Joe Montgomery, who founded Cannondale and transformed the cycling industry with bikes built of lightweight aluminum instead of heavier steel, sometimes walked around the company’s headquarters in Connecticut jingling coins in his pocket when the mood needed lifting.
“You know what that is?” he would say, Murray Washburn, Cannondale’s director of product marketing, recalled in an interview. “That’s change. Change is good. We like change.”
It was an overt display of his philosophy of embracing innovation and dismissing the status quo.
Mr. Montgomery died of complications of heart-related illness on Jan. 2 at his home in Vero Beach, Fla., his daughter, Lauren Edinger, said. He was 86.
At Cannondale, which Mr. Montgomery founded in 1971 with three partners, he and his team of designers and engineers changed the build, weight and feel of upscale, high-tech bicycles. The company was among the first in the United States to mass-produce bikes with frames made of large-diameter aluminum tubes.
“I don’t have a college degree, but I’ve always been a seat-of-the-pants engineer type,” Mr. Montgomery said in 1993 to The New York Times, which called Cannondale the “Lamborghini of mountain bikes” with shock-absorber systems “that are more sophisticated than some people’s first cars.”
The company’s oft-told origin story is that Mr. Montgomery spotted a cyclist struggling up a hill in Wilton, Conn., under the weight of a heavy backpack. His idea of lightening the load was to build a trailer, known as the Bugger, that would be towed behind the bike.
Cannondale opened its first office in a loft above a pickle factory in Wilton, a town in southwest Connecticut along the New York border. Needing a phone line for the new venture, an employee named Peter Meyers walked outside to a pay phone and placed an order. When asked what the company was called, Mr. Meyers is said to have peered at the name of the nearby train station and said, “Cannondale.”
In the 1970s, the company continued making biking accessories and apparel, tents and sleeping bags, along with dog beds for L.L. Bean. Then, in 1983, it produced its first bicycle, the ST-500, a touring model that sold for $495 (more than $1,600 today). It featured an oversized aluminum frame that became a Cannondale hallmark — lightweight but stiff, strong and responsive.
By 1993, The Times reported, the company was generating $100 million a year and had 800 employees worldwide. As Cannondale battled top competitors like Specialized, Trek and Giant, the company became known for numerous other innovations, including a single-legged fork, which provided a smooth ride; a carbon-fiber shell integrated with an aluminum spine; and SmartSense, a safety feature that employed lights, sensors and rear-facing radar.
Its first mountain bike, produced in 1984, featured a 26-inch front wheel and a 24-inch rear wheel to help the rider roll over rocks and roots. It was dismissed by some critics as cycling’s version of a mullet.
But by the 1990s, enhanced Cannondale mountain bikes were winning multiple medals at world championships and the Olympics. At the 1999 Tour de France, the Italian sprinter Mario Cipollini won four consecutive stages aboard a Cannondale racing bike.
The company also experimented with one-off concepts in the 1990s, like a bike that replaced a traditional front wheel with Rollerblade wheels for maximal aerodynamics. And there was the so-called Pong bike, made of aluminum that was cut and shaped by a computerized process and resembled a futuristic can opener.
“Cannondale started out with a kooky streak and they never lost it,” Zapata Espinoza, a leading cycling journalist, wrote in an appraisal of Mr. Montgomery, extolling his passion for “trying to be different.”
In 1990, Cannondale designed a bike that the adventurer Kevin Foster audaciously rode more than 1,500 miles along the Great Wall of China. The prototype had a seat that doubled as a tire pump and featured an automatic transmission that changed gears according to pedal pressure.
“It felt like I was putting on a tailored suit,” Mr. Foster posted in an online remembrance of Mr. Montgomery. “I was the engine, the bike, the machine.”
Joseph Stephen Montgomery was born on Dec. 11, 1939, in Coshocton, Ohio, about 110 miles south of Cleveland. His father, Edward Montgomery, was an entrepreneur who developed a process for coating cotton gloves with a rubberized compound. His mother, Frances (Bingenheimer) Montgomery, ran the family fruit farm.
Joe, too, was an inveterate tinkerer with bikes and farm equipment. He told The Times that as a boy he built a small jeep, scavenging the transmission from a junkyard.
He was 12 at the time, Ms. Edinger, his daughter, said in an interview, saying that her father’s ardor for barreling down a hill was overwhelmed one day by his inability to avoid crashing into the front doors of a church.
“I think that’s how he ended up in boarding school,” she said.
Mr. Montgomery’s devotion to college ended after fits and starts — “He was just not going to do what everybody wanted him to do,” Ms. Edinger said — and, in his 20s, he found a more suitable pursuit in the Caribbean, working on the crews of racing sailboats.
The sturdiness of the masts gave him an appreciation for the strength-to-weight aspect of aluminum, Ms. Edinger said, as did an accident that reportedly left him and four others clinging to an overturned aluminum hull while waiting to be rescued.
After stints in finance and running a bar/restaurant in New York City, Mr. Montgomery founded Cannondale. He reshaped it with aluminum frames after receiving the suggestion in a letter from an engineer named David Graham, who worked for a Connecticut company that built submarines for the Navy before being promptly hired by Cannondale.
The website BikeRadar, to whom Mr. Washburn first told the coin-jingling story, called Mr. Montgomery “one of cycling’s greatest minds.”
He wore jeans and sweatpants; favored conversations over emails; and opened offices in Europe and Japan but kept his manufacturing base in Bedford, Pa., which he visited twice weekly on flights aboard a corporate jet that he piloted.
He regularly brought along bike shop owners to the factory to promote the Cannondale brand and make dealers feel like true partners, Dave Cote, a former graphic designer at the company, said in an interview.
“It would be like taking batting practice at Fenway Park,” Mr. Cote said.
Eventually, Cannondale became overextended and underfinanced when it ventured into the motocross motorcycle and all-terrain vehicle businesses. In 2003, it filed for bankruptcy. In “a roundabout way,” Mr. Espinoza wrote, it was Mr. Montgomery’s “confidence in himself and his employees that created the motorcycle debacle that lost him his company.”
The company is now owned by Pon Holdings, a Dutch conglomerate. Mr. Montgomery later founded a software company to handle billing and medical records.
He is survived by his wife of 43 years, Celia (Congdon) Montgomery, their daughter, Ms. Edinger, and sons Michael, Lucas and John Montgomery. He is also survived by his eldest son from a previous marriage that ended in divorce, Scott Montgomery, who was a longtime Cannondale executive; and three grandchildren.
His father “would have rather pushed the envelope on technology and lead and crash and burn,” Scott Montgomery said in an interview, “than to be timid and afraid.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
The post Joe Montgomery, Who Made Bicycles Lighter, Dies at 86 appeared first on New York Times.
