Germane Holiday Cards

Here's a couple of cards from back in the day. The Santa one is all mine; I used to have some talent. The B&W cards were my concepts, executed by one of our very talented riders.

Those characters correspond to actual people, but I'll never tell...

Probably not physically possible, but a great visual. The carrying the tree part; of course an  R69 could make haste in the snow.

My fave. Theoretically, that's my old house, the house my wife grew up in and where we raised our kids. Never did have a K100RS though. 

All Roads Lead to Reuben

About a decade ago, I wrote and posted a piece about D.C. motorcycle courier culture in its heyday, the nineteen seventies and eighties. From time to time, I still get a response from one lost soul or another seeking to reconnect with their past. I’m surprised to find the piece is first and practically only legitimate hit when you Google some key phrases. The responses are pretty consistent, asking who I am, when was I there, do I remember so-and-so, did I ever work with somebody, and so forth.

And I try and respond, but most of the queries are anonymous, so we never have a conversation, simply a long disjointed series of free-floating comments, seeking connection but never attaining it.

Because of the ongoing interest, and my own interest in the subject, I wanted to reach out to the primary sources while I still can. Jerry Blum is gone; likewise, Dave Watson, Lap Nguyen and Dave McComb. Those are just the ones I know of. The others? Scattered to the winds…

I wanted to write the story of a place and time that is long gone, so those of us who still share that common experience can better remember it and maybe compare notes. I know that for a lot of us who passed through Metro Messenger, we will remember it as one of the best jobs we ever had. Not for the money, but for the sense of being part of something that’s hard to explain. I’d never want to do it again, and I wouldn’t want my kids to do it, but I’m glad for the experience. And proud of the three and a half years I spent on the street, logging about thirty thousand urban miles on a succession of Schwinn Travelers.

So I dug up an address from the internet, and wrote a letter to Reuben W. Moore asking if he would meet with me and tell his story. I mailed the letter, feeling like I was throwing a message in a bottle into the ocean. I wondered about it for a few days, and then forgot about it. At least I had sent the letter.

Imagine my surprise several weeks later when I got a voicemail with a distinctive, unforgettable and instantly recognizable voice. It was Reuben.

He and I spoke that evening for almost half an hour, establishing a common frame of reference and, oddly enough, comparing notes on the infirmities that age brings. He graciously agreed to meet with me the following week.

We met on a sunny June afternoon at his home in the Northern Virginia suburbs. As I arrive he is sorting various boxes in the garage, clad only in running shorts, running shoes and a baseball cap sporting the insignia of the 82nd Airborne. His garage is home to an admirable collection of motorcycles—all of which he still rides from time to time. Among them is a /2 sidecar rig, modified with the engine from an R100. It was custom made for him by the late Lap Nguyen, longtime mechanic for Metro Messenger and Capital Cycle, who went on to own and operate a shop in Alexandria, specializing in BMWs of all kinds. That shop is now run by Lap’s son, Khan. Also in that collection are a well-worn R75/6, an R100RS, (my personal all-time favorite bike; sadly, sans its distinctive fairing), and a first year K100.

A native of the D.C. area, he has recently moved to this house from his long-time home in Great Falls with his third wife. The house is spare and uncluttered; there is still much unpacking and sorting to be done. He remarried following the unexpected death of his second wife of twenty-five years some two years ago. He is haunted by the sudden tragedy, and the conversation tends to revert to that subject abruptly from time to time.

Despite the air conditioning, he remains shirtless, and I see that three decades has not softened his physique. It makes me suddenly very self-conscious of how out of shape I am as a longtime mouse jockey. He always had an uncanny ability to appear out of nowhere, anytime or anyplace in the city, running from one thing to another, ready to catch a careless rider off guard. He appears to keep his veins on the outside of his body, and while I suspect his peers would consider it an accomplishment to complete eighteen holes using an electric golf cart, he has run every day of his adult life, until sidelined recently by surgery. He clearly resents the interruption of this routine.

I sit across from him at a simple oak table in the dining room. We are joined by an elderly one-eyed Portuguese water dog, whose contribution to the conversation comes from gnawing on one squeaky toy, then a different toy that incessantly bleats out something about bananas. But the dog is fond of leaning into my leg, and is endlessly amenable to being petted and scratched behind the ears. I come prepared for a full-on interview, with notepad, list of prepared questions, and two recorders. But from the moment we step inside, it is clear this will not be an interview, but a conversation between two old acquaintances. I have a slight advantage, because there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of motorcyclists and bicyclists who passed through Metro Messenger back in the day. But there was only one Reuben Moore.

Reuben grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland. He was educated by nuns before leaving home to join the Army. He went to Fort Bragg where he joined the 82nd Airborne. It was in the chow line at Fort Bragg that he met Jerry Blum, who he later brought on to manage Metro Messenger.

Besides introducing Moore to the joys of jumping out of airplanes, the Army also took him to Germany, where he discovered BMW motorcycles. His first BMW was an R26, a single-cylinder bike (produced from 1956 to 1960) which produced a whopping 15 hp.

When the Army was done with him, he returned to the D.C. area. In a story familiar to many who followed in his footsteps, he attended college while working two part-time jobs: He made deliveries for the Washington Post in the morning, and for CBS news in the evenings.

With time, the volume of deliveries began to overshadow his coursework. Slowly and gradually, he began to accumulate BMWs and the riders to operate them. Metropolitan Messenger & Delivery Service was formed, operating out of a warehouse off Blues Alley in Georgetown. Now a new challenge presented itself. The motorcycles needed to be taken care of.

While making some of his early trips to Germany—he would make more than a hundred such trips during his career—he made valuable contacts within BMW and its network of over fifty OEM suppliers. It simply was easier to become an importer of parts for the motorcycles; in short order, Capital Cycles was formed as a mail order supplier of BMW parts—and an in-house resource for Metro Messenger’s fleet of bikes. It even served as its own customs broker, with a dedicated full-time customs brokerage clerk.

Metro Messenger and Capital Cycle operated from Blues Alley from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. He describes being in Georgetown during the 1968 riots. Parts of the city were so devastated they have only recently recovered, nearly five decades later. “You could smell the smoke from Georgetown. The smell clung for years. It looked like what I imagine Dresden looked like.”

