Alice Awards nominee: Pete Jacobsen

by BTA correspondent John McLaren

Pete Jacobsen likens his love for bike work to the joy of cooking. “If you really like to cook, you cannot eat everything you make or you’d weigh 300 pounds, so you give it away,” he says. That’s how Jacobsen feels about the bikes he repairs and assembles in a garage next to his Outer Southeast home. Like a cook who prepares an abundance of good food for the pleasure of feeding his friends, he charges nothing for his services.

When he retired after 36 years in the computer industry, Jacobsen, now 62, decided he wanted to “do something with my hands other than type.” So seven years ago, he embarked on a new career course as a bicycle mechanic. After training at the Ashland (Ore.) United Bicycle Institute, he served as an “minister” in the Bike Church Community Bike Shop and Tool Cooperative in Santa Cruz, Calif., where the ministers (mechanics) share tools and expertise while helping others learn how to fix their bikes.

Then Jacobsen and his wife Karen spent five years traveling around the West in a fifth-wheel trailer. They carried a supply of bikes tools and parts so Pete could lend a hand, at no charge, to cyclists in need. About a year ago they decided to settle in Portland, where his two daughters live.

Jacobsen drew on his earlier experiences to establish the Jacobsen Bicycle Service in the city’s Outer Southeast area, where conventional bike shops are few and far between. Inside his garage tools are hung in perfect order, and bikes aligned in neat rows. He has regular hours on Sunday for his diverse clientele but is ready to assist whenever a cyclist asks. He doesn’t make money, but his volunteer service yields psychic benefits. Back when he was vice president of engineering at a San Francisco Bay Area software company, he could spend a year on a project with little appreciation, he says, “but here you work for an hour and someone smiles.”

Jacobsen’s clients aren’t all that different from the folks he dealt with at the bike coop in Santa Cruz. They don’t fall into any single category, but include “friends of friends” with high-end bikes, needy adults who may use their bikes to scavenge for recyclables, and neighborhood kids “who manage somehow to destroy bikes every week.”

He doesn’t claim any great expertise as a mechanic. “I am a general practitioner,” he says. Some work on fancy bikes may be beyond his scope, but he still manages to assemble serviceable bikes from old frames and discarded parts that he donates. Often the best solutions to bike problems are simple and inexpensive. Example: “Thirty-cent brake pads are wonderful. So many people don’t have any brakes.”

Jacobsen is aided by people like Corey Cartwright, operator of Seven Corners Cycles, who sells him supplies at a generous discount. “I like what he’s doing, you know it’s fun. And if I didn’t rely on sales to put food on table, I would do it for free also,” Cartwright says.