The cycle of life
For Jonathan Loek, tracking down his late father’s beloved bikes – and sharing the many stories of the roads they travelled – is his way of remembering his dad and celebrating their shared passion for two-wheelers
‘‘ I think my dad would be so pumped to know that people are still using them.
JONATHAN LOEK
The Loek household was always full of bikes.
Jonathan Loek remembers his father, Frits, being an avid cyclist. Frits, who worked as the chief photographer of the Mississauga News, would go on 50-kilometre rides three times a week, after work and on weekends. He upgraded his bike every five or six years. But once he started a gig with a bike company called Gardin, that’s when the wheels started turning.
“He was hired to take pictures of the bikes for catalogues,” Jonathan, a 36-year-old technician, explains. “His payment for doing that was getting bikes.”
Jonathan says that as part of the deal, during the ’80s and ’90s, his dad received five or six Gardin bikes. Every time Frits acquired a new one, friends would ask about his older ride. “People ended up buying the bikes from him, just friends that wanted a bike,” Jonathan says. “He’d sell them for really cheap.” Since Frits was also a coach at the Don Rowing Club of Mississauga, many of his bikes went to members.
In 2015, Frits passed away from a heart attack. But his cycling hobby had a way of riding back into Jonathan’s life.
Last summer, Jonathan was buying a new camera from his dad’s friend Jeff Chevrier, who owns the store Photocreative in Mississauga. Chevrier asked Jonathan if he wanted one of his dad’s old bikes back. Frits had sold him a mountain bike in the ’90s and Chevrier was no longer using it.
“I had totally forgotten that bike even existed,” Jonathan says. It hadn’t been ridden in years, so Jonathan slowly tweaked it over the fall and winter. By spring, he posted a photo of the bike on Instagram, along with some memories of his father’s collection, and asked if any of his followers had one of the bikes. “A bunch of people responded,” says Jonathan, who would then post their picture and tell the bike’s story.
One of the first photos he received was of a pink Gardin road bike that originally belonged to Jonathan’s mother. It stood in the family shed for many years, and Jonathan remembers it as the first bike he ever took for a long ride. “The ride was about 40 kilometres and it was with my dad and Hans Laumann (father of Olympic rower Silken Laumann),” Jonathan wrote in a May 22 Instagram story. “When I see this bike I can still feel the jellowy legs and taste of blood in my mouth as we came down Truscott Road to finish the ride.”
Another photo he posted was of a yellow Peugeot from the 1970s. “This was my dad’s bike before I was born,” Jonathan wrote in an Instagram story. “At one point the bike was stolen, which was devastating… A few weeks later he was driving in Toronto on a photo assignment when he spotted it locked to a fence. He pulled over and waited for someone to come and unlock it. It has since been ridden by me for many years. Kala (my wife) rode it and now my friend has it.”
Jonathan has also received stories about how the bikes have been passed along to other riders. “It’s had a lot of use in the last 20 years,” wrote one recipient of a purple Gardin road bike from the early ’90s. “It was my ‘rain bike’ for ages. It got lent to a friend and he used it to commute from Oakville to his office on the Esplanade twice weekly for a solid eight months.”
For Jonathan, collecting these photos and sharing the stories is a way to remember his dad and celebrate his passion for cycling. “I thought it would be cool to find out where the bikes are and who has them,” Jonathan says. “I think my dad would be so pumped to know that people are still using them.”
Since his first posting, he’s received messages from five people who have shared images of his dad’s former bikes and how they use them. He thinks his dad went through more than 10 bikes as an adult, so Jonathan continues to seek the whereabouts of the collection. “I find that there are stories behind almost all of the bikes my dad owned,” he wrote in an Instagram story. “Many of them are still out there somewhere, still collecting the miles.”