It’s been 50 years since Tom Owen took delivery on the first stock he put on display at Owen Cyclery, but he remembers it well.
“We bought $16,000 worth of bikes, parts and tools from a salesman and gave him a check,” he recalled.
Owen said he felt “overwhelmed” when the tractor trailer backed up to deliver his order.
“Back then, $16,000 in merchandise was a lot,” he said.
He sold that, and lots more, in the course of the next 30 years. He sold the business itself in 2002 — “after 30 years in retail, it was time,” he said — but was back at the store Thursday to help mark its 50th anniversary. The store is at 1920 Northpoint Blvd. in Hixson.
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“What I think about is the employees,” Owen said in a telephone interview prior to the event. “They were usually high-school or college kids, and I was in my late 20s (when we started) — pretty close to their age. We’d get to be friends, and they’d come to me with situations they’d gotten themselves into. I was parent, counselor and, sometimes, loan company.
“I still see some of them, and several have gone on to be pretty successful,” he added.
Erik Hunt, the store’s co-owner from 2002 to 2016 and its sole owner since, said he was one of those employees as a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga undergraduate in the late 1980s.
“The store’s larger now, close to 6,000 square feet, and the changes in technology for bikes today is mind-blowing,” Hunt said in a telephone interview, “but the one constant throughout is that we’ve always had an incredibly faithful customer base.
“I’ve had the pleasure of selling bikes to four generations of families, and that was sort of the way Tom ran the business — community-centric, building relationships, helping clubs and organizations. It was a seed he planted that’s grown to this day.”
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One thing Owen and Hunt seem to have in common is that neither was well suited to bicycles. Owen said his father was his family’s bicycle “enthusiast” and founded the Chattanooga Bicycle Club in 1967.
“My passion was motorcycles,” Owen said. “Two wheels, but with an engine attached.”
Owen said he and his parents talked occasionally about opening a bike shop. In late 1973, he said, they opened Owen Cyclery.
“Dad had another business, but he’d come to the shop on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays,” he recalled. “He kept the books. Mom would come up Wednesdays and Fridays and did some wheel-building.
“I didn’t take any money out of the business for the first two years. I never got sick to my stomach about (potential failure), but with a small business, you always have that fear in the back of your mind.”
While Owen preferred motorcycles to bicycles, Hunt said he had “no background” in bicycles when Owen hired him in 1987.
“I always had very good mechanical aptitude,” Hunt said. “I came to the store, we hit it off and he hired me.
“Over the years, a lot of people who were into cycling found their way into a job here. What’s funny is that I went on to race bikes after I started here.”
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Hunt said that after he graduated from UTC in 1989, family responsibilities dictated that he stay in Chattanooga. He said Owen made him the store manager and, eventually, began the process of “passing the torch.”
“Tom’s been almost like a dad to me,” Hunt said. “This was nothing I ever aspired to do, but he set me on a path.”
Hunt said just as Owen Cyclery was a business of its time when Owen did everything manually, it’s a business of its time today, with day-to-day operations computerized. But what hasn’t changed in a half-century, he added, is the feeling of family there.
“From day one, really nice people we’ve formed relationships with,” Hunt said. “Companies come and go, but that’s been a constant.”
Contact Bob Gary at bgary@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6731.