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Narrator<\/strong>: Welcome to the National Bicycle Greenways Mountain Mover podcast series. Here, you will get up close and personal with people who are taking giant steps for the betterment of cyclists and for the planet itself. <\/span><\/p>\n We’ve spent some time on the phone today with a highly educated man who, after a long career in mental health, created a notable market for the recumbent bicycle in the relative middle of nowhere, in the state of Pennsylvania. Armed with his genuine desire to offer test rides, that result in happy, smiling faces, Rob Gentry, tirelessly continues to sell a wide array of trikes and bents from his shop in State College called Recumbent Bike Riders. We’ll also talk about the Taiwan-based quality recumbent called The Performer he now has a big online presence for.<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: How are you doing today guy?<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: I’m doing pretty well. How about yourself? <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: I’m doing great. You’ve got a lot of snow back there, you were saying. <\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: Yes. Philadelphia got a couple feet, which is bizarre for Philadelphia and down to Jersey Shores got flooded too. So, it’s not like the old Sandy but it’s pretty messy. Anyhow…<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: How far are you from Philly? <\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: It’s about two and a half hours, three and a half hours.<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Okay. And then how far from Pittsburgh are you? <\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: About two and a half. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Two and a half? Well, Rob, let’s just get right into this. Where did you grow up at?<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: Right where I am, State College, Pennsylvania. It’s in the middle of the state. I was born in Lansing, Michigan, but we moved to Central Pennsylvania within a year or two, just because my father was hired at the University of Penn State, so I’ve been here most of my life, right in the middle of nowhere. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Wow. What did your dad do at the University?<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: Well, he worked in Microbiology, Bacteriology, he was a scientist, in poultry and avian diseases. So it was fun growing up because I got to play with the chickens and then I got to… I really did, we’d go and play with the chickens and later, when I was hurting for money, I could go up and be part of a project- scoop and poop. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Oh my God. <\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: Hey, you do whatever you do, when you’ve got kids, you do whatever you do. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Yes, man, wow. So your dad, was he a PhD, then?<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: Yes, he actually had two doctorates.<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Oh, my God.<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: Yes, he was a veterinarian, a full vet and then he actually went back for a PhD in Microbiology and Bacteriology. Dad, he was one smart little guy, that’s for sure. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Man, man…that’s amazing. You know, I’m in Davis, and Davis, as you know, is the bike capital of America. It’s also the home of UC Davis which is the top veterinarian school in the world. <\/span><\/p>\n Rob: Oh, nice. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer: Yes. There’s lots of crazy stuff around. In fact, I work out at the gym with a guy named \u00a0 <\/span>Yilma, I can’t pronounce his last name, but he’s one of the top educators in the world at the top veterinary school in the world and he’s getting ready to retire. So, I guess your dad is still around? <\/span><\/p>\n Rob: No, he passed a while ago. He also liked to smoke, which isn’t good. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer: Oh no. <\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: Yes, I’m afraid that’s what got him. But, yes.<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: As a kid, were you a bike rider?<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: No, not really. I mean, I had the…as a little kid, I had the leftover 20-year-old, rusted, one-speed, three-speed that my sister had or something like that but I more or less walked around with that and pretended I could ride. Yes, I know. I tried to enter a contest, a biking contest and I kept falling over but when I got a little older I had the old Stingray, and that was my favorite. I mean…<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: How old were you when you got in the Stingray mode?<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: Oh, I was 10, 12? <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Good, good.<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: Yes, it was fun. It was the coolest bike I think I ever had. At least I felt cool.<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Wow. Awesome. And then from there, did you end up doing any, follow in your dad’s footsteps, any college?<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: Oh, yes. I did some college, I went to Penn State. I was here, the deal was, since he was on faculty, there was a 75% discount in the tuition. So the deal was, if I went here, great, he’d pay for it, but if I went somewhere else, I got to pay for it. So guess where I ended up going? And then for grad school, I went to the University of Kentucky, down in Lexington and I did Family Studies and Rural Mental Health. That was my emphasis. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Rural Mental Health?<\/span><\/p>\n Rob: Yes, Rural Mental Health, it’s a whole other thing for country folks. Yes, we found out in the hollers. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer: So Rural Mental Health is different than Mental Health?<\/span><\/p>\n Rob: A little different because mostly, what you’re working with…the funniest part was, I wasn’t as educated, I didn’t have as much training but there are so few people out there like grandfathered in you could say. So I would have a staff of Bachelors level and Masters level doing the work that we really needed, the most educated in the field, but people want to go to private practice, and make some money, this is non…we’re a non-profit. So we did this more for the commitment than anything else. Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Wow. So I don’t want to deliberate on this too much, because I want to talk about bikes. So Rural Mental Health, is it because there’s less education, that’s why it’s different from normal mental health? <\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: No, I think it’s more rural mental health because we concentrate on…we’ll go visit people who don’t have any health care even. They have never seen…they don’t trust counseling as such, and by the time we get them, they may have some severe problems. So we would more or less do an intervention if we could, try and calm things down, get them to a doctor that would prescribe any kinds of medication they need. We didn’t provide any of that. <\/span><\/p>\n We were just more for intervention and doing the therapy we could. A lot of the times it didn’t take long, it was just a couple needed to talk or the kids needed to become more organized by the parent, should I say. It was fun, but part of what we did was structural family therapy. I don’t know…what that means is that we had two therapists, five teams of them, that would work with a family, which was really nice and then I would oversee them. We did that through Pittsburgh, Western Psychiatric Institute, that was fun, I really did like that. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Wow. Well, you were saying the other day, before…first off, the other day you were saying that you were able to use your training in the sales of recumbent bicycles or at least at your shop or somewhere or the other. How long…before you answer that question, speak to that, how long did you work in the field of mental health then? <\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: Well, probably about 25 years.<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Wow, geez…<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: This is the second…recumbent are like a second or third career. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer: Geez. So, how do you apply that work to recumbent cycling?<\/span><\/p>\n Rob: Well, I guess, in a nut shell, it goes into sales and people. I mean, we don’t have to do hard sales really in the recumbent world. If we can get someone to sit on it, that’s half the sale right there. And also, mental health… I mean, look at all the recumbent folks, we’re not exactly all normal, you know what I’m saying? And I say that tongue-in-cheek of course. But they are more open to other people it seems, and they do have a better outlook on life, more give, it’s really nice. But seriously, what I’ve learned really from people, it might sound funny but I’ve learned patience from them because I really needed that. I needed listening skills, and that was really all you do.<\/span><\/p>\n You ask a couple of questions and listen to the people talk, and most of the time, at the core, no matter what mood they’re in or what issue they might have coming in the door here, it’s just like what I learned before, they’re basically good folks and deserve respect and love. If you can do that, it’s good. You both bond, I have a good time, there’s no hard sales, they can trust me, they can ask me anything and I think it’s made sales nicer. If I had come into this without working with people, like I did, I think I would have been a little more cold about it, more like, what a Dale Carnegie say, type of approach and I don’t… didn’t like that. I wanted this to be fun, and it has been. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: It’s just a lot more love.<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: Yes, actually, pretty much it.<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: I love it. <\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: It’s no defensiveness. People, even if they come in and they get mad at me or they don’t like what I’ve done, or they don’t like the work or whatever…I don’t know. A lot of times, the anger in all those things come out as fear or distrust or whatever. So if I just wait around with them and be with them, be patient, we’ll get through everything. And also, they can relax and they know that I’m not trying to sell them something they don’t want or I’m not trying to make them think something that I want them to think or that they don’t believe in, it’s nothing like that. “How are you doing? What kind of riding do you do?” And we go from there. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Wow. So before you got into the… to be able to bridge mental health work, with recumbent cycling, I think it’s fantastic because I see that all the time. I worked as a baseball umpire, when I did it professionally, how I’m able to bridge that into working with people. When did you do your first recumbent bicycle ride and what kind of bike was it?<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: Yes. How I got introduced… a friend of mine had a really bad motorcycle accident and he was laid up for about a year, and when he started getting better, he wanted to ride his bike because he was an upright cyclist and it hurt and his doctor yelled at him, because he wasn’t healed yet. But he also said that if you’re going to ride, ride a recumbent. <\/span><\/p>\n So, Peter Stull, the bicycle man, he went up there and he ended up coming home with a RANS Tailwind and so, I got to ride a RANS Tailwind. I rode it in the grass first because I wasn’t so sure I was going to stay afloat but, it worked out all right. In fact, after that day, I kept thinking, I wonder what other kinds there are and then I go on the internet and find out there’s a whole recumbent world. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer: What year was that?<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: That was about 18 years ago, 18,20. I don’t remember, something like that. Asking me memory things is not a good idea. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Okay. Wow. So, about 1999 or ’98, somewhere there. <\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: Yes, before that, before that. It took me years just to come around to the idea of doing a store but I certainly wanted to get one. One of my first bikes was a BikeE, my wife and I ended up with BikeE\u2019s, which I loved. I eventually became a BikeE dealer. Because I bought two, I guess they figured I got it right from BikeE, got into a conversation eventually and then I thought, I wonder if I can get a Vision, and I wonder if I can get a Linear and I wonder if I can get a…and it kind of built from there. