Kenneth Acklin and his father were on a birding trip in rural Pennsylvania in 1972 when the weather decided to ruin their plans.
The 11-year-old Acklin found himself ducking into a bicycle shop owned by one of his father’s friends instead of catching a glimpse of great blue herons during nesting season. It was pouring rain, and Acklin’s dad went into the office to talk to the owner, leaving his young son alone in the bicycle shop.
So, Acklin did what every preteen boy would do: he let the air out of every single tire in the store.
“We got home, and there were no answering machines, and our phone was ringing. It was the owner of the bike shop,” Acklin said. “I distinctly remember hearing my father say, ‘No, I don’t think he would have done something like that, but let me ask him.’ He asked me, and I said, ‘Oh yeah, I did that.’ My punishment was I had to go to the shop every Saturday for a full month and air up the tires.”
And the rest was history.
Since that fateful day 53 years ago, bicycles have not only become a passion for Acklin but his life’s work. He’s been in the industry ever since, owning his own bicycle shop, servicing pro cycling teams and helping enthusiasts design and customize their rides.
“It was really cool because I got to hang out with real mechanics and listen to grown people swear and yell at bikes. It was a coming of age thing for me,” Acklin remembered about his so-called punishment. “I was building wheels by the time I was 13. I realized I had the mechanical aptitude for it, and I was hired on by the shop.”
Acklin decided he wanted to be an engineer and was accepted to Carnegie Mellon University, but his father wanted him to become a doctor and attend the University of Pittsburgh. Teenage Acklin ultimately decided to pick neither option and moved to Price, where one of his siblings worked at Utah State University Eastern.
There, he obtained his “associate’s degree in nothing” and had a brief stint working in a field other than bicycle mechanics. He quickly realized he was miserable, though.
“I decided that I would rather be happy than wealthy and made the conscious decision in my mid-20s that I was done trying for the American Dream and just wanted to go be happy,” Acklin said.
Acklin worked in bike shops all over the country, including Colorado, California and, of course, Salt Lake City, before landing his current job as the head of Park City Bike & Demo’s service department. Now, he helps Park City’s avid cycling community fix and modify their bikes for Summit County’s summer season, when locals and tourists alike trade in their skis for wheels.
“We met about three years ago at a bike shop, and I knew right away he was definitely the smartest and most experienced man I’ve ever met in the cycling industry,” said the store’s general manager Ian Rugaber. “He’s my biggest mentor in the cycling industry. His experience is unmatched. He is willing and wanting to teach you everything he knows and wants you to pass it on, which I think is a beautiful and super inspiring thing.”
Beau Frentheway, lead technician for Park City Bike & Demo, first met Acklin five years ago when he was working as a pizza cook. Frentheway’s brother worked at the same bike shop as Acklin and suggested he join them.
“I don’t think I could have gotten someone better to teach me what I know,” Frentheway said. “He’s very patient. Instead of just teaching you, he teaches you and then he’ll take the bike apart and make you do what he just taught you. He has a very good way of speaking to people.”
Frentheway called Acklin a role model, both in the cycling industry and in his personal life.
“If we have a problem, he’s opened my mind to be able to see how to fix that problem instead of trying to find a part and ordering it,” Frentheway added. “We can just make a tool that fits it. He’s taught me basically everything I know.”
Rugaber similarly said Acklin was a “genius on a bicycle,” especially when it comes to teaching coworkers and younger generations how to repair and troubleshoot mechanical issues.
“His words are very well calculated, and he knows how to explain things really, really well, and that’s from decades of experience and going through the hard parts and learning the hard way,” he said.
Acklin described bike mechanics as “engineers without the degree,” emphasizing the importance of ingenuity.
“We have to be able to go from a concept to a working prototype in an amount of time that would make most people’s heads spin,” Acklin said. “We have to modify tools to make them work in situations that come up that aren’t covered by what manufacturers anticipate. We have to take designs that were, quite frankly, pretty terrible and make them work. Problem solving is the key to all of this.”
And, of course, Acklin imbues life lessons along the way, often by telling stories about his own life. He has a plethora of bicycle-related memories to share, from getting lost in Wyoming and biking 210 miles on his own to working as a “domestique” or helper for a professional Dutch team to servicing famed Olympian Peter Sagan’s bike when he visited Utah a few years ago.
But his favorite memories, Acklin said, will always involve the camaraderie of working alongside his fellow mechanics.
“There’s absolutely no way I can do what I do in this shop without Beau, Ian and Tomas,” Acklin said, also referring to technician and salesman Tomas Parra-Gomez. “This is truly a very unique situation in this shop. We have insightful and supportive owners, and the skill in the shop is mindboggling. Beau is a younger technician, but he is so far ahead of where I was when I was his age, and Tomas is the same way. If you even watch these guys ride, I feel inadequate. They’re so good, but it’s about how we all work together. It’s more than just our individual talents in the shop. It’s how we work together that makes us really special.”