Columbus, Ohio USA
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Keeping Up With Pace
Pedal power keeps bike tour director Charlie Pace going strong at 80
By Cynthia Bent Findlay
May 2011 Issue
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Charlie Pace – named director of TOSRV in 1967 – will retire after the 50th anniversary tour on May 7 and 8, 2011.
Photo © Larry HamillWho is Charlie Pace?
Many in Columbus are familiar with the name. Neighbors in Victorian Village know him as a genial, sociable man with many connections. For decades, the business community recognized him as a consummate professional, a vice president of investments for The Huntington for 31 years.
But in Columbus’s growing cycling community, Pace is a legend – the man who drove the Mighty TOSRV, the Tour of the Scioto River Valley, one of the nation’s oldest continuous group bike tours which this May will celebrate its 50th anniversary.
Pace has been TOSRV’s director since 1967. For 44 years, he tirelessly volunteered his time helping to shape and shepherd the adventure on wheels, coordinating the mass of thousands of cyclists riding from the Statehouse in Columbus all the way to Portsmouth and back on Mother’s Day weekend each May.
It’s literally a year-round job. Planning for the next year’s TOSRV has always begun immediately after the ride is over. It takes hundreds of hours of logistical planning, finding and coordinating volunteers, food, lodging and other resources, mapping routes, working with local public safety along the 105-mile route.
The easy answer to why Charlie Pace, now 80, has worked so hard for so long is that he’s always done it and he loves it. But that only scratches the surface of who Pace is and how he has accomplished all that he has. After all, he’s as good as had two careers, between The Huntington and TOSRV.
“He’s truly an enigma. He’s a kind and gentle man who does not give that immediate impression,” says Ralph Rosenfield, one of his best friends.
“He’s such a honey bear,” says Phyllis South, TOSRV’s volunteer coordinator for five years and tour volunteer for 31. “He is a so very welcoming, welcoming man.”
“He just knows everyone, he’s one of these people who has never had an enemy, just the type who walks up and starts talking to people,” says Pat Lewis, a Victorian Village neighbor.
On the other hand, he’s the most politically incorrect man you’ll ever meet. “We joke with him that he’s to the right of Attila the Hun,” Rosenfield added. “You get in a car with him and he’s instantly complaining about people moving too slowly. I used to race cars, I told him, ‘Charlie, it won’t make any difference if you’re 1.5 minutes later!’ He’s just that active, he’s just always in a hurry,” says Rosenfield, who has known him for more than 50 years.
Rosenfield met Pace at the age of 14 and went on a group tour of Europe with him a few years later. “I ran out of cash before I got out of Great Britain, and he lent me money in about 20 different denominations. I borrowed kroner, rubles, francs, everything. And he didn’t have to do that.” Their first introduction was in 1961 on an American Youth Hostels club caving trip to Kentucky. Pace was active in the nascent outdoors movement; he served for years on the local AYH council’s board and also with the club’s successor, Columbus Outdoor Pursuits.
“He took a bunch of kids like me caving. We crawled through the caves, got covered in mud, got back into his car, a white ’59 Caddy coupe with the big fins and a blue brocade interior. We drove back to Columbus and dropped everyone else off. I lived closer to him so I was last. We pulled up to a car wash. He washed most of the outside with a wand. Then he opened the doors and washed the insides out. I knew right then this guy was a little bit different but he was someone I’d relate to,” Rosenfield says.
“Charlie came along at a time in my life when I needed him most. My parents were going through a divorce, it was a difficult time. He was a good father figure, and he’s been my best friend ever since. And I know I’m not the only one,” says Rosenfield.
Greg Siple is another one of those friends. Siple, then a teenager with a growing passion for cycling, was trying to expand the tour he’d started with his father from a group outing of several teens into a large event. He met Pace through the AYH council.
“He was kind of like an old guy to us then,” says Siple.
“I was a kayaker,” Charlie Pace says. “I got roped into riding the thing [tour]. Now I haven’t kayaked since about 1965 or ’66. My friend Dan Burden talked me into it.”
So, Siple says, in 1965, Pace and Burden showed up for the fourth tour along with a dozen or more teens.
“It’s hard to understand now, but at that time, to have that many 10-speed bikes, all riders intending to go 200 miles, this was really special.” says Siple. “I had some sense for what I was trying to do, how publicity was important, I wanted to create an image because I’d become an advocate for the bicycle. And Charlie and Dan show up on American Stingray balloon tire bikes.
