Passes & Canyons Blog

I’ve been reading Rider magazine for as long as I’ve been riding. John had a friend who rode, who died, and his widow gave John a bunch of the guy’s magazines, which John passed on to me after he had read them. One was Rider. I remember the cover photo on that first issue featured the Honda Pacific Coast, which was brand new.

A lot has changed with motorcycle magazines since then, with some folding and others going digital-only. Somewhere maybe about a year ago it occurred to me that I had not received an issue of Rider for quite some time. Had they folded? Quit publishing on paper? Had I allowed my subscription to expire? Had they gone digital-only and was I still being automatically renewed while not getting anything for my money?

I sent an email to their subscription department. (They definitely had not simply folded.) Was my subscription current, I asked, and if so, why had I not received any issues? Had they gone digital-only? Because if so I would probably choose to cancel my subscription. Or were they still publishing a hard copy that I just was not receiving?

I got a reply that due to Covid they had halted printing hard copies but all the latest issues were available online, and yes my subscription was still current. But most importantly, they were resuming hard copy publishing with the December 2021 issue, and to compensate me for missing so many issues they were extending my subscription. In fact, when that issue arrived I saw that they had extended my subscription for two full years. Nice. Thanks.

So this first hard-copy issue had a bunch of surprises in it. Mark Tuttle, the editor-in-chief since forever has left. Retired I assume. There in the lead piece, always written by Mark, was Greg Drevenstedt. Holy smokes.

This drove me to see when it was that Mark left. I’ve worked with Mark for years and am still sitting on a story I pitched to him that got delayed repeatedly. So I dug into the online-only issues. It turned out that Mark’s last issue was December 2020. I found this by working backward to see when Greg’s first issue was, and found that in January 2021. But then there was another surprise in store for me in that issue: Clement Salvadori was retiring and the January 2021 issue was his last.

Holy smokes again. Clem had been with Rider since before I started reading the magazine. He was one of my favorite writers. Oh my gosh.

Life moves on, I guess. Things change. Meanwhile, though, it’s nice to be receiving Rider in the mail again.

Biker Quote for Today

I used to own a motorcycle that couldn’t go anywhere. Later I found out it was because it was two tired.

Tags: Rider magazine

This entry was posted on Monday, January 10th, 2022 at 11:32 am and is filed under motorcycle talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.