By Ted Costantino
SAN RAFAEL, Calif. (BRAIN) — Thomas Franges, who as a boy in Zagreb, Croatia, dropped smoke bombs on Nazi occupiers in his city and as an adult helped stem a threatening tide of product-liability lawsuits against the bicycle industry, died on November 19 at home in San Rafael, California. He was 89.
Like many wide-eyed optimists, Tom got into the bike business during the gas crisis of the early 1970s, when prices zoomed, automobile sales plunged, and the self-reliant simplicity of the bicycle seemed a sure path to the future. In Tom’s case, he tossed a 15-year career as a stockbroker over his shoulder and opened The Montclair Bikery in New Jersey on June 1, 1973.
The Bikery’s offerings ranged from three-speeds to touring bikes, but one of the shop’s most exciting first sales was a $400 racing bike to a 19-year-old who paid by check. Sure enough, it bounced: “Nonexistent funds in a nonexistent account,” reported the New York Times, in an article about the bike rental market that featured Tom's store. Although The Bikery eventually got the bike back, Tom was despondent. “It was the first $400 bike we had sold,” he told the Times.
Despite Tom's rough initiation into the art of retailing, The Bikery thrived as a high-end outlet specializing in Japanese bikes. The zero-defect quality of the bicycles fascinated Tom, pushing him to learn more about them. His devotion to Fuji bicycles in particular led to a firm friendship with Ken Moriya, grandson of the founder of Fuji, and eventually to a consulting job with that company. That, in turn, led to work with SunTour, first as a consultant and then as executive vice president.
SunTour held a few aces: It had a patent on a superior rear derailleur design (the slant parallelogram, which was adopted by other major derailleur makers after the patent expired), and it was in the forefront of designing components for the emerging mountain bike market. It also held a few jokers: a U.S. headquarters in New Jersey, far from the mountain bike’s burgeoning scene in California, and an ossified corporate structure. Tom solved the first problem by moving the U.S. headquarters to Marin County, California, and the second by promoting a freewheeling office environment. At the SunTour USA office, he announced, “If you come in late, you have to leave early.”
Unfortunately, much of Tom’s time with SunTour was filled with legal battles with an industry competitor. It was a brutal education, but it did serve him well in his next assignment.
Indeed, Tom’s greatest contribution to the bicycle industry was his work with the Bicycle Product Suppliers Association. In the 1990s, suppliers and dealers faced a plague of lawsuits alleging that the quick-release system used for wheels was faulty and unsafe. In an era of rampant consumer litigation, it was no longer sufficient to inform a new bicycle owner that, as one vintage manual memorably put it, “Assembly of Fuji bicycle requires great peace of mind.”
Instead, Franges, with the support of committee chairman Bob Margevicius, created a uniform bicycle owner’s manual to help thwart nuisance lawsuits stemming from product misuse. Gone were the shaky illustrations of wheels and saddles magically making their way to a generic bicycle frame with the help of vaguely swooping arrows. In their place were clear instructions and plenty of safety warnings.
The killer app was a checklist that the retailer had to review with the customer before turning over a new ride. The customer’s sign-off was designed to make post-purchase litigation a difficult proposition.
Lawsuits dropped dramatically.
In his final industry stint, Tom managed the U.S. office of Dedacciai, maker of high-quality frame tubing, and Deda Elementi, which offered an upscale line of handlebars, stems, seatposts, and accessories. Tom’s ministrations helped Deda, a newcomer to the field, become a credible competitor to its established Italian compatriots Columbus, Cinelli, 3TTT, and Italmanubri (ITM).
In his spare time, Franges was an enthusiastic motorsports fan and participant. As a student at Harvard University, he founded the Harvard Sports Car Club and, embracing the maxim that it is more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow, campaigned a battered series of woefully underpowered British sports cars on local racetracks. Sometimes to good results: He once beat Skip Barber — New England’s answer to Mario Andretti — in a hillclimb at the wheel of a clapped-out Triumph.
Tom upgraded to an Alfa-Romeo Giulietta two-door coupe for few years but reverted to form when he fell under the spell of a near-dead Cooper Formula 3 open-wheeler. It resembled nothing so much as a bathtub on wheels — a miniature bathtub at that. When he called about the car, one of the seller’s first questions was, “Are you a big man, Tom?” He wasn’t, particularly, but even a fellow of normal size would have found the Cooper confining. Once Tom got the car running, he discovered that the only way to drive it was with his elbows outside the cockpit, flapping in the breeze, as if he were on a Sunday drive to the ice cream parlor.