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: So, what year was that? Can I ask that question?<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: I started doing that… when was that? It had to be about 18, yes, that was about 18 years ago I started actually building up the idea to go into business.<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Oh, okay. <\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: I didn’t just one day go, “Oh, I love that, I rode a Tailwind I’m going to start a business.” No, it sunk in. In fact, I was going to do it with that friend who was in the motorcycle accident, yes. Mr. Barletta. And he comes from a background of selling used cars and I’m not, so he was going to do the sales, I did all the mechanic work and packing and shipping and whatever, and after a while, he decided he didn’t want to do it, so I took over and…<\/span><\/p>\n My wife was, my wife was a little bit skeptical and I was too, but one quarter, I looked back at my so-called books…I was learning how to do books and we did $30,000 gross in the 3-month period, my wife, was like “Bam, maybe this is something you want to look at.” And then from there, I got a little more serious, I started looking at how to get out of my day job what I… so I eased out of that, and it went from there. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer: So, all this time, you were selling bikes our of your garage and out of your front room? <\/span><\/p>\n Rob: Yes. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer: I remember those times. And you were pretty stealth on the internet too, maybe you’re doing a lot of work on the internet.<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: I was trying my best to learn HTML…in fact it was more simple than it is now. But I did make it with that page and I did other things to try and get the word out, so that spiders would find me for the search engine spiders. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Right, right. So, what year did you actually go brick and mortar, you opened up a real shop?<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: 2000, 1999\/2000. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: Because there was a period of getting it ready. It was real but I got an old gas station, Unimart kind of place, convenient mart, and we had to clean that out. In fact, we took, four tons of stuff that had just been left in here, for like a decade and took it out back. And we had like four layers of linoleum to bring up off the ground. It was good. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Wow. <\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: It took a while is what I’m trying to say. And then once we cleared it out, we looked at it and said yes, this is a big enough space. We had freezer space in here, we had, my freezer, big freezer, where the glass doors usually go in and we see where we would have all the sodas behind them and everything to buy. That we took out and behind that, which was the original freezer for this Unimart is where we have our mechanic stand, and I do the computer work and all that. So…<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: Wow. And that’s there in College Station?<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: No, people make that mistake. That’s down in, listen to me, down in Maryland. Larry would not be happy with me just now. This is State College…<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer: Oh, okay.<\/span><\/p>\n Rob: Pennsylvania. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer: I’m sorry. What do you say.<\/span><\/p>\n Rob: I think it’s close. I get a lot of that. People call up and ask me if that’s what it is and I go you’re looking for me or Larry Black and then we sort it out. So, University, college, it’s all the same.<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer: Right, right. Okay. I’m glad I made that mistake on account of helping people. That was pretty funny. So behind every great man, as all of us know, and we know there’s a lot of truth to this, there’s a great woman. Your wife is also working in mental health, still working in it. Is that correct to say? <\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: Yes, that’s correct, although calling ma a great man, that’s a little much. I appreciate it Martin, but…<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: You’re a great man because…<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: Are you kissing up or something?<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: You’re a great man because you’re in recumbence, dude, because you’re in recumbents, you’re a great man.<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: All right, all right. <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer<\/strong>: And you’re able to keep the ball floating. That’s what I like about Rob Gentry. So, does she still act, does she still play much of a part in recumbent bicycle riders, at all?<\/span><\/p>\n Rob<\/strong>: No, not really. In the very beginning, she tried to with time, with but she’s a psychologist, she has her own people on that and she really realized she knows nothing about bikes, just that she likes to ride one once in a while. So, from the beginning, it pretty much was just me. She would come on a weekend to bring lunch, sit around, talk to some of the folks and when we had our rally going every year, she would, of course, be a wonderful host for that, but no, not really. <\/span><\/p>\n She sticks to her own stuff. Now, being supportive in the other ways, yes. I couldn’t have done this without her being supportive, mostly because I had doubts at times. I thought I had finally gone over the edge, I was going to quit my job, and use all my personal money to start a business I know nothing about. In fact, I was never a bike mechanic, I had to learn that from scratch. Eventually, I went out to Barnett’s in Colorado Springs and took his basic course and then took other courses in bike mechanic. And that helped.<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer: Wow, awesome. <\/span><\/p>\n Rob: But certainly, she was the most, my favorite…we’re like each others cheerleaders, so… <\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer: And she’s really quite the high profile mental health therapist, is that correct, to say?<\/span><\/p>\n Rob: Yes, that’s correct to say. Yes, she’s been in a lot of…even some high profile stuff in the news, even been on some national news about stuff that she was a part of. But, I won’t get into that here. She gets embarrassed too, she’s very shy. <\/span><\/p>\n