He confirms the apocryphal tales of training new hires by leading them from the Georgetown base out on deliveries ‘Mother-goose’ style. He would initially lead the way, holding up fingers to indicate the appropriate gear to be in for urban riding. It was not something that came naturally to all riders. He has harsh recollections—to put it mildly—of some of his less capable charges. Mistakes were not tolerated, and carelessness with a Metro Messenger motorcycle could result in dismissal on the spot.

At its peak (at the time I was part of Metro) the Metro fleet comprised an assortment of BMWs from vintage /2s to relatively late-model R80/7s. Most were /2s and /5s; all carried a simple fiberglass fairing with a Plexiglas windshield. All the bikes were painted bright yellow for visibility, with the company name and phone number on the fairing. (There is still a yellow /2 gas tank from a Metro bike in the “museum” at Bob’s BMW in Jessup, Maryland). There is a photograph of the fleet, some two dozen bikes in all, parked in a row somewhere on L’Enfant Plaza S.W. That picture hung in the Metro dispatch offices for many years, and now hangs in Reuben’s garage.

Part of the fleet was equipped with rear-fender mounted radio boxes with whip antennas; the rest of the riders wore two-way radios in holsters on their hip. In the early eighties, Metro began requiring all its riders to wear bright yellow reflective safety vests, to help reduce their accident and injury rate; the vests were uncomfortable and awkward; riders generally hated them and would make any excuse to ditch them. But riding without your vest was a fireable offense, and eventually they were accepted as a necessary evil, though protests persisted.

The conspicuous radios frequently caused Metro riders to be confused for Police or other officials by tourists; the rider’s use of ‘10-codes’ to talk with dispatchers exacerbated the confusion. Simple questions for directions or the location of one attraction or another were likely to be met by an indifferent stare and a roar of exhaust as the rider wordlessly rode off.

Packages were carried in canvas bags slung on each side beside the rear wheel and above the mufflers. Once in a while, the bags might catch fire from the heat, as one rider enroute to Dulles Airport, twenty or so miles outside the city, discovered. He was described as racing out the Access Road, trailing a thin line of white smoke behind him much of the way, only to arrive at his destination with smoldering bags and an incinerated package.

As both companies expanded, Reuben brought Jerry Blum into the picture to run Metro; while he focused his attention on the parts import and distribution business. I asked if there was a “Good Cop/Bad Cop” dynamic with them; many riders felt that way. He rejects that notion, but adds that he was always more serious about the business side of things, while Jerry was more affable and interested in socializing and ‘being friends’ with the staff.

I will add that from my recollection as a young twenty-something bicycle courier, Reuben was frequently intimidating and terrifying and someone to steer clear of, just in case. There were all sorts of folk legends about what might happen if Reuben spied you doing something untoward while he was running about the city. In hindsight and with the benefit of speaking with him in person and at length, I think my concerns may have been exaggerated; his approach to the business seems quite reasonable.

After Blues Alley, both companies moved to 2328 Champlain Street N.W., a block east of 18th street in pre-gentrified Adams Morgan. Capital Cycle operated from the first floor, opening onto Champlain Street, while Metro Messenger operated from the second floor, accessed via the ramp and loading dock from the alley. The relatively short, steep ramp served to launch both motorcycles and bicycles into the alley at the beginning of the day as well as to stall their entry on returning at the end of the day. The garage was lined with steel lockers and had enough space for the fleet of motorcycles to park, as well as space for bicycles to be wedged in here and there.

The office and dispatch bullpens, nominally off-limits to couriers, faced the front of the building and were a smoke-clogged cacophony of phone calls, shouted interrogatories, crackling radio calls and urgent commands barked in 10-codes.

The ramp and loading dock were the hangouts of choice when the day was done. Beers were consumed, cigarettes et cetera were smoked, fables spun, advice given, notes compared, receptionists ranked, hazards discussed, outrages shared. The camaraderie was thick; what we experienced on the street was difficult to share with outsiders. It was hard to convey the good or the bad to people who weren’t doing it all day, every day. And yet it was critical to be able to unwind, to share in the common experience. The only respect or regard you received came from your peers; you faced an unflinchingly hostile world from the moment you rolled out in the morning until the moment you rolled back in at the end of the day. The outside world just didn’t get it.

It was easy enough for an upstart company to poach a disgruntled client or two from someone else with the promise of cheaper rates and faster service; just a handful of clients in different lines of business were all it really took to get off the ground. As long as there was a certain degree of counter-cyclical business built in, you could hardly go wrong. The growth of the federal regulatory sphere in the late seventies and early eighties (even well into the Reagan era) fed a booming band of competing companies, some as Washington outposts of national companies, others home-grown.

The barriers to entry in the courier business were few and slight. A cheap office and a phone line or two were all you really needed to break into the business; the niceties could come with time. Couriers communicated with the dispatchers through a mix of payphones, pagers, two-way radios and the courtesy phones of patient, long-suffering clients.

Riders who “aged off” the street (via burnout, injury or simply through wising up) would often be repurposed and recycled into any available office position. If they were presentable and personable, they might become an outside salesperson; if less presentable, they might find themselves answering phones. A very few former riders had the right mix of instinct, knowledge, patience, temperament and fortitude to become dispatchers. And a very select subset of those became good dispatchers. The best worked for Metro.

I started my courier life on a sweltering June morning at second-tier company located in the nondescript-est of nondescript office building in N.W., the D.C. outpost of a Manhattan-based company. I hated the dead end job I had, and an article in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine told of the exciting and thrilling life of a bike messenger. I took their written test and passed with flying colors. It was a single page with questions about which side of the street the odd addresses were on, what streets met at Dupont Circle, what street ran north from the Capitol, and such. I thought I was a whiz for doing so well, but realized quickly that passing and failing meant pretty much exactly the same thing as far as that company was concerned.

The pace of work there that summer was languid, and my paltry commissions reflected it. Their office shared a block with a bookstore with a large cart full of esoteric remainders, so at least I was well read.

Working there was kind of like how you see taxi or delivery services portrayed in movies or on T.V. A dispatch window; a fetid waiting room full of characters who were assigned a run, went out and completed it, called in to the dispatcher, then came back to the office and got back in the rotation. On a good day you might do a dozen jobs. After two summer stints there, about a year in total, I got annoyed by some trivial incident (…how was I supposed to know nobody makes money in the summer because D.C. shuts down?) and got the word about Metro. I was told to go and ask for “Jerry Rubin” or something like that. I applied and was told to come back the next day, ready to go to work.

