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Quiet activists, resident anchors, low–key community builders – they’re in every community. Neighbors know them and generally appreciate what they do, but the appreciation is usually pretty quiet too. Such neighborhood treasures are all too often taken for granted. 

One such unsung hero for the neighborhood south of Ashby and just east of Sacramento is Bob Clear, who has occupied the modest white house with blue trim with his family for over twenty–three years. What has Bob Clear done for this South Berkeley neighborhood? Better known as “Bicycle Bob,” Clear has been fixing the bicycles children bring to him for over twenty years. 

His neighbor, Jack Moore, who lives next door, has watched the story unfold for the whole two decades. 

“He’s been doing this for years. I see children there almost every day. Whenever a child has a problem with a bicycle, they come knock on Bob’s door.” 

An unassuming man with a slightly sardonic smile, Clear is modest about his contribution. 

“Mostly I do it just to be part of the community. I’m not a religious person and I’m not a joiner, so when I think about community and ask myself what am I gonna give back, my answer is, one of the things I can do is work on bicycles. There are a lot of people doing things, but most of them do it in an organization.” 

At least twice others in the community tried to organize what Clear does into more formal youth development efforts. 

“Two or three years ago, a woman who was part of the church up the street tried to organize my repair work at the church. She tried to tie it to getting the children involved in doing things in the community. And recently someone else came by and asked me to teach the children how to fix their own bikes, but the children wouldn’t come on a regular basis. Some of the children are amenable to learning how to fix bikes themselves and some of them aren’t.”  

Clear doesn’t remember exactly how the tradition got started. “It was very much chance. Probably somebody walked by pushing a bike with a flat tire and I said, ‘you want that fixed?’ But then it got to be too much – I found I was doing it all the time – so I ended up having to set hours. Wednesday afternoon and most of Saturday I try to be here. I don’t always succeed.” 

Before Clear established regular hours, children would knock on an almost daily basis with a bicycle in hand. 

As good as Clear feels about giving back to the community, he’s had his doubts about it from time to time. 

“It’s had it’s ups and downs. You know, children can play rough, and sometimes games get out of hand, especially if they get into the insult game. One child says something that strikes too close to home and gets someone mad. It can escalate real fast. I’ve had concerns that I might be creating a nuisance, with there being so many children gathered here and some of them not always polite.”  

A few times, Clear or his wife have even been threatened “because I didn’t do something they wanted me to do, or I broke up a fight.” 

“I worry sometimes whether it’s too much for my neighbors who live in the first floor apartment, because it’s happening so close to them. And sometimes, though not recently, I’ve had a hard time keeping a hold of tools and that can get discouraging.” 

But the satisfactions outweigh the discouragement.  

“What’s most satisfying is to have the children you’ve helped come up to you a few years afterwards and say they’re doing okay, that they have a job, that they’re making something of themselves. Often it’s the children I’ve had lots of problems with. Seeing them doing well as adults feels good.” 

As he talked, Marshawn, 7, and Michael, 9, rode up.  

“What do you need?” 

“I need my handlebars straightened,” said Marshawn. 

“And I need air in my front tire,” said Michael. 

Examining Michael’s bike, Clear said, “That’s not the only thing you need. This is going to be a real problem. See all this loose stuff hanging here?” he said pointing to the frayed ends of Michael’s pants legs. 

Marshawn looked at his friend’s ankles and concurred with Clear’s prognosis. “I hit a pole once when my pants got stuck in the chain.” 

Clear tells a story of how he and his wife, Barbara, were riding their bikes and came upon a boy fallen by the roadside lashed tightly to his bike by his pants. 

“He was locked to his bike. We had no tools, so we ended up having to cut the end of his cuff off and then burn the torn end out from under the chain.” 

The children said that they learn a lot from Clear. “The last time my chain was broken I brought it here and I kept on watching him so I could learn how to fix it,” Marshawn said. “I come here every time I get a problem.” 

“Really, what I have is access to tools,” Clear said as he worked on the handlebars, “and patches are inexpensive.” 

“And I’ve learned things from the children too,” Clear said, telling how once a child came to him with an inner tube that was too big for the tire. “He had a unique way of holding the tube and stuffing it inside on itself to get it in the tire. It was very clever.” 

Clear came to the Bay area with a doctorate in chemistry from UC San Diego, but he hasn’t worked as a chemist for over twenty years. Instead, he ended up at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working on energy conservation.  

He and his wife looked around for what they could afford, and ended up in their present home, which he expanded five years ago by adding a second floor. 

Clear, 53, is now semi–retired, only occasionally being called to the Lab to help out. He puts in a lot of unpaid time developing mathematical models. 

“My wife and I live simply. Our house is paid for. We have no car. A lot of people take a lot of money to live. Seeing the prices of houses climb the way they are right now, I must confess I’m pretty concerned that soon people won’t be able to afford to live here anymore.” 

But while such larger issues of community sustainability worry him, he nonetheless constantly radiates the calm assurance that he is doing what he can to help knit the community together. 

“It makes me feel good about being in the community. I can provide a model. Once a child asked me how much I charge and I told him, ‘I charge an awful lot. I’m doing you a favor and I want you to go out and do a favor for someone else,’” Clear said 

“So in some ways it does get back to philosophy. I’m not religious, so when I ask myself the question ‘what’s the purpose of life?’ my answer is ‘the only purpose I have is the purpose I make for it.’”