I was a little bit peeved, I figured they’d ruined the picture.”
Stung and scornful that the pair thought they’d be able to finish the 100-mile trek on what were really kids’ bikes, Siple set off with the group from the Statehouse. A few blocks later, a couple of Burden and Pace’s friends appeared from around a corner with the pair’s 10-speeds.
“I realized they were mocking me here,” Siple says.
Only a minute or so later, Pace got into a colossal wreck trying to avoid a policeman in a cruiser who had spotted the group and unwisely opened his door into their travel path. Pace dislocated some fingers in the wreck and had to break off to go to the hospital.
“We rode south, and I thought, well, we’ll never see him again,” Siple says.
Siple says over the next year he came to know Pace better and the pair became friends. In 1966, Pace rode the entire tour; 45 riders showed up.
“It really clicked with him. He saw its potential. He began to realize it was going to need organization if it was going to work,” Siple says.
“It was getting too unwieldy. We had to have plans for food, and all the other things. I just got hooked,” is all Pace says of why he wanted to be more involved.
By 1967, Pace was directing the tour, which began to grow exponentially as the word spread around the country. By 1970, TOSRV reached 1,000 riders.
Pace rode the tour himself every year even as director until about ten years ago. He began dedicating himself – and his friends and neighbors – to the tour, as Siple devoted his skills as a graphic artist and journalist to TOSRV’s promotion.
Pace was able to enlist The Huntington as a sponsor, and the bank allowed TOSRV to use its computers to keep track of registrations that grew into the thousands.
A corps formed that gave countless hours and funds to printing newsletters (for years in Pace’s basement), registering riders, setting up food stops along the route, and otherwise building an event that once experienced, became something of an addiction to participants – whether riders or volunteers.
Siple gives Pace credit for building that corps.
“He just has this very sincere warmth. He could find common ground with anybody he spoke with. Even though he was older than a lot of young people, he was able to connect with them instantly. At the same time he could sit down with more serious adults and connect with them, too,” Siple says.
“Charlie to his credit always enjoyed younger people asking about life experiences he might want to share with them, time and time again. He’s a fun-loving guy too. You feel good being around Charlie Pace,” says Greg Lashutka, Columbus’s former mayor and now Chairman of the board of Franklin University.
Lashutka met Pace through their shared love of biking; Lashutka himself rode the tour multiple times. Their paths also crossed working on community issues and at the North Market, to which both are devoted. Lashutka says Pace built a professional practice the same way, on his reputation for integrity.
Ralph Rosenfield and Charlie became fast frieends when they met over 50 years ago.
Photo © Larry Hamill“There were many people who wouldn’t invest at the bank if not for him,” says Rosenfield. “They trusted him and no one else. My grandmother was one. She’d be just as happy putting her money under the bed and he did very very well for her. He had a lot of old widows who were like my grandmother.”
“There’s some feeling that a lot of the volunteers are doing it just for Charlie. They enjoy working with him. He doesn’t exploit people. It would be easy to chew people up and get them to do all of the work, but Charlie is very inspirational, the way he leads and organizes,” Siple says.
“I don’t think people realize the extent that Charlie probably self-finances the tour too,” says Rosenfield. Pace often finances backup cases of food, for example, when food stops run out. “He does a lot of things for which he never gets paid back because he wants to do it.”
“He talks people into things. He talked me into it. It’s a worthwhile cause,” says Pat Lewis.
The thing about CP, as he’s known, is he is one of those people who make you feel like you’re a part of the club. It might be a club you never knew existed ten minutes ago, but you still feel lucky to be in it.
A couple of reasons the Tour under Pace has been so successful is that Pace’s energy level and his skills as an organizer and a problem solver are legendary.
Siple says there were many times in the run up to TOSRV each year when Pace would sleep only a few hours each night, but he would still be a live wire, whipping up enthusiasm among the volunteers. Then, he’d go ahead and even ride the grueling tour with walkie-talkies on his belt, solving problems as he went.
Pace rises before the birds and is working out at McConnell Heart Health Center in Upper Arlington every morning by 5:30.
“If you want to have breakfast with Charlie, you’re going to have breakfast at seven,” Rosenfield says.
He applies that energy skillfully, says Siple and others. TOSRV may appear to go off without a hitch to the thousands of bikers who ride it, but volunteers over the decades have seen Pace cope with everything from banana shortages to missing bridges.
“I watched and the tour often has weather that is not optimal, and so that means things come up the last moment, there are trucks that do not get food there on time, but you’d not know that as a rider because Charlie makes things happen by using resources that show innovativeness,” Lashutka says.
