In 1973, 83-year old Clarence Pickard showed anyone can ride RAGBRAI

Celebrities like actor Tom Arnold, seven-time NASCAR Cup Series Champion Jimmie Johnson and Tour de France winner Greg LeMond have ridden RAGBRAI.

But the first celebrity on the Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, celebrating its 51st year, was an 83-year-old retired farmer from Indianola. Wednesday's meeting town on RAGBRAI 2024, it plans a tribute to him as the riders pass through.

Clarence Pickard stunned Iowans with his grit and determination during the ride's first edition in 1973. Born in Kansas, Pickard spent most of his life in Indianola, graduating from Simpson College and serving on the faculty at Iowa State University.

In an example for riders on the current edition of RAGBRAI, the hilliest ever, Pickard showed that anyone with enough grit and determination can ride a bicycle across Iowa.

"Clarence Pickard made the ride," said longtime former Des Moines Register Iowa Columnist Chuck Offenburger, a RAGBRAI veteran. "That first day he made that ride was so important (because) it was like, ‘Wow, an 83-year-old man can do this. Even better, he’s got these cool high-top black tennis shoes and a silver pith helmet.'”

An unlikely celebrity

Pickard decided to participate in the Great Six-Day Bike Trip — the cross-state ride that launched what would become RAGBRAI — to see his state and because he had heard older people should exercise three days a week.

Of the 200 readers who showed up in Sioux City to join the ride with Register journalists John Karras and Donald Kaul, Pickard seemed the least likely to succeed in completing the 460-mile journey to Davenport.

He rode a used women's 10-speed Schwinn bicycle he bought the day before the ride started. A far cry from today's ultra-light, carbon-framed marvels, the bike weighed 35 pounds, while the 5-foot 6-inch Pickard weighed just 116 pounds, according to Greg Borzo’s 2013 book ‘RAGBRAI: America’s Favorite Bicycle Ride.” There was no electric motor to aid his ascents.

Karras asked Pickard how many miles he'd logged on the bike before the trip.

“I rode it around the block a couple of times,” Pickard replied.

Today’s spandex-clad cyclists also would wince at Pickard’s riding outfit for the nearly 100-degree August heat: long pants and a long-sleeve, button-down shirt on top of a wool sweater. He topped it with his signature pith helmet.

“I stay insulated and cool,” Pickard told Offenburger, who was then a 26-year-old, second-year reporter.

Least likely to succeed

Karras and Kaul doubted Pickard would make it past the Sioux City limits.

“He would drop out from soreness or exhaustion or both, we believed,” Karras wrote in 1992 . “We couldn’t have been more wrong.”

For the next week, Karras and Kaul in their daily reports in the Register chronicled Pickard’s triumphs and mishaps. Karras called Pickard “the chief inspiration” of the first day after he rode through the steep Loess Hills on one of the hottest days in years.

Pickard fell off his bike often, eventually developing what he said was a technique to find a “nice grassy spot to land on.” Three days in, Karras realized Pickard did not know how to shift his bike's gears and gave him a lesson as they neared the overnight stop in Fort Dodge.

When the ride reached Des Moines, Offenburger picked up Pickard, drove him to a motel on the south side and interviewed him for a profile. He learned it wasn't Pickard's first adventure: A former associate dean at what is now Iowa State University , he was in his mid 70s he joined the Peace Corps and served for two years in India.

By that point in the ride, Pickard already was a folk hero, along with Karras and Kaul, Offenburger said.

“It was like the state had Pickardmania,” Offenburger said. “Everybody wanted to know what the latest was, how far he’d made it. By Wednesday when they came in (to Des Moines) it was nuts.”

Crowds wait hours to greet Pickard

On Day 5, during the ride from Des Moines to Williamsburg, Pickard missed a turn just east of Colfax and rode onto Interstate 80. Iowa State trooper Frank Fisher told him,” “Mr. Pickard, you can’t ride a bike on the Interstate.” Pickard replied, “Then you’d better get me out of here.”

A couple recognized Pickard and gave him a lift in their car back to the route.

As crowds welcomed Karras, Kaul and the rest of the caravan, they waited hours to greet Pickard, who generally lagged far behind. Karras and Kaul tried to ride with him, but “It was almost impossible because of his snail’s pace," Karras wrote a decade later. “He was slow, slower even than I’ve grown."

Pickard endured the 110-mile ride from Des Moines to Williamsburg, then finished the final, 80-mile day to Davenport in the dark. But he rode every mile of the Great Six-Day Bicycle Trip. Kaul called him a "national hero" at the end.

Readers from around the state flooded the Register with letters saying they'd loved reading about Pickard’s adventures.

“Don and John got us going, but it was really Mr. Pickard’s presence that made us hang in there,” wrote Virginia Hufford of Des Moines.

‘Clarence Pickard made it an event for all Iowans’

Leo Landis, the museum curator for the State Historical Society of Iowa, said Pickard is one of the most important people in the history of RAGBRAI. Pickard popularized the event because he looked like a folksy Iowa farmer people could relate to, Landis said.

“He shows that anybody can do the ride, and is enough of a character that it makes people pay attention,” he said. “He carries that look of your grandfather if you’re a 12-year-old or your father if you’re a 40-year-old.”

Pickard’s importance to RAGBRAI cannot be overstated, Offenburger said. Without Pickard’s influence, the ride likely would have become an event mainly for young people, with less appeal to families, if it continued at all, Offenburger said.

“Clarence Pickard made it an event for all Iowans,” he said.

'If he can make it, then by God the rest of us can too'

Three years later Pickard completed half of the cross-country Bikecentennial route from Virginia to Oregon at a spry 86 years old. At age 92 in December 1982, Pickard was hit and killed by a car in Indianola as he tried to cross Iowa 65-69. Officers said at the time that Pickard misjudged the distance required to cross the highway and the speed of the approaching car.

RAGBRAI memorialized him on the next RAGBRAI with a commemorative patch in the shape of his pith helmet, now a prized artifact along with his bike at the Warren County Historical Society Museum in Indianola. The bike will be part of a display on the southeast corner of the Warren County Justice Center lawn in the center of Indianola as RAGBRAI passes through on Wednesday, said city spokesman Aaron Young.

After 1973, Pickard only rode on limited sections of RAGBRAI. But no one ever forgot his achievement that first year.

“By the end of the day, everyone’s tired and hates each other,” Kaul wrote on Aug. 30, 1973, as the initial ride neared its end. “But the thing that keeps you going is that long after you’ve quit, somewhere back there — and still riding — is Mr. Pickard and he’s smiling. He’s 83 years old and if he can make it, then by God the rest of us can too.”

Philip Joens is riding his 19th RAGBRAI. He has completed the river-to-river trek seven times. He covers retail and real estate for the Des Moines Register and can be reached at 515-284-8184 at pjoens@registermedia.com or on Twitter @Philip_Joens.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: In 1973, 83-year old Clarence Pickard showed anyone can ride RAGBRAI