When we picked it up from Jitensha Studio, I took it for a quick test ride in a nearby parking lot, even though purchasing it was a prearranged deal - I think my parents had deferred to Hiroshi’s expertise and he had just chosen and ordered it specifically for us. The RB-T represented such a quantum leap beyond anything that I had ridden before that I am sure I didn’t really know what to make of it.
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Learning to shift and stop on what can only be called weak equipment taught me not just how to ride a bike but how to be a cyclist. Little could I realize, of course, that the thumbies were teaching me how to shift and trim gears by intuition, and the flexible side-pulls were, in their own lawsuit-courting way, teaching me how to control my bike by moving my weight around and looking ahead down the trail. Mine had a kickstand, which I removed in protest when I discovered how uncool this was. My bike had bottom-of-the-barrel friction thumbies, wiggly side-pulls, and steel one piece cranks. I had fun on them, and they worked on the hills, trails, and roads just fine, even as I saw my friends getting “better” bikes that had super-cool features like rapid-fire indexing or cantilever brakes. I didn’t take particularly good care of them and had a tendency to crash into things. Nevertheless, they were just fine for a kid like me. The were heavy, rattly, and not great in any sort of objective sense. My previous bikes had been department- or toy-store hi-ten Huffys and the like. The storefront window of Jitensha Studio on University Ave., in Berkeley, CA. (In 2006, the shop was profiled in the New York Times.) My folks had met him on the school playground, which, as a parent now myself, I realize is the primary way you meet new people as an adult with kids. We had the good fortune to get the bike from Hiroshi Iimura, designer of beautiful Ebisu bicycles, inspiration for Grant Petersen’s designs at Bridgestone and later Rivendell, and proprietor of the elegantly understated Jitensha Studio in Berkeley, CA. Actually it comes with a 90 degree stem, for slightly higher handlebar position.” All the catalog scans come from Sheldon Brown, here. In the cow photo, the bike has a normal road stem. If you don’t race either on the road or the dirt, and you don’t have a good bike yet, and you can only get one, and the hills in your area demand low gears. The text is pure Grant Petersen: “This is our most versitle bike. A page from the 1991 Bridgestone catalog, showing the RB-T Synergy being ridden by the mythical Pineapple Bob, himself.
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