Innovative? You could say that, says Rosenfield.
While considering making the upcoming Europe trip via bicycle in 1962, Rosenfield and Pace took a test run to Sandusky – Rosenfield’s first lengthy bike trek. On arriving in Sandusky, exhausted, the group found the youth hostel they’d planned on staying in closed.
“Charlie, without even hesitating, went to the local jail, and he persuaded the sheriff to put us up in the women’s section if there weren’t any female inmates there, and there weren’t. We didn’t have camping gear, he didn’t want to pay for a hotel. So we spent the night in the jail,” says Rosenfield.
“I was about 17 years old,” he says. “I did not think much of it. But that’s what he decided. And I knew this was going to be the last time I’d do that. We were on steel beds, it was NOT comfortable. The drunk tank was next to us, we could hear them. And oh yea, ‘Isn’t this normal?’ was his attitude.”
“It was the only place I could see up there that would take care of us,” Pace says now.
Such was Pace’s draw, however, that Rosenfield went on that junket to Europe with Pace – although the group traveled in trains this trip.
Another remarkable thing about CP is that all of these decades, for all of those tens and tens of thousands of cyclists, he worked as a volunteer, Siple says.
Why does he do it?
In The Mighty TOSRV, a tribute book to TOSRV written in 1986 by Greg and June Siple (Siple’s wife), June wrote a profile of Pace. She’d known Pace and worked closely with him for years at that point and she also asked him the question “Why?” point-blank multiple times. She came to the conclusion that it’s just impossible to know.
“Actually, I don’t enjoy it at all,” he’s quoted as saying in the TOSRV history.
“It’s like the plague, you know.
I spend every night on it. Last night it was an hour, tonight, who knows…
I guess I’m just a masochist at heart. I don’t know, really.” … I give up on getting a straight answer from him because I’m convinced he’s never thought about it, nor is he interested in thinking about it. He doesn’t care about the question in the least. Charlie’s just not introspective – he’s a doer. Most of us just think about what we’re going to do next, and while we’re thinking, he’s ten steps beyond,” writes Siple.
Allen South, who coordinates TOSRV volunteers with wife Phyllis, believes it’s because of a combination of his commitment to cycling and his enjoyment in exercising his ability to organize.
Pace says he simply loves cycling and how it enables him to see new parts of the world, new people.
Among many other trips, he cycled in Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s, well before the Berlin Wall came down.
“It was my most enjoyable trip,” says Pace. “The people had heard about Americans, but never met them, especially American cyclists.”
He says he took up directing TOSRV because “someone needed to organize things.”
“He saw that this could be a really good thing, a benefit to other people that deserves to be worked on,” Siple believes.
The truth probably also is that he kept it up all those years because just as people return year after year for Charlie, he returns year after year for them.
“I think to bring that many people together for a weekend is really important to him, and to know that relationships are made, weddings have taken place on TOSRV, friendships are developed. And he’s a little bit crazy. It takes all angles,” says Phyllis South.
“He’s just a real people person. We have an exchange student from China living with us now, and Charlie has gotten to know Jacob, taken him out for dinner, that sort of thing. Jacob will volunteer [for the tour] but that’s not what Charlie is after – that’s not his only life. He has another life too and he just likes people,” says South.
For whatever his reasons, it’s easy to underestimate the impact Pace has had on biking in the U.S. TOSRV’s success spawned dozens of other tours around the country – even an entire movement, says Siple, who has been a part of that movement since the beginning. Siple now works in Montana for the Adventure Cycling Association, which creates and sponsors bike tours and provides resources for touring cyclists all over the world.
TOSRV’s success is owed to many things, muses Siple.
“The timing was right. If Father and I had done the ride in say, 1955, the next year there wouldn’t have been anyone to go with us. The boomers had this rebellious attitude, they were interested in health, the environment, and it was a whole different thinking than the ’50s,” Siple says.
The route through the rolling hills of pastoral southern Ohio and the distance of 100 miles have also always proven attractive, Siple says, and the geography of the highways, with towns neatly apportioned for rest stops, plus the local’s eager cooperation were also all crucial.
“But the key was Charlie, because he then organized all of it. I think without Charlie, the tour wouldn’t have survived past the early’ 70s,” says Siple.
But Pace’s contributions are well recognized in the biking community. The bike Charlie rode on about 30 of the tours will soon be displayed at the Bicycle Museum of America in New Bremen, Ohio, along with some promotional tour posters of Siple’s.