It was a rude awakening to say the least. Kingfish was my “Mother Goose,” and I was his ugly spastic duckling. I did my best to keep up with him as he flew across the city. I had no idea what was going on, and by mid-afternoon I was convinced the bones in my feet were ground to powder. I was hungry, dehydrated, and I ached in places I had never felt before. We raced from point to point, interweaving picks and drops in what I had to admit was an amazingly logical fashion. I strained to understand the gibberish and static that came over the radio, but failed miserably. When it came my time to speak on the radio, I could never find a moment to get a word in edgewise; everyone else was so quick and fluid. We never went back to the office until the dispatcher barked “R-T-B” to us at the end of the day, telling us we could return to base. I was utterly exhausted, confused, overwhelmed, my head was spinning, and sure I couldn’t cut it. This was the big leagues, for sure.

My first few days were embarrassing and a little humbling. At Metro, you were expected to know which entrance to a building you used to get to a specific room number. You were expected to park your bike in the right spot. You took the elevators up and ran the stairs down, except where the stairs might take longer. We didn’t bother with signatures or manifests; they wasted time and time was money. Every second spared added up to a few more jobs by the end of the day. I once trailed one of my coworkers as he sprinted down a hallway, whipping envelopes under doors as he passed; I followed into one of those offices to see the receptionist pick up the envelope from under her chair without moving.

The dispatchers all knew exactly how long a task should take, and knew the second you were overdue. The singularly unforgivable transgression was “ghosting”—disappearing while on a run. It was the equivalent of being “AWOL,” but with the added concern that someone unaccounted for might be in trouble. If you wanted to have a steady stream of work lined up for you, you learned quickly to be where you were expected when you were expected. Being smart was good; being fast was good; being predictable was even better.

What I didn’t appreciate at first was the peculiar dynamic of a place like Metro Messenger. Turnover was high, something like four hundred percent annually by my rough estimate. Long-timers simply didn’t bother getting to know rookies; it wasn’t worth the bother because so many came and went every week. But around the three month mark, suddenly you ‘vested.’ You became 100% part of the group simply because they had seen you around long enough and all of a sudden, you were part of the club. It was an amazing transition to witness, even better to be a part of.

Metro spawned a number of competitors over the years like Speed Service and Mar-Sid, and through the seventies and eighties, services founded or staffed by Metro alumni followed a similar business model, though generally without the owned fleet of motorcycles. Metro begat a veritable Genesis’ worth of progeny over the years; second and third generation offspring traced their lineages back to Blues Alley or Champlain Street. Each new generation explored either a different niche or took a different approach to solving the same problem: How to make money by getting something from here to there.

By the early eighties, the relationship between Reuben and Jerry Blum began to fray. Eventually, a schism erupted between the two men that resulted in severing the long-standing partnership of Capital Cycle and Metro Messenger. Reuben turned Metro over fully to Jerry, and in 1982 Metro moved into new quarters at 2327 Champlain Street N.W., directly across from the old building. The new space had a fenced parking lot with parking for couriers, a larger garage, and office space upstairs which allowed the management offices to be separated from the dispatch area.

With the relationship with Capital Cycle sundered, the BMW fleet was no longer commercially viable. The decision was made to begin phasing out the BMWs and operating the newly released Honda Rebel 250 instead. (The Metropolitan Police Department has just added Rebels to their fleet, so the logic seemed sound.) Metro even made an appealing offer to its motorcyclists to help ease them through the transition from the prestigious BMWs to the more downscale Hondas: Ride a Rebel for a year and you can have it. Of course, most experienced riders added the phrase “…what’s left of it!” to the offer. The cheap, underpowered Rebels would be no match for the daily abuses a courier motorcycle experiences. I don’t know if anyone ever managed to earn their Rebel or not.

Capital Cycle left D.C., moving to new quarters on Moran Road in Sterling, Virginia, an area near Dulles Airport which was undergoing a transition from abandoned farmland to industrial parks and exurban sprawl. The location near the airport greatly improved the logistics of receiving inbound freight shipments from Capital’s many overseas suppliers, and outbound shipments of parts to its many customers.

Metro Messenger began using independent contractors in place of employees, offering a higher commission as an incentive. But the transition away from company maintained BMWs diminished the company’s reputation among the young riders of the city, and gradually there was little to differentiate Metro Messenger from its myriad competitors to potential riders.

At the same time, fundamental technological changes undermined the foundations of the delivery business worldwide. The fax machine is certainly cited as the primary blow to an industry built on moving papers from one place to another, but the emergence of desktop publishing and the laser printer (through the joint efforts of Apple, Aldus and Xerox) was another upheaval. Printing companies and the design, editorial, and prepress companies they worked with were all benefactors to the messenger business. The demand for sending bulky, deadline-driven analog artwork and proofs represented a large percentage of many companies’ revenue and many couriers’ earnings.

Microwave transmission of news stories from remote sites was another blow to demand for courier services. Couriers were a mainstay of the news business from the post-WW2 era until the eighties, when suddenly every network and most local affiliates had trucks with antennas and built-in mobile editing bays. No longer was a roll of film popped from a camera and handed off to a waiting motorcyclist who would rush it back to the network’s bureau on M Street or DeSales Street or Nebraska Avenue to be developed. By the mid-eighties the news was beamed back to the bureau immediately, ready to go on the next news segment, before the onsite talent stubbed out their cigarette.

The local messenger business which had grown so explosively from the sixties to the mid-eighties began to implode. Complex systemic changes shattered the foundation of the delivery business “Version 1.0,” long before the Internet or World Wide Web caught the public’s fancy in the nineties. Revenues collapsed across the board. It would take decades for a resurgence of sorts to occur, not to move paper anymore but to address the “last mile” problem of online retailing and logistics; when the delivery business did rise again, it had little use for bicyclists and motorcyclists. Metro Messenger never recovered to the heights it experienced in its heyday. As the business faltered, so did the health of Jerry Blum. He died in 1998.

In 1990, Reuben sold Capital Cycle. Today, it is no longer on Moran Road, but just a few miles away, still in Sterling, near Dulles Airport. He describes his post-Capital Cycle life: “Every day is Saturday.”

