This long awaited day (July 18) has come for all of us!  Opening Ceremony for the Deaf Historic 66 Biking Route was held at 5100 West Irving Road, Chicago with the Chicago Club for the Deaf as the host.  It was well stocked with a variety of American Style food free of charge!  The catch is you gotta pay for the booze which made up for those free bikers’ feed. We also had deaf club style skits, door prize drawings and group picture.  Yep, Paul Stefurak mastered the skits real good, including his infamous middle finger hilarious stories.  His sidekick=2 0Bob Bergan managed to tone down Paul’s vulgarity shows with his biking jokes.  Excellent door prizes were given out to ALL bikers, I suspect as a peace offering so they wouldn’t burn down the building.  No official headcount was made but this writer guesstimates about 125 persons were present, with about half bikers and the other half wanna bikers.  As usual the H-D outnumbered the rest of field.  Someone said there were 47 of them out on two sides of the bar.  Only four of them were not much of iron horses (three Japanese lawnmowers and one plastic horse).  Bob Bergan quipped that one of those lawnmowers unfortunately belongs to Chairperson Paul Stefurak despite of the fact that he is from Calify and his sweetheart, Janice, rides her own Harley.  This couple can’t be an item!  Yep, there was a photo-op with all the bikers and their riders posing in front of the bar as shown on this website.  I suspect there will be interesting “before and after” pictures with the last one to be taken at Santa Monica, CA on August 1.  Speaking of the host, CCD is one of the few clubs for the deaf still standin g, thanks to grassroots Deaf leaders!  President Tom Lewensky took time to discuss his visions with this writer, saying that CCD went through a very unusual crisis, compared with other clubs.  It had its own valuable building with excellent rental income producing tenants until some legal problems which forced the sale of the building.  After this great real estate killing sale, CCD was subjected to some city, state and federal tax issues that are still unresolved after 5 years wrangling.  However, CCD continues providing excellent community services in education and advocacy for the Deaf.  This writer has known Tom and his sister Ellen as die hard Chicagoans who returned to their hometown turf after graduating from Gallaudet in Washington, DC over 35 years ago.  Nitey nite!

Bernie, “the Pro”