05/14/2020
EPITATH: JOHN FORESTER
by Bruce D. Epperson
So, John Forester is dead, at age 90. I have been involved with cycling, cycle
advocacy and cyclists in general for almost fifty years now. For much of this time I have been
a lawyer, a professional disputer. When you make your living arguing with people, there are
bound to be hard feelings. Less than you might think, however. After all, today’s adversary
could be tomorrow’s ally, so there is a form of pack etiquette. But I can say one thing about
John Forester that I cannot say of any other person I have ever encountered in this game:
He was evil. John Forester was an evil man.
I have disagreed with lots of people. A few have exasperated me. One or two have
been so over the top that I actually pitied them, but I can think of no other person associated
with any sort of public or civic advocacy that I truly believed wasn’t just amoral, but outright
immoral. Not just outrageous, but villainous. Not guilty of mere amateurishness or
insensitivity or ignorance, but actual wanton, deliberate, cold-blooded malevolence.
Despite his reputation for zealousness, he really believed in nothing; he could switch
his position in an instant depending on who was on the other side, or testify without hesitation
either for or against a cyclist. He could solemnly swear that a cyclist was at fault for not
taking the lane. The next day he could testify that another cyclist was wrong for not hugging
the curb, or even dismounting and standing by the side of the road to let a truck roar past, and
so brought her own doom down upon herself. He could, and he did. The facts didn’t matter.
He owned a pittance, had no family, and wanted nothing and nobody - except to get
his way. He was evil regardless of whether he was in the saddle, blathering away on some
chat group, testifying in court, flying one of his model airplanes, or building a ship in a bottle.
That’s the important part. That’s what I want to stress to you. That’s what you have to
understand. Had he never touched a bicycle his whole life, he would have still been a bad
man. He just needed a means to express his maliciousness - a purpose and a direction, a
modality. Bicycling gave him that. The cyclists he abused, or lied to, or lied about, or stole from, or set against each other, were just so much roadkill. To Forester, they never really
existed. Not as humans, anyway.
I was an enemy of John Forester. It wasn’t because I believed all that strongly in the
things he loathed and held in contempt. I volunteered for the job. And believe me, I’m no
hero. I was his enemy because it was safer. Being his enemy was no big deal, and there were
just so many of us. It was an easy crowd to blend into. But believe me, you did not want, ever,
to be his friend. If you were his enemy you knew where you stood. Being his friend was like
walking across a minefield; any second you could be blown to bits, and for dozens, it
happened. Just like that: boom. In fact, I have to wonder whether he really had any friends,
just sycophants. Or whether he wanted them.
II
He was born October 7, 1929 in the south London suburb of Dulwich. His name was
John Smith. Plain old John Smith. No middle name. No middle initial. His father was Cecil L.
T. Smith, a medical school dropout who started publishing novels in 1926 under the
pseudonym C. S. (Cecil Scott) Forester. He started making a good deal of money off stage and
movie adaptations of his works, beginning with Payment Deferred, starring Charles Laughton,
then The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. So he adopted his
pen name as his own, although he never formally changed it.
John claimed that America had nothing to teach him about cycling, that everything
important he had learned in England, but if so, he must have been some kind of cycling
prodigy, as he came to the United States when he was barely ten years old, in February 1940,
along with his mother and brother. His father was already here, scriptwriting. They settled in
Berkeley. His parents separated in 1944 and divorced a year later.
John entered the University of California in the fall of 1946 as a physics major. He
flunked out in the spring of 1949. After working for a few months he returned as an English
Lit major. He graduated in the spring of 1951. It was the Korean War; the army was drafting
permanent resident aliens. He became a U.S. citizen so he could enlist in the navy, where he
hoped he could get into officer candidate school after basic training. He did, but three months
later was sent to the psychiatric unit at Bethesda Naval Hospital after nearly assaulting a petty
!2
officer. His psychiatrist found “deep feelings of inferiority and poorly directed hostility” that
were “manifested by impulsive behavior and emotional outbursts.” He was diagnosed with a
“personality disorder which renders him unfit” and discharged. He had served eight months of
a four year enlistment. So if you want to know where he became such an expert in “inferiority
complexes,” that’s where: from forty-three days on the psych ward at Bethesda.
Forester married in 1952 and started as a shipping clerk at a steel plant near San
Francisco in 1953. In 1958 the family moved to suburban L.A. In 1964 John received a
master’s degree in production management from Cal. State - Long Beach. He later claimed
that he was a lecturer or, at other times, an assistant professor there, but records show he was
never more than a graduate teaching assistant, paid by the hour.