I ask him if he thinks he had a hand in growing BMW motorcycle culture in the mid-Atlantic. (The Washington metropolitan area has long has a higher proportion of BMW motorcycles registered than most parts of the country.) I posit that his introduction of so many hundreds of motorcyclists to the pleasure of riding and the quality of manufacturing of BMWs enticed many to adopt BMWs for their own pleasure riding.

It was certainly a common phenomenon to see many new Metro riders arrive at work on any number of other brands of motorcycle initially, only to succumb to the next available used BMW to appear in the want ads and never look back. And it was not uncommon to chat up a BMW rider on the streets in the D.C. area and find a Metro Messenger connection somewhere.

Certainly, the presence of Capital Cycle made it easy and affordable to maintain a BMW in the D.C. area, another factor which certainly had to contribute to the healthy BMW community here. If there were an award for “Friend of the Marque,” he would certainly merit it. But he demurs, and suggests he never considered that he had played such a role. The humility with which he rejects my suggestion is endearing.

We move from the living room to his screened-in porch to watch the lengthening shadows cross the lawn and enjoy a beer. We discuss his interest in politics and religion and backpacking and skydiving and a host of other things, and I discover we have many interests in common besides motorcycling. In fact, I find that our paths have likely crossed a number of times, and we have explored many of the same places—though his list of places explored is an order of magnitude greater than mine.

We have now spoken for hours. The dog, who listened patiently to most of our conversation, needs tending. So we step outside into the June evening, and walk with the dog to the end of the street, so the dog can sniff things and do whatever it is that dogs find important.

We end our visit with a handshake and thank-yous, and the suggestion we make the time for a ride when the conditions are appropriate. Suddenly, I understand that time in my life a whole lot better than I did when I was in it. Metro Messenger was as Sui generis and integral a part of Washington, D.C. in the sixties, seventies and eighties as Ben’s Chili Bowl, Go-go and Straight Edge punk. The city is poorer for losing the unmistakable growl of a vintage /2 wound out and roaring up Pennsylvania Avenue past Lafayette Park; poorer without the flash of canary yellow as the bike zooms past; poorer without the rider’s grin flashed from behind mirrored sunglasses.

We now transact our 4g business in drab, colorless, virtual exchanges facilitated by gaudy apps on smartphones. It’s hard to believe that not so long ago, our transactions were made possible by scores of young people—mostly men—who were willing to ride bicycles and motorcycles in urban traffic year round, eight or ten hours a day, in sub-zero to triple-digit temperatures, rain or shine. All for a buck or two a delivery, plus the sheer joy we got from getting paid to ride. Yeah, honestly, sometimes it just felt like a scam to get paid to ride, whether you were riding a yellow BMW or a Schwinn 12-speed.

When I look back on that business in D.C., it’s impossible for me see it as anything but a gigantic tree, planted back in the sixties. Branch upon branch grows, splitting and dividing into countless smaller branches over time; some branches wither and drop off. Yet regardless how far the branches go, the roots all go back to Reuben.

He made a good thing back then, Reuben did.

Sorta Counter-Intuitive, Innit?

…Bicycle, scooter, motorcycle…couriers are sought. As always, only couriers with direct DC courier company experience will be considered. Those highly experienced and capable couriers must also be hard working, dependable, polite, clean, and intelligent. You are not yet qualified…just because you enjoy bike riding and working outdoors, are a good rider or fast learner, or because you've done courier work in another city, delivered pizza, flowers, furniture, or hardware, drove a taxi, built an aqueduct in Africa, or really think you can do the job if given a chance. One must begin one's 'career' elsewhere, and perhaps try back after at least six months to learn the business. It's not necessarily that you are not capable of learning, it's just that we are not interested in teaching, or in taking the extra time and effort required to help you learn…

I pulled this nifty little quote off the internet this morning. It's from the website of a D.C.-area messenger service, from the 'employment' heading (Not that I was looking). Despite the lapse into the passive voice, I find the tone charmingly engaging, and can almost hear the speaker. I give them props for specifying “…hard working, dependable, polite, clean, and intelligent,” characteristics that, if I recall correctly, were frequently left by the wayside by many of those responsible for hiring couriers.

But I must take serious exception to the fundamental philosophy on display. There’s a slightly delusional whiff of hubris about it, a haughty arrogance that I think is undeserved. Come on guys—being a bike messenger ain't rocket surgery, is it?

Back in the day, I took the diametrically opposite approach.

My ads called for “Enthusiastic Bicyclists—Experienced couriers need not apply.” Despite the occasional offended phone call from irate couriers, who would attempt to convince me of the error of my ways, it was a pretty fool-proof approach. The ad attracted a caliber of bicyclist who might not have considered working as a courier, but loved the idea of making money by bicycling. These riders were definitely cut from a different cloth than your typical bike messenger, and that was a real plus in what is first and foremost a people-oriented service business.

My logic was two-fold: First, I attracted good, interesting staff for whom, frankly, the pay was a secondary consideration (the mantra was “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this…”). Second, I didn’t have to break the bad habits that someone picked up at a poorly-run competitor, also known as the ‘beaten-dog syndrome.’

Rookies were paired with a trainer of my choosing for two days. Day one, the rookie followed and observed, shadowing their trainer's every move; day two, the rookie did all the work and the trainer observed. Day three, the rookie was up and running solo as a productive member of the team—assuming the trainer gave their blessing. If somehow an unqualified person slipped through my net, the trainer had the authority to recommend they be dismissed. A small investment of time and money yielded a smart, capable, reliable fleet of enthusiastic bicyclists.

Now, this is not to say that I didn’t engage in some “poaching” from time to time, if I came across someone riding for a competitor whose work ethic, people skills and intelligence I admired. But I didn’t have the patience for running a ‘cattle call’ for disgruntled, dissatisfied, underperforming hooligans who I had no intention of ever unleashing on our customers. (They would do us so much more good working for the competition…)

I know for a fact some of my best riders—people who became my close friends, and who have gone on to happy, successful, satisfying lives as real people in the real world—were rejected by the company quoted above. It’s a perfectly valid business model. I just don't think it's a very smart one, and it's not a policy I would ever agree with.

When A Bicycle Courier Saved The World:

From The Gallup Management Journal (behind paywall) , by way of thewashcycle.com :

"The Cuban missile crisis in 1962 not only showed how close the United States and Soviet Union could come to a nuclear war, but also the sorry state of the communication channels needed to avert it. During one point in the crisis, the Soviet ambassador to Washington had to rely on a bicycle courier to take his urgent messages for Moscow to the local Western Union office."