Now 80, Pace says he doesn’t ride much anymore… except two times per week to Plains City – a 13-mile round trip. He also tries to go on one bike tour every year. Last year he rode for a week on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
He is finally retiring from running the tour this year. He’s also retiring this year after 60 years from the board of Columbus Outdoor Pursuits.
“Probably I’ll ride in it, but I don’t know,” says Pace. “It would be fun to ride again.”
Pace scoffs when asked how the tour will fare without him.
“It’ll be fine,” he says.
But all his friends say they worry a little bit about how many volunteers will come back, how things will be without the decades of institutional knowledge he carries, the personal touch he applies.
“I hope that the organization has been good enough to them and they’ve had a good enough experience that they’ll just want to do it even though CP is not directing anymore,” says South.
Siple, who comes back as often as he can, believes the tour is established enough to survive.
But Charlie says he might have to be out of town on the weekend of May 7-8. Add one more mystery to the Pace folio – how could he miss the 50th anniversary? He isn’t saying.
But if Pace is missing, the hills will still bite around Chillicothe and Waverly, it will probably rain as it often does, but it’s surely not going to be the same TOSRV without CP.
The Mighty TOSRV
Charlie Pace in 1979. Photo © Greg Siple The Mighty TOSRV, as it is known, was born in 1962 when Greg Siple and his father Charles talked each other into riding from Columbus to Portsmouth and back. Siple says that his father was an avid cyclist as far back as the 1930s, though cycling was a rarified activity in America in those days.
“At the time, in early ’60s, only kids rode bicycles in the U.S., plus perhaps a few adults here and there, sometimes immigrants,” Siple says.
Greg Siple became fascinated with the whole world of cycling – the exotic ten-speeds, the European history, the lure of the open road – and began to undertake his own expeditions.
He enjoyed the Columbus to Portsmouth ride so much that he convinced a set of friends to go with him again the next year. The Columbus Council of American Youth Hostels, later Columbus Outdoor Pursuits caught on to the trip, and the fourth year, 16 riders went (including Pace), and from there TOSRV grew exponentially.
TOSRV always starts early Saturday morning from the Ohio Statehouse and finishes there late Sunday. The route used to travel SR 104 but now utilizes smaller roads on the east side of the Scioto into Circleville, then crosses back to 104 and winds down through food stops at Chillicothe and Waverly, and into Portsmouth for a 105-mile trip.
Temperatures can swing wildly from 80 degrees and sunny to 40 and blattering rain – all in the same weekend. It’s not a ride for the uninitiated – though it’s not a race, riders should be able to handle a decent clip for hours on end. Besting the distance, the weather and its accompanying headwinds seems to bring satisfaction to many TOSRV warriors.
Saturday night, some lucky riders score hotels, but most bivouac in various indoor shelters TOSRV reserves for them, on their sleeping bags that TOSRV trucks down for them from Columbus. Sunday morning, the Crispie Crème Donut Shop starts serving donuts and coffee at 5 a.m., and it’s back upstream to Columbus.
TOSRV gained riders every year from its inception to holding steady at 3,500 riders from 1977-1982, when numbers started to climb again, reaching a high of 6,650 in 1989. Through the early 1990s, numbers hovered around 6,000, then 5,000 or so, and started dropping off down again to closer to 3,500 by 1999.
In a way, TOSRV’s been a victim of its own success as cyclists around the U.S.
visited, took home the idea to create a group bike tour of their own, and siphoned off riders to other locations around the country.
“That’s OK, 6,200 riders was a real problem, we had pace lines passing pace lines on Route 104. We’ll probably have about 3,000 this year and I hope we don’t have more than that,” Pace says.
“It gets to the point where wherever you go you’re standing in lines, there are oodles of people, and it’s maybe a little oppressive,” Siple says.
Pace expects to go through 60 cases of bananas, 50 cases of grapes, plus almost 800 gallons of Gatorade – and 200 faithful volunteers who register all of those riders truck luggage and serve food, drive “sagwagons” for those who can’t make it all the way to Portsmouth or home, and welcome riders back into Columbus.
TOSRV riders will come from probably 40 states this year, Pace says, plus some from Canada. The ride used to be a young person’s outing, but the group has aged. Pace says he thinks the biggest concentration of riders is now between 48 and 62 years old, and many are devoted veterans.
© 2011 Short North Gazette, Columbus, Ohio. All rights reserved.
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