Years later, Tom became race director for the Classic Sports Racing Group, a like-minded confederacy of vintage race car nuts founded in 1968 and now headquartered in Mill Valley, California. He served from 2009 to 2018 and, according to CSRG’s former President Locke de Bretteville, Tom brought desperately needed order to the organization. “Prior to Tom there was little methodology to putting on events,” recalled de Bretteville. “Tom was responsible for entries, schedules, race dates, track negotiations, social events, CSRG staff, et cetera. Basically he ran the show and did a superb job of it. And CSRG really flourished.”
Tomislav Franges was born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, on December 30, 1935, and lived there during World War II. The German invasion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, in April 1941, quickly overwhelmed the Yugoslav forces and the country was partitioned after an unconditional surrender. Zagreb became part of the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet territory of Germany and Italy, with troops from those countries remaining as unwelcome residents.
Citizens staged constant acts of resistance, large ones that resulted in debilitating casualties and small ones designed to annoy the occupying forces. With the help of a friend’s father, a representative for Kodak, Tom and his band of youthful insurgents learned that expired film could become a first-rate smoke bomb when stuffed into one of the spent flare canisters littering the ground from allied night bombing.
Suitably armed, Tom’s irregulars set their sights on a building directly across the street from Tom’s house that had become a German barrack. They climbed to the roof, lit their charges, and dropped the canisters through the air shaft. As the Nazi soldiers raced out into the street trailing a cloud of acrid smoke, Tom’s gang unleashed a fusillade from their air guns and slingshots. It was the high point of the war for Tom, and he and his pals repeated their attacks as often as munitions and enemy surveillance allowed.
Years later, while working in Manhattan, Tom went to a nearby cafeteria for lunch. There were no empty tables, but there was an open chair opposite another diner. He asked if the chair was free, the other fellow said “Yes,” and the two men discovered they had similar accents. “Where are you from?” the man, a German, asked. “Zagreb,” Tom replied. “Oh,” the man said, “I love Zagreb. I spent the best years of the war there.” And where was that, Tom asked. The guy reeled off an address, and Tom recognized it as the house across the street.
Eyeing the other fellow carefully, Tom said, “Do you remember those kids who used to drop smoke bombs down the air shaft?”
The former Nazi stared at Tom for a moment, then stood, picked up his tray, and left the room.
Tom’s family escaped Zagreb by train in 1945 and made their way to Trieste. His mother was somehow able to make a transatlantic call — collect, no less — from a phone in the American-occupied zone. She reached Tom’s uncle Ivan in Washington, D.C., who was chargé d’affaires for the government-in-exile of Yugoslavia. Ivan helped them reach Venice and, eventually, New York, arriving on Christmas Day.
Once in America, Tom’s father, a lawyer, found work in New York and settled in Manhattan with Tom’s mother. Tom, however, was entrusted to the care of his aunt and uncle in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, where he flew through a classic New England education: Exeter Academy for prep school, then Harvard. He graduated in 1959 and joined the Francis I. DuPont investment brokerage house in New York City.
He’d made it. Sort of. But 15 years of work on Wall Street grated against his fundamental nature. He had, as his friend Grant Petersen of Rivendell Bicycles aptly put it, “a rebel streak.” Pushing securities wasn’t rebellious. Chucking it for a shop full of bicycles was. And it suited his fascination with mechanical systems. He’d already mastered the art of synchronizing a pair of Weber side draft carburetors on an inline-four Alfa. After that, a triple crank and a five-speed freewheel on a touring bike was child’s play.
In the years preceding his death, Tom was still lapping tracks close to home in his Cooper Formula 3, a car that had won the USA championship in the late 1950s before being thrashed almost beyond recognition. Lovingly restored by Tom, it was chain-driven by a pre-unit-construction Triumph motorcycle engine and featured a useless roll bar that was shorter than the driver’s head. It was, in brief, the perfect reclamation project for Tom, one that he had, over the years, assembled with great peace of mind.
Tom is survived by his wife of 31 years, Sky Yaeger, of San Rafael, California, his son Christopher, daughter Alexandra, and former wife Anne, of York, Maine.
