikes ought to count for something so I went off in search of a bike shop.  It just so happened, that a new shop had just opened North of Campus in the Dublin area.  The firm that rep-ed Raleigh bikes in the center of the country had just opened and was looking for employees.  Keep in mind that this was 1983, the shop had two dressing rooms, TVs, carpeting, aluminum bike racks, raised clothing platform, super sanitary work stations, custom display cases, open ceilings........pretty much state of the art at the time.  The idea was to show bike dealers that they could sell 100% Raleigh and make a living.  Raleigh had a rough time in the late 1970's and early 1980's before Huffy bought the rights to the name in the US so many dealers considered it a second tier brand.  It was also to serve as an place where sales reps could come and see how retail worked and bring in dealers to "wow" them.  This is where I purchased my very first mountain bike, a Raleigh Seneca.  I remember changing the cable housing out for yellow to sport it up some.  I think it retailed for about $350, and I called my parents telling them that I couldn't imagine ever having a nicer bike! As I wheeled my new steed out to the car, I fell flat on my butt while turning a corner on the center ridge tires.  Thus began my mountain biking career.  The original name of the shop was "Raleigh Bikes of Hayden Run" and turned out to be pretty successful. 

Since the first store worked out, they decided to open a store in Westerville and then purchase the former Rick Case store right on Campus.  For those of you familiar with Columbus, the corner of Lane and High is a well know intersection.  Rick Case had gone over to France and had LeJeune bikes, among others, custom made to his specs.  Needless to say, they didn't upgrade the bikes.  They were miserable to assemble.  They didn't really come in a box, more like two sheets of cardboard that was shrink-wrapped.  You had to use pliers to get the seat rails close enough together to fit in the seat post clamp.  Every chain had a "lucky link" that was sure to fail if you didn't find it.  The Rigida rims were made out of the softest alloy know to man and dented if you looked at them wrong.   We were selling $179 French road bikes, that weighed just over 20 pounds, to college students.  Let's just say that repairs were common.  Once we cleared through that junk, we were back to selling Raleighs.  Just in time for the aluminum Technium line that sold very nicely.  We weren't overly impressed with the Raleigh mountain bikes at the time so we convinced the management to let us order a run of Specialized bikes.  I was lusting after the pearl white 1987 Stumpjumper Comp but they were sold out for the year so we ended up with Rockhoppers.  I think mine must have been a 1986 since it was red.  We later got in some of the 1987 Rockhoppers which came in blue or yellow.  A lot of the guys switched forks for the other color, confusing collectors for decades to come!  I had put off graduation as long as possible, but it was time.  In May 1987, I graduated with a computer engineering degree and made a few half-hearted attempts at interviewing with the appropriate companies.  Fortunately, none seemed to be in need of my skills so I hung at the bike shop. 

Since I wasn't getting a "real job", it looked like I needed to get more serious about the bike industry.  Two college buddies and I spent a week traveling through North and South Carolina as well as Georgia.  We went to all of the larger cities, bought a map, checked out the Yellow Pages, and visited each shop.  We took tons of notes about service, prices, bike lines and took them home to study.  Charlotte, NC seemed to be the most underserved market and became the target.  Meanwhile, my current employer thought that it would be a good idea to ship me to Kansas City, KS to help open a shop there.  It took us a couple of months to get up and running and I still remember being locked in a vacant shop stuffed with boxed bikes.  The 1987 Raleigh Seneca wasn't a big seller since it was something of a pink (they called it salmon) color so we had like 100 of those that were bought on close out.  Once the shop was up and running, it was time for a short vacation to recover.  Steve, my boss at the time, pulled me aside and had heard about our bike shop plans.  He told me to come back committed to staying on or to not come back.  Well, that vacation lasted a little longer than originally planned. 

Since I know longer had a job, it was time to get moving.  Since Charlotte seemed to be the best market, I moved there and hoped the others would follow suit.  As often happens, nobody else followed through so I was on my own.  While working on a location and business plan, I worked  selling tires until one day, the boss and I had a clash.  I opened the newspaper and actually saw a want ad for a bike mechanic in a place called Mooresville.  Hadn't heard of it before but it was reasonably close on the map so I called to check it out.  I made the trip north and met with Bruce, the owner, and showed him my business plan and told him that I was interested in working with him but not for him.  We decided to give it a couple of months to make sure it would work.  The shop was in a small down town building that was fairly run down and there was somewhere around 35 bikes in inventory at the time.  In late 1988, we heard that one of the shops in Statesville was closing and decide to check out the market.  We drove around Statesville for a day and just as we were leaving town, ran across a vacancy at 1814 E. Broad St.  It looked good so we called the owner and toured the 1,250 square feet the next day.  Next thing we know, the lease is signed and I am a 50% partner in Cool Breeze Cyclery.  The Statesville store opened in April of 1989 and for awhile we were open 7 days a week which was a drag.  Bruce ran the Statesville store and I was running the original Mooresville location. 

Things were moving along smoothly and sales were good.  In 1991, we purchased the Mooresville building and began to make some much-needed improvements.  The Statesville store was quickly outgrowing the original 1,250 square feet so we moved across the street to 1811 E. Broad St. in April of 1991 into 3,000 square feet.  We were growing enough that the owner of Pro Cyclery in Hickory approached us about purchasing his business.  It looked to be a pretty good deal so in June of 1992 we added a third location.  The Hickory market was the largest of the three and quickly outpaced the other 2 stores in sales.  The original location wasn't in the best of neighborhoods so we quickly moved into the Viewmont area of Hickory.  Thing went along pretty nicely until early 1994 when Bruce and I were having conflicting views on how to run the business so I proposed to split the business.  Since we had three inventories, a store truck and a building, splitting the assets was relatively pain free.  I took the Statesville and Hickory stores and Bruce took the Mooresville store, building and truck.  I wanted to start our new identity so a name change was needed.

I spent a couple of hours going through a dictionary and making a list of words that sounded interesting.  The list got narrowed down pretty quickly and included some of the usual stuff with "cycle", "chain", "adventure" and "breakaway" but nothing seemed to stick.  I really wanted something unique to us.  How many Chain Reaction stores does the world need?  I had always been interested in flight, especially the Wright brothers.  There were some parallels since they started in Ohio at a bike shop and came to North Carolina which is a similar path that I took.  First in Flight was also the license plate motto for North Carolina and was also the motto they used later on the state quarter.  I really liked the story behind the name, plus the uniqueness, so First Flight Bicycles was in!  At this time, our vintage bike collection was somewhere around a dozen bikes or so.

Right after the split, I was looking for a building with more space and hopefully, something that we could purchase.  Downtown Statesville has some really nice old buildings and, in the mid 1990's, they were relatively affordable.  We actually had the choice of several similar buildings and ended up purchasing the one at 216 S. Center St. since it had a couple of parking spaces included with it.  The building had at one time been a five and dime store and more recently, an auto parts store.  The best part for us was the 2 stories at 5,000 square feet each plus the 14 foot tall stamped tin ceilings.  This would give us plenty of space for our growing bike collection.  About this time, we put up our first web site on AOL.  It was pretty much shop hours and a couple of bikes and that was it.  I do remember the pages having a hideous orange background and little tiny fuzzy pictures.

During the spring of 1995, we were preparing the new building for occupancy.  The ceiling required 13 GALLONS of paint, all applied with a fuzzy roller from the top of a 10' step ladder.  Brad Walton did a lot of the painting and now has his own bike wear company called Spectrum Techwear and prints most of our t-shirts for us now.  The shop was selling Trek, Specialized and Cannondale now which was unusual for a store of our size.  At that time, those were really about the three most desirable bike lines.