Editor's note: Agency head Ken Vreeke, who runs Vreeke and Associates (think those cool Dunlop ad/posters, the cool Honda Parts, Helmet House, Oxtar ads, etc) a former staffer at Cycle, takes this opportunity to respond to Soup's story on the demise of Cycle, published last week.

My time at Cycle magazine came in the post-Cook/Jennings era. I was part of the last generation of Cycle staff, but we were all schooled by Cook, Gordon, Schilling, Dale Boller, Jess Thomas, Paul Halesworth, Tom Saputo, photographer Bill Delaney, John Stein, Don Phillipson, Mark Homchick, Mark Lindemann, Ken Lee and all the others who made Cycle what it was over the years. Hell, the whole industry was schooled by these guys. I penned my first story in 1985, a piece called Growing Up Squidly, about a youth misspent in the very Malibu mountain roads that I would ride again and again while road testing for Cycle. In my time there, I had the opportunity to ride with some of the greats in our sport, and I include in that list Dan Coe and Thad Wolff, who helped form the backbone of our testing staff and with whom I rode in close company for literally thousands of miles. Those were some of the best rides of my life.

Coming in at the late stage of the magazine's existence—1985 to its demise in 1991—I had an opportunity to work a little with Jennings and a lot with the great Kevin Cameron. The fingerprints of these guys never really left the magazine. Not for some of us, at least. There was so much respect for the magazine and for the people who had come before us. Through all the changes in ownership and management, the goal of the editorial staff never really wavered. It was all about getting it right, about being true to what the magazine always was, about learning and experiencing as much as possible and passing that along to our readers. There were a lot of talented people on the Cycle staff over the years, and it was an honor to work with them for as long as I did.