Breaking Away : Men in Their 60s Pedal Across U.S. for Mentally Ill

Speeding down the Rocky Mountains so fast that fear made them hit the brakes, two men in their 60s finished the first leg of a bike trek across the United States.

When it ended 36 days later, one of the three original riders had suffered a concussion, dozens of flat tires had been replaced and thousands of dollars had been raised to help the severely mentally ill.

“Hot, hot, hot,” said Frank Disparte, 64, of Huntington Beach. “That was the prevailing feeling of the ride.”

Disparte, along with George Mattes, 67, of Fallbrook and Jerry Fewel, 65, of Brea raised $35,000 for the National Alliance of the Mentally Ill on the journey that started at the Huntington Beach Pier in late May and ended in Washington about a month later, said Chuck Harman, alliance spokesman.

Fewel, who has a relative with schizophrenia and who had the idea for the trip, also was its first casualty.

Just outside of Victorville, the three men had formed a straight “pace line” when the front man had to stop. All three riders desperately began trying to stop, and Fewel, with his feet locked onto his pedals, veered to miss the others, he said, skidding onto a heap of loose gravel.

Fewel was hospitalized for a concussion and Mattes and Disparte continued on, with Fewel joining them several days later in a support vehicle.

Averaging about 117 miles a day, with 31 days of actual riding, the remaining pair saw the changing countryside of America at a pace slow enough to appreciate it, Disparte said.

He remembered brutal heat in the Utah desert and the steep inclines of the Rockies. He recalled pushing against a strong head wind in Minnesota and watching the corn die from drought in the Midwest. But most memorable, he said, was the natural landscape.

“The greens and the browns of the land, and the rushing streams,” he recalled. “They were very inviting, but we didn’t have time to stop.”

One of the greatest challenges of the trip, said Disparte, was dealing with stretches of road that offered only monotony. Except for a few live rattlesnakes on the roadside, he said, most of the time it was quiet, continual peddling.

“You get so bored you would talk to cows,” he said. “You’d say ‘moo’ and see if they would look at you. They would turn their heads and look at you for a while.”

Mattes said he was challenged by the extreme temperatures. The riders endured 116-degree temperatures in Baker, Calif., only to later encounter a 32-degree climate in Heber City, Utah, he said.

The group of two cyclists and three support vehicles traveled through 15 states, stopping during the day only to fix mechanical problems, the riders said.

When stopping for the evening, the riders and those who accompanied them usually were welcomed as heroes by local chapters of the National Alliance of the Mentally Ill, Fewel said.

“We had an awful lot of loving attention from the parents of the victims,” he said. “People loved us for what we were doing. People accorded us hero status. It was embarrassing.”

When the group arrived in Las Vegas, it received an extravagant welcome from the local association chapter at the Aladdin Hotel and Casino, complete with gifts, balloons and a key to the city presented by the mayor, Disparte said.

Fewel got the idea for the ride after he learned of the misconceptions and fund-raising problems with which mental illness charity groups deal.

“Other charities are easier to get money for than (those collecting for) the serious mentally ill,” he said.

Harman said money raised for research into schizophrenia totaled $12.54 for each affected person last year, while funds for multiple sclerosis research, he said, totaled $529 a person and funds for cancer research totaled $353 a person.

Another motivation for the trip was the ultimate challenge that a ride across the country presents, said the men, all accomplished riders for several years.

“Every biker dreams of going across the U.S.,” Disparte said. Although that was a beginning motivation, all the riders became swept up the in the difficult task of raising money for the mentally ill, he said.

Most of the money raised by pledges to the three riders will be donated to researchers making advances in the study of certain types of mental illness, Harman said. The rest will be used to finance support groups and education programs that the association sponsors, he said.

The Alliance of the Mentally Ill is a 70,000-member organization, Harman said, with 900 chapters nationwide. The group, he said, provides support for families with severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and manic depression.

Each of the three bike riders donated at least $1,000 to the cross-country effort, and local bike shops also contributed, said Fewel, a Hughes Aircraft retiree who has been riding for four years and put a down payment on his first bike with the winnings from a horse race.

Disparte, a retired Los Angeles City fire captain, said that the ride was the toughest of his life and that he has no plans for an encore, even though he said he averages about 210 miles a week of bike riding.