In 1972 when I arrived at Witcomb Lightweight Cycles, Robert Morley had already been there for a while. He was a local boy, younger than I was at the time (and still is, by the way) and doing whatever needed to be done. Assembling, shipping, but not making frames. I left almost a year later and Rob was still there.
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This kid was a font of information. Rob knew the codes for all the spares of every small Campagnolo part. This, in a time when there was no SRAM or Shimano. He knew the differences between the brake casing paths of a Merckx versus a Barras or a Verbeek. Rob knew who made the frames labeled Bird Brothers that Mick Ballard or Alf Engers rode. But I think Rob (like me) was a Derek Cottington fan.
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It was a different trade then. Smaller too, but that doesn’t tell the story. Folks like Robert Morley were the backbone of all the cliques we traveled in. Some people raced. Some even raced well. But others were equal parts of the whole. As if cycling was a net that caught all of us. The Robs were there to balance the scale. Or maybe that’s what everyone else was for.
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