C. S. Forester died in April 1966. This proved to be the pivotal event in John’s life.
Out of an estate worth approximately $750,000, his father left John $5,000. Almost everything
went to his second wife, Dorothy Foster. According to Dorothy’s relatives in England, John
harassed Dorothy, trying to get her to turn control over the estate to him. C. S. had apparently
anticipated this. A provision in his will stated that if Dorothy should die unexpectedly within
six months of him, the estate should go to his brother in England, not to his son. That’s scary
when your own father would think like that. I mean, real scary.
John then divorced his wife. He later wrote that it was because she objected to his
bicycle riding because “it jeopardized our social standing.” However, I interviewed John’s son
Geoffrey in 2009, and he told me that he never detected any antipathy on behalf of his mother
to either his or his father’s cycling. In actuality, John had been laid off from his job at Xerox,
and used it as the opportunity to move back to the Bay Area, shed his family and continue the
task of getting his hands on his father’s estate.
He was in for a shock. When he arrived he discovered that Dorothy had, quietly, sold
the Berkeley home and moved back to England. John later wrote that he and his brother had
been left his father’s literary estate, but this is untrue. From the date of C. S. Forester’s death
in 1966 until Dorothy’s death in 1998, all copyright office registrations are in her name. The
estate – all of it - was gone forever. He made the acquaintance of a visiting research
biochemist from Michigan. He soon convinced her to move into his home in Palo Alto, and
she got a high-paying job near Stanford. His money worries were over. He could concentrate
on his Triumph sports car, his Zodiac boat, his scuba gear, and his garage full of bikes.
He started in cycle advocacy in early 1973. Palo Alto had installed a bikeway system.
It was rudimentary, with some temporary sections. The then-city engineer, Ted Noguchi,
admits the city hadn’t coordinated its engineering with its ordinances. Previously, city law had
prohibited sidewalk riding almost everywhere. A new law that was supposed to allow bicycles
to use stretches of sidewalk made them mandatory. It was quickly corrected. But for months
afterward, Forester would call Noguchi late at night and either yell at him or simply hang up.
He told a conference that when the chairman of the city’s bikeway committee crashed in front
of him, he laughed. “We would have laughed harder had he been seriously injured,” he added.
He even included that anecdote in a conference paper. It’s in writing, it was published. You
can look it up. People who read it say, “the guy’s sick.” No. The guy’s evil. Or he was.
Forester’s solution to the Palo Alto problem was . . . .more bicycle facilities. Bicycle
boulevards, to be exact. I’m not kidding. He was the guy who thought up the bicycle
boulevard concept and was the first to advocate for it. He even wrote a Bicycle Boulevard
Greenbook for the California Association of Bicycle Organizations. The key to the Forester
Bicycle Boulevard was a special yellow Stop sign. They were yellow because that meant only
cars, not bicycles, had to stop. Ted Noguchi, planner/editor John Williams and Palo Alto
councilwoman Ellen Fletcher took the idea and made it work. Without the yellow signs. John
later denied he had anything to do with it. But again, it’s in writing, you can look it up.
Forester was soon corresponding with L.A.W. Executive Director Morgan Groves.
Groves put him in contact with already-established advocates such as Fred DeLong, Clifford
Franz, Harold Munn and Jim Konski. Munn, Konski, and especially DeLong had, by 1973,
already been advocating for the need to integrate cyclists into the normal stream of traffic.
DeLong had been enormously impressed by what he saw in France, a nation with many
cyclists and few, if any, bikeways. He started teaching proficiency classes in the 1960’s. These
weren’t bike rodeos; they were adults, out in traffic, making turns, the whole bit. In 1978
Bicycling editor James McCullagh said “Effective Cycling may consist of everything you
really need to know . . . .[but] some 15 years ago in Philadelphia, Fred DeLong, in
conjunction with the American Youth Hostels, had a similar Cycling Proficiency Program.”
Forester dumped bicycle boulevards and became a convert to the “vehicular
integration of cycling” (Munn’s words) idea. Years later, in an attempt to prove that he had
“invented” vehicular cycling, he would trash all of these pioneers. Especially DeLong, who he
hated passionately. DeLong, a mechanical engineer, was Schwinn’s consulting engineer.
Philip Corboy, one of America’s leading trial lawyers, called him “the best bicycle expert
witness in the country,” and said he once single-handedly saved Schwinn from a $4.2 million
adverse judgment. Mind you, Corboy was the lead attorney for the other side.