"...six men who looked as if they'd been taxidermied by Brooks Brothers and one who looked like the Silver Surfer"

This article certainly dredges up some mixed emotions:

In Washington, a Two-Tire Industry Goes Flat

Athletic rebels swathed in Lycra, zipping in and out of traffic to beat the delivery deadline, watch their livelihood evaporate.

By Steve Hendrix Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Getting a meticulously prepared legal brief to a courthouse or federal agency on time used to require a bit of comic-book valor. Just before deadline, exhausted lawyers handed off the document to a character in the tight Lycra of a superhero, the shoulder bag of a Pony Express rider and the bulging thighs of an athlete. One of Washington's legions of bicycle messengers would then dart through perilous traffic and any weather to deliver the goods in the nick of time. Now, as the last of the area's courts and agencies begin to allow electronic filings instead of demanding piles of paper, deadline dramas in many law offices are being reduced to little more than hitting the "send" button.

The courier business -- for decades a quirky by-product of Washington's No. 1 industry, paper-pushing -- finds itself in rapid decline. Tighter security restrictions imposed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have closed off many government office corridors to couriers, and the recession has dampened activity at law firms and lobbying shops, rendering the life of a time-sensitive document in the District a lot more boring. The number of full-time couriers in Washington has fallen from a high of about 400 in the 1990s to about 150, said Andy Zalan, a longtime bike messenger and head of the D.C. Bicycle Couriers Association. "Those of us left are making a lot less money," Zalan said. "This last week, I set a personal best for futility: I sat out here for seven hours and made $25."

The decline is being felt in all cities, according to Michael Gualtieri, president of the Messenger Courier Association of America. In New York, consolidations and business failures have cut the number of courier companies from a high of almost 500 to about 40, he said. But Washington bike messengers have been hit particularly hard because of the recent shrinkage in the government's document stream. "There's just not as much paper being pushed," Gualtieri said. "In the past few years, we've seen quite a few more government agencies go electronic."

The falloff threatens to end what has been for decades a very public aberration from Washington's buttoned-down business culture. Downtown has long been filled with messengers racing the clock -- and sometimes each other -- along the streets (and sometimes sidewalks). On weekdays, the parks at Dupont Circle and Farragut Square were piled with bikes and swarmed with couriers awaiting a call from dispatch. And generations of workers from K Street to Capitol Hill knew the experience of being in an elevator filled with six men who looked as if they'd been taxidermied by Brooks Brothers and one who looked like the Silver Surfer.

"I always took great pride doing deliveries to House and Senate buildings dressed like Boba Fett," the Star Wars bounty hunter, said Matthew Ayers, who worked as a messenger briefly after finishing law school at American University. "Without the messengers, these people might take themselves too seriously and implode." Longtime messengers bond over tales of epic wrecks and glorious rides. Veteran messenger Matt Dwyer (broken middle finger '96, fractured mastoid '98) once took a "super rush" job from Georgetown to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Northeast in less than 10 minutes. "I picked up the filing at 4:51 and made FERC by the 5 o'clock deadline," said Dwyer, 46, a messenger for 13 years who still delivers every day even as he runs his own courier company. His vacation in July was a solo ride from Montana to New York.

Mark Gross, a courier in the 1980s and now the owner of Quick Messenger, remembers the time he and six other riders scrambled to deliver a hot-off-the-Xerox press release to all 535 congressional offices. Elapsed time from getting the panicked call from the public relations firm to dropping off the last envelope: 80 minutes. "You can fax something that fast, but is anyone going to actually look at it?" said Gross.

In their heyday, bike couriers reigned as a kind of sweat-soaked office avenger, helping secretaries avoid deadline catastrophes, facilitating billion-dollar contract negotiations and helping prescription refills and forgotten eyeglasses catch up with their VIP owners...Washington couriers managed to keep riding through the advent of the fax machine and the first several years of e-mail commerce. But the beginning of the end came with the security shocks of 2001, first the attacks and then anthrax.

Messengers were relegated to alley entrances and basement mailrooms. Veteran riders still find ways to get their rushes through; White House staffers, who aren't allowed to accept handoffs through the iron fence, have been known to meet couriers at nearby coffee shops. But gone are the lucrative days of blanketing Capitol Hill with hand-delivered packets...But couriers who were holding on to messenger work felt the ground shift beneath them when the economy gave way last year.

"Almost in one day, we were getting a lot fewer rush jobs," said Marcia Vottero, 28, a rider for Washington Express..."I used to be able to make $1,500 a week, not even working long hours," said Vottero. "Now that's cut in half, and I've got to work all day." Vottero, who has clearance to deliver inside the Department of Justice and the World Bank, is on the high side of earners. More typical now, according to several couriers, is $400 to $500 a week.

Almost all couriers work as contractors, without benefits or much job security. An independent, unruly bunch by nature, they have never been able to organize effectively, Zalan said, allowing companies to keep pay rates low.

Still, he and many of the dwindling number of hardcore messengers ride on, addicted to the adrenaline of the rush job, thrilling to the freedom of life on the roll. At a party recently, someone noted his riding jersey and asked Zalan if he was a professional cyclist. "And I thought, yeah, actually, I am," he said. "The bottom line, dude, you're making money riding a bike. It's the childhood dream."

Well, first of all, Georgetown to the FERC at 4:50 in ten minutes? Puh-LEEZE. What, did he get lost or something? Stop at Starbucks for a latte? Second, odds are I was one of those six guys helping Mark Gross deliver those 535 packages to Congress, and don't get me started about that.

But what this brings to mind are some long-lost recollections of a time when I had pretty much full access to the city. Few folks realize how incredibly open official Washington was, not so very long ago, and the event that triggered the eventual choking of access we've come to accept as normal was the bombing of a washroom in the U.S. Capitol in 1983. And we're all poorer for the loss of that access.

Prior to that, a sweat-soaked bicycle courier in shorts and a tee-shirt could enter the anteroom of the Secretary of State, climb to the top of the tower in the Smithsonian castle, wander the halls of the Department of Energy unescorted. You could enter the door of your choosing and walk from one end of RHOB through LHOB and CHOB, take the tunnel to the house side of the Capitol, freely move throughout the hidden corridors and backways of the Capitol (including to those secret offices actually located in the dome) to the Senate side and continue to RSOB, DSOB and HSOB without ever coming above ground.

