By David Schweidenback
Spring 2022 Newsletter
The last newsletter featured a memorial to Bob Gleason. It got me to thinking that I should write about other individuals who have had a profound impact on Pedals for Progress and me personally.
I would like to tell you about Ernie Simpson. He was a soft-spoken, simple man. He was a good old farm boy from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. To be a farmer you have to be a mechanic. Ernie served in the army during World War II in Europe, fixing jeeps, and returned home to work his farm.
As he was just about retiring from farming he started collecting bikes. He started to see bicycles being thrown into the trash that had nothing wrong with them or needed a simple fix. To him, it was wrong to be so wasteful so he decided to do something about it. He started collecting bikes he saw and soon had quite a few and he managed to give away some children’s bikes to local kids.
Soon he had so many bikes that they filled his barn. He reached out to Bob Nordval, who was a Dean at Gettysburg College and an avid bicyclist. Bob went over to see Ernie and was shocked to find Ernie had almost 200 bikes; the vast majority were adult bikes. Every one was totally repaired and ready to be ridden. Bob realized that he could never find a home for all of those bikes in Gettysburg so he did some research and found Pedals for Progress.
As soon as Ernie had a place to send the bikes he jumped into action. He produced 800 bikes per year for more than 10 years. He scoured Western Pennsylvania and restored every bicycle to perfect condition. If there was a little rusty spot he would sand it and paint it. He patched or replaced every inner tube and tire. He was so proud that he was saving these perfectly good bicycles from the landfill and getting them to people who truly needed them.
In 1999, when we started collecting sewing machines, he quickly ramped up sewing machine production and recruited his friend Dick Swisher (a sewing machine mechanic) to go over and refurbish each of the machines he collected. As most of the sewing machines came out of cabinets, Ernie built wooden shipping boxes for each one and he printed a copy of a generic operator’s manual for each machine. Besides the 800 bikes per year, he was soon collecting 50 or 60 sewing machines per year.
I cannot do justice telling his story but here is a Spring 2008 Newsletter article that gives a more complete picture of the character and generosity of Ernie Simpson. He was humbled and proud to meet Charles Mulamata from Uganda. He was thankful to have the opportunity to perform the service of collecting, repairing, and processing bikes for shipping overseas. He dedicated the last 12 years of his life to rescuing bicycles for overseas communities. We got to be very good friends as I drove a truck to Gettysburg seven or eight times a year for 12 years. Ernie was one of the best men I have had the honor to have known. He was truly inspirational.