Forester badly wanted to knock DeLong off as king of the expert witness mountain.
The only problem was that Forester had no engineering degree. What he did have was a
professional engineering (P.E.) certificate from the State of California. In the 1940s and ‘50s,
California handed them out like Halloween candy. The guy who stoked the boiler in your
apartment building could get one. The state wised up in the 1960s when the big engineering
societies complained, but they couldn’t revoke the certificates of those who already held such
spurious titles as “soil engineer,” “safety engineer,” “agricultural engineer,” and of course,
“industrial engineer.” It’s against the law in California for an industrial engineer to try to pass
himself off as qualified in civil or mechanical engineering. To get around that, he started
calling himself a “Bicycle Transportation Engineer.” Not only did he invent the field, he told
one court, he was the world’s only practitioner of it. A profession of one.
As the years went by, he became more and more messianic. Vehicular cycling grew
into a quasi-religion, and John was its one true prophet. The sycophants came, sang his
praises, but always, sooner or later, ended up dismissed, humiliated or denounced. Their sin
was either to become too well known in their own right, or to attempt some independent
exegesis of the holy canon. This, in spite of the fact that much of it had become disingenuous,
self-contradictory or incomprehensible. As time went by he progressively cited fewer and
fewer outside sources until he only footnoted his earlier writings. The only authority John
recognized was John. A discipline of one. As his marginalization grew, so did his message: to
survive in a hostile world, vehicular cyclists will have to remain few in number, fervent in
belief, and patiently wait out the current dark age of false belief.
I told a conference in Madrid a few years ago that I feared that as he became older,
poorer and increasingly caught up in a web of his own messianic visions, he might go
skittering off the rails entirely. Think of David Koresh blasting away at the FBI as his Branch
Davidian compound burns down around him, or Aum Shinrinkyo releasing Sarin gas in the
Tokyo subway system; and of course Jim Jones and his Peoples’ Temple with their tub of
KoolAid. His partner left him, and he moved from the Bay Area into a tiny house near San
Diego. His writings became darker, more fatalistic.
III
Instead, he surprised me. He just kind of deflated. He started sounding less the angry
evangelist than a gaunt, rag-garbed martyr wandering around looking for someone to light one
of his loose threads. Now and then he would still write a crotchety post on his site, but they
grew increasing tired, flaccid, repetitious. Except for that one last, enduring cry: I Invented
Vehicular Cycling. Challenge that, and he would still rise to the bait, snarling.
Let me state one thing, absolutely and categorically: John Forester did not invent
vehicular cycling. Everything he said, everything he wrote, he took. And not from some 1960s
Italian racing manual or the long-dead editor of a British cycling magazine, either. He took it
– no, he stole it - from his contemporaries, in real time. DeLong. Konski. Franz. Munn.
Shanteau. Groves. He gave none credit, and disparaged all to cover his tracks.
You may think vehicular cycling is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Fantastic. If
you are a sport cyclist, especially one who doubles as a utility cyclist, you don’t have much
choice. Government hasn’t done a lot to help, so you are pretty much on your own. What I am
saying boils down to three things: 1) The program you are following, that thing you call
vehicular cycling, it wasn’t invented by John Forester. 2) Had John never happened, you
would still be a vehicular cyclist, doing pretty much the same things you are doing now, in the
same way, for the same reasons. 3) On the other hand, had there been no John, your vehicular
cycling would be more widely accepted, with more official recognition and accommodation
than today. That’s because John pi**ed off so many people in so many ways for so long that
roadblocks were thrown up to high-skill cycling just out of pure spite to the man.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell – husband of the current Secretary of
Transportation – can say we wouldn’t have a highway capacity problem if it wasn’t for all
those busses and bicycles, and be believed by half of America, because the predominant
image of “bicycle” is an arrogant, loudmouthed bore in a baggy jersey with a bushy beard and
a fake English accent saying that the only people who count are 150,000 purists; the rest of
you have an inferiority complex, you’re just hopeless, quit trying, go away, get lost. So when
Forester’s scum of the earth raise their hands and say, “excuse me, but what we really need
are better sidewalks to ride on, please” the response of civic leaders and traffic engineers is
instantaneous: “you got it.”
So he is really, finally dead. Huh. The only question now is: “who can rescue the
vehicular cyclists from themselves?” Forester thought he was a messiah. It may take the real
thing to pull off that job.
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