The decline of the business began long before 1983; the fax was emblematic of the technological change that gutted the business but was only one part of it. It was a death of a thousand cuts, and decline on the demand side was matched by increasing obstacles on the supply side. The September 11th attacks and the subsequent anthrax attack were simply some of the more recent wounds inflicted on what was once a lively and interesting way to make a modest living.

I was fortunate to have been a part of that scene during the twilight of its 'Golden Years.' For better or worse, it played a part in shaping who I am. I met most of my very favorite people during that time, and through subsequent connections. My kids grew up surrounded by courier culture, and have robust immune systems for that.

And I have to say I laughed out loud when I read the line (..echoing a thought I had countless times over 4-1/2 years):

"...And I thought, yeah, actually, I am," he said. "The bottom line, dude, you're making money riding a bike."

Also: http://rlymi.blogspot.com/2008/10/few-words-about-motorcycle-couriers.html

A few words about motorcycle couriers:

In another lifetime, I worked as a bicycle courier in D.C. year-round for four and a half years. I worked when it was over 100 degrees and when it was below zero. I successfully trained about a hundred bicycle couriers during that time.

Then I was fortunate to have the opportunity to manage a courier service for another dozen years, training a fairly large cadre of motorcycle couriers. I have very fond memories of the people I worked with and the time I spent in the business, and have stayed in touch with many friends from back in the day. I am proud to see the lives they have created in the “real world,” and to remember the time we worked together.

So when I needed to write about a folk culture, this seemed like a natural choice. It is adapted from an interview, and dedicated to all my old riding buddies.

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For about two decades beginning in the 1960s, a fixture of the urban Washington, D.C., working scene was the motorcycle courier. Riding his own motorcycle or a company-owned bike, the motorcycle courier spent his day being radio-dispatched on a continuous series of pickups and deliveries in and around the Washington metro area.

As with their antecedents, the Pony Express, the historical duration of their profession was short, and the unique confluence of demographic, economic and sociological trends that brought the profession into being guarantees it will never return. Like the Pony Express, changing technology destroyed the economic niche that created and sustained the motorcycle courier.

“Couriers is a better word than messengers,” according to John C. Steinberger, president of Speed Service Inc. “Anyone can deliver a message, these people perform a service.” He founded Speed Service Couriers, Inc., in 1957 with a motorcycle, an operations center and a two-way radio…though he had drawn up the idea in the early 1950s. In those days, before the advent of portable tape rigs and movable wirephoto machines, dispatches were in the hands of the press courier. The seconds counted when the courier was on his way back with film…As still and motion picture cameras ranged farther and farther into the field, and with expanded deadlines and news shows, needs changed.

The first practical application of the Speed Service System came with the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961. A heavy snowfall stopped traffic; even motorcycles had a rough time moving about. There were a dozen [inaugural] balls to cover. Steinberger…solved the problem by having more men on the street, riding anything that could move.” (Mastrangelo).

The economics and demographics of the early-to-mid nineteen seventies caused an unprecedented expansion of the motorcycle courier industry. The gas crisises had driven consumer demand for motorcycles as an affordable, energy-efficient alternative to automobiles, and the number of registered motorcycles doubled between 1968 and 1973. This in turn led to the creation of a large pool of riders with some experience, primarily young men between the ages of 15 and 25. Motorcycle couriers were, for all intents and purposes, exclusively men, reflecting the composition of the motorcycle riding population of the time. The ready availability of this labor pool, along with the uncertain unemployment picture at the time, assisted the growth of the industry.

A final local factor in the local growth of the industry was the dramatic expansion of the federal government in the late sixties and seventies, catalyzing the change of the Washington metropolitan area from sleepy southern backwater to world-class city. This fueled demand for services by drawing hundreds of law firms, corporate government relations offices and lobbying firms to the area.

Unfortunately, this singular intersection of trends created just a brief heyday for the industry, which in later years would dwindle into insignificance, a victim of other societal changes. Foreshadowing this eventual decline, in 1975 alone motorcycle sales dropped by 25% from their 1974 level; the populations in the primary motorcycle purchasing groups were anticipated to continue to diminish in number steadily until at least 1985. At the same time, a steady stream of environmental regulations concerning exhaust and noise emissions were serving to increase the complexity, and hence the purchase price, of motorcycles to the point that discouraged new entrants to the endeavor (Business Week). This demographic shift has continued unabated to today.

In 1980, nearly a quarter of riders were under 18; by 1998 less than 4% were. During the same period, the total number of motorcycle registrations declined by about 30% from its all time peak, all but eliminating the pool of riders that made up the business in the 1970s and virtually guaranteeing that such an industry will never be reconstituted (Glamser). Meanwhile, the price of an entry-level motorcycle has typically more than tripled (in unadjusted dollars) discouraging investment by young, unemployed individuals looking to make a living. Thus, we can look back on a brief “golden era” from about 1973 to about 1985, when scores of young men made their living as full-time motorcycle couriers, logging hundreds of miles a week riding in and around the metropolitan area, rain or shine, year round.

Being a courier—of any kind—is generally not a career destination, but a way post to something better. When Metro Messenger placed an advertisement for motorcycle couriers in the Washington Post, Oscar—a classic candidate for the position—responded.

After a cursory interview to ascertain whether he actually knew how to ride a motorcycle, his ‘road test’ began. Metropolitan Messenger and Delivery Service (“Metro”) was unique in Washington in that it operated its own fleet of motorcycles, several dozen bright yellow BMWs of mixed vintages, with large radio boxes on their rear fenders and jury-rigged saddlebags made from “borrowed” UPSP mailbags. (Mailbags were inexpensive—unless you were the Postal Service—and readily available; the only drawback was their tendency to occasionally smoulder and catch fire from the heat of the motorcycle’s exhaust system. More than one load of deliveries met its end in such a fashion, with an oblivious rider blasting down the highway trailing a long plume of white smoke.)

One of the two owners of Metro, Reuben Moore, assigned Oscar to a motorcycle, a pre-1970 R60/2, and the two of them proceeded from Metro’s garage/office off “Blues Alley” in Georgetown for Oscar’s “road test,” a baptism-by-fire with Reuben riding his own motorcycle in the lead.

