The rich RAGBRAI history behind a bike up for auction at this weekend's route announcement

Last year, when Rachel Kaul rode RAGBRAI for the first time in 40 years, she felt like she reconnected with her late father — ride co-founder Donald Kaul — and the event that he both loved and felt consumed by.

Now she's making a big gift to the community surrounding the Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. She's decided that at this Saturday's route announcement party for the 2024 ride, the restored, custom-built bike her father rode on early RAGBRAIs will be auctioned off. Proceeds will benefit the Dream Team, a charity that works with at-risk youth to build their self-confidence by training for and participating in RAGBRAI.

Now 58, Rachel Kaul, Donald Kaul's youngest daughter, was a 6-year-old in Washington, D.C., when the Register's Washington columnist dreamed up the cross-Iowa ride with fellow Register journalist John Karras. As what was dubbed the Great Six-Day Bike Ride evolved into RAGBRAI, an annual event drawing thousands of riders from around the world, she occasionally traveled to Iowa to ride with her father, a local celebrity not just for his role in starting the ride but also for his by turns popular and controversial acerbic writing style.

After her father cut ties with the ride on its 10th anniversary in 1983, she stopped participating. But following his death in 2018, she decided to honor his memory by riding in the 50th anniversary edition of RAGBRAI in 2023.

She said she felt welcomed into the RAGBRAI family by its current leaders, whom she had never before met but felt like she had known for decades. Now, she said, she wants to pay it forward and help new generations learn to love both cycling and RAGBRAI.

She said it was the hardest decision of her life to give up her father's beloved bike, to be sold at the event in Hy-Vee Hall at the Iowa Events Center. But, she added, "RAGBRAI is life-changing no matter who you are. It becomes this placemark in your life. It changed me when I was a kid. It’s this unique opportunity. It’s transformative."

RAGBRAI started as a search for stories. Now, a founder’s daughter returns to find her own.

Twin custom bikes built for RAGBRAI founders

Karras commissioned construction of special bikes for Kaul and himself in 1977 by now-legendary central Iowa custom-bike builder Jeffrey Bock, now 71. The Register covered the cost of the bikes, painted in the RAGBRAI colors of blue with red-and-white lettering and white-and-gold accents. Kaul and Karras had their names inscribed on the frames.

"John's idea was that these would be like the RAGBRAI team bikes," Bock said.

Karras' bike also will be auctioned after the conclusion in December of the Karras family's loan agreement with the State Historical Society of Iowa, where it is on display. Karras, who died in 2021, kept his bike in its original condition, but after Kaul left the Register in 1983, he had Bock repaint the his bike to remove its yellow and white accents and the RAGBRAI logo and his name.

Bock said the last time he talked with Kaul, the former columnist did not know where the bike was. Rachel Kaul said she and her brother Chris found it in the garage of his Michigan retirement home.

Back in Iowa, mechanics at the Bike World chain stripped the bike of its components. Bock then re-painted the frame in its original colors. Mark West, a mechanic at Bike World’s West Des Moines store, said Kaul's bike was tuned up and given new paddle shifters on the stem ― Donald Kaul's preference.

“I would have no hesitation sending someone out for a ride on it. It’s 100% functional,” West said. “It wouldn’t have to be just a wall ornament.”

Kaul owned six or more bikes at a time, his daughter said. Her brother claimed his classic Masi road bike, while she kept what she called the "Bock bike." But, custom built to her father's size, it did not fit her or her partner.

"It went from sitting in my Dad's garage to sitting in my basement," she said, but "it made me happy to look at it."

She said she hopes the buyer appreciates it "for all that it represents," and also will ride it.

"It's such a beautiful machine," she said. "I'm a little torn. On the one hand, I want people who would appreciate it to have access to it. On the other hand, I want it to be appreciated for its function."

The Kaul family's devotion to cycling

There’s a misconception that Donald Kaul hated his place in history as a founder of RAGBRAI. His close friend Karras earned the nickname “Grandpa RAGBRAI” and stayed active with the ride until his death. Kaul's last major public appearance happened during a pre-recorded video greeting for RAGBRAI's 40th anniversary celebration in Cedar Rapids as he recovered from a heart attack.

RAGBRAI co-founder and syndicated columnist Donald Kaul sees the end of the road approaching

Kaul was a curious fellow, a lifelong atheist born on Christmas Day. He was not on the ride when he died on the first day of RAGBRAI in 2018. 

Kaul ended his formal role as one of the planners of RAGBRAI in 1983 amid a bitter split with the Register during a power struggle with editors, saying riding hurt his back. He returned to the Register in 1989 and wrote columns until his second retirement in 2000. He returned to RAGBRAI several times and occasionally made fun of what he assumed would be the first line in his obituary.