“They met in the Army…Jerry [Blum] was the people person, and Reuben was the one with the ideas, the smart one of the two of them…I became personal friends with Jerry; he helped me buy my first BMW…Jerry would go out of his way to help you if you needed help. The two of them made a good team, and Metro was a great business. It should have gone on…but unfortunately their business model was wrong.”

“Reuben Moore had me follow him…the opposite of what I would do. His primary concern was taking care of his motorcycles…he told me to follow him, and he would put his finger up in the air every time he wanted me to shift gears…if he put two fingers up, I needed to be in second gear…and so on…he was showing me how to shift the motorcycle. I was hired [at $3.00 an hour] but I was damn well gonna shift that bike the way he wanted me to.”

He tells of Reuben coming upon the scene of an accident involving one of Metro’s motorcycles while out on one of his regular jogs around the city. First, he picked up the bike to inspect its condition. Second, he walked over to the rider who was lying on the ground with a broken leg—still waiting for the ambulance to arrive–and told him he was fired. Then he went on jogging. In another apocryphal story, a rider quit and filed for unemployment; under his reason for quitting, he stated, “…his boss was crazy.” Reuben went to the unemployment office in person to contest the claim, and the examiner found in favor of the employee.

When asked about the people he worked for as a motorcycle courier—the clients—Oscar said, “The clients were all the same…except for CREEP. CREEP I’ll never forget. There will always be only one CREEP. 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue, sixth floor…they had a little office with the name on the door at first, but they removed the name…” [CREEP was the ‘Committee to Re-Elect the President,’ Richard Nixon’s re-election committee, and quite notorious in 1973 and 1974.] They (clients) haven’t changed in all the years that I’ve been in business…the receptionists still look the same, act the same… it’s all the same.”

He described an insular community comprising young, white, college-educated men who were “transitional…between things,” working 50-hour weeks, year round, rain or shine. “When it rained, I was wet…when it was cold, I was cold.” There was an egalitarian meritocracy functioning within the group. “The bad ones didn’t last very long; they either wrecked or they quit. The ones who were there, who had been there a long time—they were equals.” Annual turnover could run as high as 1,000%. Typically, long-term employees made up half the workforce; the other half turned over rapidly and repeatedly. This created a group that was reluctant to acknowledge newcomers until they had ‘paid their dues,’ which is to say, had stuck with it long enough to move into the inner circle. It took about 90 days to be recognized, at which point you were ‘fully vested.’ In a dangerous and demanding work environment, riders learned to be cautious about making emotional investments too quickly.

Following the brusque initiation at the hands of Reuben Moore, riders (as they refer to themselves) simply either succeeded or failed. Failure could mean any of a number of things—having an accident and being fired for carelessness, having an accident and being incapacitated, quitting because of the stressfulness of the job, quitting for not making enough money, simply deciding one was not cut out for the courier life, or any number of variations. Success meant one thing—showing up day after day and making a living at it.

The social order within the community bestowed status and a degree of prestige on ‘good’ riders. Despite the image of couriers in the media, speed, recklessness and wild abandon do not make a good courier.

“I wouldn’t think of couriers as risk-takers…it’s a misconception.” A good courier is “…efficient, shows up every day, steady and dependable, doesn’t hurt himself… a good courier, like in any job, is very efficient; he maximizes his motion, so he’s not necessarily racing down the street, but he knows the best route to take…he knows how to get on and off his bike, he knows where to park, knows how to get in and out of the buildings—he knows where he’s going. He knows exactly how to ask for the items he’s picking up…so it’s more efficiency, which translates into speed, which translates into production, which translates into money. Speed is certainly part of it, but there’s a lot of things that go into speed more than just racing through traffic.”

The garage was a special, sacred, safe place for the riders. There was a magical moment at the end of the day when a rider received the order “R-T-B” (“Return to Base”). Though a rider could be fired on the spot if their motorcycle was seen parked in front of a liquor store, however innocently (Reuben would jog countless miles throughout the city daily, always keeping an eye out for his motorcycles, and the list of Reuben-mandated fireable offenses was long and inscrutable) the last stop of the day was frequently to grab a six-pack before heading to the garage.

The garage was the gathering place for riders at the end of the day. Besides being the place where the motorcycles were signed back in and serviced, and paperwork was completed, it was a site for ‘male bonding.’ There was much bragging, lying, story-telling, cautionary tale reciting, and general camaraderie taking place. After a riders’ initial introduction to the business with Reuben (and later, as the business grew, with other senior riders), the garage was the where the real educational process took place. Newcomers would listen quietly on the periphery, absorbing as much information as they could. Old-timers would hold court, telling ‘war stories’ from that afternoon or years ago. Questions would be timidly asked, answers provided. Everyone would share information communally; of particular interest was information concerning riders who had been injured (regardless of what company they worked for—all riders shared a common kinship) or hazards to be aware of. Hazards could be man-made or natural; maybe just a security guard with a bad attitude. This daily storytelling ritual and exchange was key to building the culture of the motorcycle courier.

Timothy Tangherlini, writing in his book "Talking Trauma: Paramedics and Their Stories," says “Storytelling pervades our everyday lives and structures how we view the world. We learn the beliefs of our culture through stories, respond to certain situations by telling stories, entertain each other with stories, and voice our fears, hopes, frustrations, and joys…Even at work, storytelling can play an important role in how we perceive our jobs and our relationships with coworkers and in how we carry out our tasks. In many cases, the stories employees tell play a major role in the functioning of the organization. Workers rely on stories of coworkers' experiences, coupled with their own narratives about work, as a guide to day-to-day life.”

This was certainly true for the culture of the motorcycle courier. There was little competitive attitude between riders, except comparing daily production totals, which were eagerly awaited each evening; the competition was with the outside world as a whole: the city, the weather, the clients, the traffic. Alcohol was ubiquitous; marijuana was common, particularly in the office areas (where outsiders were less likely to wander in) and the general atmosphere was of relaxation and commiseration. In many ways, the role of the garage as safe haven helped accentuate the insularity of the rider community. It was a single sanctuary in a hostile world that had little appreciation for the work they performed.

Riders would frequently socialize together on weekends, taking ‘busman’s holidays’ on their personal motorcycles despite the 50 hours a week they spent riding for work. Oscar says: “ I remember going out on winter days and riding with these guys…and freezing. I remember lots of parties…I remember lots of marijuana; it was everywhere. There was lots of alcohol, but I don’t remember people using any of that stuff while they were working. I only remember it as an after work thing, or a weekend thing. It was a young group…it was, after all, ’73, early ’74, the behavior was fairly typical of what you would find. It wasn’t courier behavior, it was 1973-1974 behavior of people in their twenties.”

The day-to-day working world of the motorcycle courier is far removed from the few popular culture images we have been given. A typical day is a steady stream of overlapping pickups and deliveries beginning between 8:00 AM and 8:30. The rider begins by picking up item after item in series. The dispatcher, generally an experienced rider who was promoted (often a living testimonial to the Peter Principle) takes responsibility for keeping track of what each rider has done, is currently doing, and will be doing in the future, typically having to think hours ahead and anticipate what may come. During the late 70’s Metro had two dispatchers operating on two different radio channels; one was responsible for deliveries across the general Washington area, the other solely for deliveries between downtown and Capitol Hill. A third person served as a dispatcher’s dispatcher, routing jobs to one channel or the other.

With their bright yellow classic motorcycles, bike-mounted two-way radios with long buggy-whip antennas, colorful helmets and later, brightly colored yellow reflective safety vests, motorcyclists who rode for Metro were clearly delineated from the average courier in the city. Frequently, they would be mistaken for police of one kind or another by tourists, and it was not uncommon for the sudden appearance of a Metro motorcycle in certain kinds of neighborhoods to produce a panicked cessation of all visible activity.

But the delineation cut two ways. Besides the garage, the motorcycle represented the rider’s entire real workplace. Tangherlini similarly described the association of paramedics to their ambulance: “Many medics refer to the front seat of the ambulance as their “living room,” and see the vehicle itself as a safe haven from the dangers lurking outside.” The rider was safe and in his element while he was in the saddle, and woe to anyone who impinged on this tiny mobile universe. While there were few opportunities to ‘personalize’ an individual machines, a rider was generally assigned to a specific bike. It became his ‘trusty steed,’ and each rider grew to know his bike's idiosyncrasies and foibles intimately. The rider’s radio however, more than the motorcycle itself, was his talisman, the secret of his power. It was the link that kept him connected to his community of fellow riders and, while a constant tormentor, provided a modicum of emotional security. The rider could hear the transmissions to and from all the other riders, and could create an ever-changing awareness of who was where, a shifting constellation of the community of his fellow riders. This mental image became the virtual workspace the rider functioned in, that was every bit as real and as important to his working life as the tightly constrained workplace that was his motorcycle.

On occasions, a general radio failure could prompt a flurry of panicked phone calls from riders, far out of proportion to any real inconvenience. It was a true breach of faith if the radio was inadvertently shut off before the last woebegone straggler limped in at the end of the day, and more than once an irate rider stormed into the dispatch room wanting to know why he had been abandoned. [It was not an unreasonable question; riders counted on that lifeline if they got lost , had an accident or a mechanical problem.] In keeping with the quasi-police trappings of the job, riders were assigned a “unit number” which was used, sometimes along with, often instead of, their name when communicating over the radio. Radio communications were conducted using a modified “10-code” based on the standard Public Safety Officers series of 10-codes. As with paramedics, the use of codes on the radio represented a boundary between those in the profession and those outside it.

There were some very pragmatic reasons to use the 10-code system. It conserved airtime, which is critical when 30 riders are competing for the attention of one dispatcher; it was easily understood under poor transmission and reception situations; it was nearly symbolic, so it was understood almost intuitively. But is also provided intangible benefits when used in place of, or to augment, plain English. While plain English could be understood by anyone, radio codes helped create a mystique around the daily tasks, which in turn helped define and establish the place and worth of the individual. When arriving at a pickup location, the rider would listen for a break in radio traffic, give his unit number and say “10-7,” meaning he was where he had been sent and was awaiting further instruction. These terse exchanges continued all day long, until the rider was “10-30” (“all clear”) and would hear the eagerly-awaited “RTB.”

Oscar says: “I spent half my day on Capitol Hill; the other half in the K Street corridor…most of the afternoon was spent picking up two or three things for every one you dropped…a lot of times, you’d have fifteen or twenty things in your bags at five o’clock, then you’d start dropping…you’d get off when your bag was empty.” He presented an interesting dichotomy. On one hand, he described being a motorcycle courier as something “you would do for money,” and “get out of it as quickly as you can…the world is filled with jobs like that. What happens to a lot of people is before they know it, they’ve done it for five years or ten years; that’s the big risk.” He said he was looking for another job the entire time he was working at Metro.

On the other hand, he said it was probably the best job he ever had, and clearly he was nostalgic when recalling that period of his life. “It’s a young man’s job; I couldn’t do it now. It’s physical labor, and when you’re young, you can do it and you can still party all night.”
“I loved it. I loved it. It was hard work, but I loved it. I liked the people; I hung around with them after work, on weekends, and it was the kind of job where you didn’t take your worries home with you. It was a special kind of job, because you were doing something you knew not many people could do. You delivered that last package, and you were done…it was Miller time.” A common refrain from motorcycle couriers was “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this…”

The young men who worked as motorcycle couriers during the “Golden Age” were self-aware enough to recognize they were intelligent, highly skilled, talented, resourceful people doing a job that was dangerous, poorly compensated, had no future, no prestige and no social standing. However, the cohesive nature of the informal relationships within the group apparently provided more than enough job satisfaction to overcome the low-status, inherently unfulfilling work. The homogeneous nature of this group combined with the clearly defined sense of institutionalized traditions created by two charismatic founders created a strong and lasting social bond that invested the work—and the workplace—with significance and meaning.

Thousands of men passed through Metro Messenger over the years (as did many women in later years, though predominantly as bicycle messengers) and went on to successful “real world” careers. It is likely many will look back on their time at Metro as the best job they ever had. What made this the “Golden Age” was the strong and insular network this group created. Metro Messenger was sui generis, and was an avatar of the strong personalities of its founders. The strong sense of camaraderie created within this organization, the sense of place, and the sense of tradition (though the timeline would hardly suggest that traditions could have had time to form) provided a balance to the seemingly overwhelming negatives of the professional equation.

We will never see such a time and place again.