“My ambition was to be a nationally known Washington columnist,” Kaul wrote. “Unfortunately I would imagine the first line in my obit will read ‘one of the originators of RAGBRAI.’ It just took over my career — brutally.”

RAGBRAI, in Kaul’s words, “was just waiting to happen, and we uncovered it.” Five years into the ride Kaul already lamented that what he once dubbed “the Olympic Games of the Ding-a-ling Bicycle Set” had outgrown him.

In 1980 Kaul joked that when he and Karras started the ride, they did not know they would be given a "life sentence."

“We thought of it as a one-shot deal with two or three riders accompanying us across the state on a semi-private ride," he said. "Now we feel like Dr. Frankenstein."

After Karras had convinced him to buy a three-speed bike in the early 1970s, however, he never lost his love of riding. His daughter said cycling became his infatuation, and on the first day of the initial ride in 1973, he wrote that it was "one of the overriding passions of my life."

"Where once I was weak, I am now able to clear tall buildings at a single bound. Where once I slouched in the trough of life, I now come on like the UCLA basketball team. It has changed my life," Kaul wrote.

RAGBRAI gave the introverted Kaul a place to talk to anyone with ease, his daughter said.

"He did not hate RAGBRAI," she said. "And if he had, he certainly wouldn't have dragged his kids on it as often as he did."

Until he suffered his heart attack in 2012, he rode his bike to work every day, she said, adding that he solved problems by buying bikes. In her 20s, when she faced a health scare, her father bought her a mountain bike even though she already had road and hybrid bikes, she recalled.

"He loved the engineering of a bike," she said. " He loved riding a bike. I think he liked being in his head on a bike."

The RAGBRAI Dream Team changes lives through cycling

During RAGBRAI 50, Rachel Kaul connected with the Dream Team because its baggage trailer hauled the luggage for her Team Legacy. Now in its 27th year, the Dream Team, founded by late Ride Director Jim Green, changes the lives of disadvantaged youths in central Iowa by teaching them life lessons through cycling.

"I was just enthralled with this whole project. I thought, 'What an amazing thing,'" she said.

On the final day of the 2023 ride, Carl Voss, a Des Moines City Council member and former Register photographer who was friends with Donald Kaul, spotted Rachel Kaul in a breakfast line in West Liberty. Voss and she had talked before when plans for the RAGBRAI Founders' Statue at Water Works Park in Des Moines were being created, but she had never met him in person.

They rode together to Muscatine, the final-pass-through town that day. Voss rode a custom-built bike also designed by Bock and suggested she raffle or auction her father's bike for charity, with the Dream Team as the beneficiary.

"I'm doing my thing. We're all feeling good. I'm standing in line waiting for a breakfast burrito, and I hear 'Rachel Kaul!,'" she said. "I had never met him. I had never seen him. It's such a RAGBRAI thing."

Now, she hopes to keep paying it forward with RAGBRAI. In a few years she plans to retire from her job in Washington and told organizers she would like to volunteer to help with the ride.

"I will probably never do the whole RAGBRAI again, but I will absolutely ride for some days," she said. "Being there is so great. I love the community of it and being in Iowa was so nice."

How to bid on Donald Kaul's bike

Former KCCI anchor Steve Karlin will serve as the auctioneer during Saturday's RAGBRAI route announcement party. The event will be streamed on the RAGBRAI Facebook Page starting at 8 p.m. Prospective buyers can participate in person or call 515-207-5186 to submit their bids, said Scott Matter, a Dream Team volunteer and part of its leadership team,

Every dollar will help the organization because it costs $3,750 to put each member through the program each year, Matter said. This spring, the organization hopes to start this season with 50 members, he said.

There will be other ways for people to donate to the organization during the party if they cannot afford to purchase the bike, Matter said. QR codes will be displayed on various screens at the party and on the event's livestream, which will send viewers to a page where they can make online donations, he said.

"People think of Dream Team as a cycling organization," he said. "We definitely are that, but our real mission is to lift up central Iowa youth."

'RAGBRAI is just the reward': Dream Team celebrates 25 years of changing lives through biking

Philip Joens has ridden RAGBRAI 18 times and completed the river-to-river trek seven times. He covers retail, real estate and RAGBRAI for the Des Moines Register. He can be reached at 515-284-8184, at [email protected] or on Twitter @Philip_Joens

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: How to bid on RAGBRAI co-founder Donald Kaul's custom bike Saturday