Messenger Bag Nonsense

And a Little History Nonsense “What I always like about Aerostich gear (and the messenger bags…) is the little things like the buckles, shoulder pad, etc. While other gear makers use technical materials that stretch or have other comfort enhancing features, Aerostich's KISS-principled equipment that still answers questions of function in practical fashion seems, to me, to be a great long-term solution.”  - Zack Kurylyk, by email June 25, 2026 Thanks Zack. These messenger bags (and other similar bags made by others) are one of the most underrated and subversive products in all of motorcycling. They make it far easier to load and carry things when short-hop urban riding (commuting, errands, etc) and this greatly increases the likelihood of any rider choosing their motorcycle for utility transportation, instead of driving their car. If that is not what a subversive product is, I don’t know what one might possibly be. The larger mainstream world wants everyone to consume and use automobiles…Safe, comfortable, orderly, calming and uh, for the most part, overly boring compared to riding a bicycle or motorcycle. (Despite all that I enjoy using my car whenever I must use a car for some reason. This usually means driving only once every few weeks during the summer. Which, combined with aging, has turned me into a lousy driver.) Some have noted Aerostich messenger bags are a copy of pioneering messenger bags. This is partly so, but ‘Inspired-by” is a more accurate description. When we were developing ours several fairly good messenger bags were already being made, but they all were crude and intended mainly for commercial courier use. Before the internet and email, professional riders used either bicycles or motorcycles to quickly deliver legal documents (and similar) across urban areas quickly.  What is true about the development of Aerostich’s range of messenger bags is this: The first two messenger bag sizes (the Courier and Dispatch models) were created and introduced in 1988 or 89. Our first step involved sourcing examples of the two or three already-existing commercial-use messenger bags so we could study and experience using them. One was made in NYC by 'Manhattan Portage’, and again this bag was mostly sold to professional bike and MC couriers working there. Side note: they were made in NYC until 2002, then manufacturing was outsourced to somewhere in Asia.  They are still in business today. Another messenger bag was made by a company in Portland or Seattle, and I think a third one came from some company in San Francisco.  After trying each for a few days I thought we could improve on all of them, so our version included dozens of refinements and improvements. Some changes were more important than others.   For example, I did like the approximately triangular shape of the ‘Manhattan Portage’ messenger bag but that was about the only element. This bag’s overall detailing, and how the pieces were cut and arranged to be put together, and all the straps and hardware, were different from what I wanted. Every product is made to a recipe. Messenger bags are no exception. But note that a blueberry pie is not a copy of an apple pie simply because both pies come out of a circular pie pan. Same with a McDonald's hamburger vs. all the other fast food franchise burgers. Each business’s recipe is usually unique and different. The recipe for Coke and Pepsi is unique to each, and each recipe has its devoted fans.  Similarly, Aerostich messenger bags are different than all other messenger bags, despite and roughly similar shape to several of them.  Many messenger bags are approximately similar in shape, but the details are all different and add up to completely different products. Aerostich messenger bags are generally more heavily constructed and stitched than most others, especially the popular lighter weight bags from companies like Timbuktu and Patagonia. Ours are also very simple compared to many, but arguably a lot more versatile and durable. Ours have more useful and unique details like the tubular webbing grab handle centered at the top of the lid, and a large area of Velcro loop for the flap to attach to, even if the bag is over-filled and the lid cannot be fully closed. There are dozens of other examples of detail differences which make the Aerostich messenger bag recipe unique, and, at least to me, superior. I don’t specifically remember if any of the early messenger bags we’d purchased were made of Cordura nylon or if any had plastic (Delrin) buckles or hardware, or a nylon seat-belt webbing shoulder strap, but maybe one of them could have had such features (?). I do clearly remember at least two of them being made of heavy unwaxed cotton canvas and having aluminum or steel shoulder strap length adjusters. One had two short strips of reflective material clipped loosely to the top flap just dangling there. One of those bags was unlined. Another had a thin 1” wide strip of hook and loop for the flap which required careful alignment every time the flap was closed.  Another had a yellow nylon fabric lining. Several had ‘binding’ around the edges of the flap. I hate binding and like edge-stitching, which our bags have. None had that carrying handle I wanted on the flap.  None had any reflective sewn directly onto the flap or anywhere else.  None had an oversize shoulder pad on an easily adjustable shoulder strap. None seemed built as ‘heavy duty’  or were as carefully-detailed as what I wanted Aerostich messenger bags to be. Blah, blah, blah.   I obsessively wanted a more durable, more well-made and more well-detailed messenger bag than anything else out there, and that’s what we ended up with. Soon, I came to know several of the owner-operators of professional motorcycle courier businesses. One was a guy who owned and ran a successful messenger and courier company in San Francisco.  This was decades before DoorDash and the rest of the internet.  More blah, blah, blah.  Sorry. The last part of this is about how the bags we make today are not static, and not exactly the same as the very first ones.  Whenever we can figure out how to improve them, we do. For example, the reflectives and hook-and-loop used in these bags have been improved by their manufacturers several times, and we now use the current versions of both. And the oversized shoulder pads now hold up a lot better because we use a better foam for this application. There have been improvements in the patterns and stitching details also. These bags are even better now than they were. I’m sure incremental improvements will continue, but the core values embodied in each bag will always remain: Durability, ease-of-use, and functionality. - Mr. Subjective, June 2025 PS – These bags come with lots of old stories.  I remember one time someone filled one with loose ice and bottles of beer and were everyone’s hero on a hot campout.  Another time, it was campfire wood. The year we were introducing them, I’d brought a duffel bag full of them to the old Cincinnati Motorcycle Dealernews trade show and had reserved a time for a presentation to the editors of Motorcyclist magazine. That year they’d booked a private hotel conference room so companies like Aerostich could present their products to their editors away from the chaos of the show. At the appointed time I walked into that room and found the publisher of Motorcyclist, Dick Lague, the editor-in-chief, Art Friedman, and several other editors including Mitch Boehm, Dexter Ford, Tim Carrithers, Marcie Baritz and Nick Ienatsch. All were sitting around this big conference table in semi-reclining comfortable chairs. I set the overstuffed duffel bag on the floor, zipped it open and covered the table with an array of Aerostich messenger bags in many colors. Then I took a deep breath and in an oratorical voice declared: “The book pack is dead! The day pack is dead! This is a better way to carry stuff on a motorcycle!” Then I went on to explain the many features and advantages of messenger bags: Faster to put on than using bungees to hold something to a rack. More reliable than bungees and a rack. It took maybe five minutes of that oratory to explain the ‘why’ of the various sizes and all their technical details. I don’t remember any questions, so at the end I thanked them, picked up the now-empty duffel bag from the floor, and with a sigh of relief left the room exhausted by the stress of doing this presentation. A few months later, there were product reviews published about those bags, and they also started showing up in random Motorcyclist magazine editorial photos. Why do I remember this moment so well forty years later? Adrenaline, friends. Adrenaline is a memory fixative, and I was scared as heck having to give a product presentation to those moto-journalist experts. What did know about motorcycling compared to those editors? Today, I look back and wonder if any of them (all except Mitch, now long retired) still have and use one of those bags.    

Here it is, anyway… Summer finally arrived. All is well here.  The temperature reached near 80ºF yesterday. Everything was absolutely lovely until about 8 PM when the skies opened and a hard rain began. In the morning, I’d opened the R-3’s pit zips and back vent zip (each slider to the center) for the first time this year. A well-worn all-black Aerostich with at least a dozen years of regular day-to-day wear, and one replaced zipper slider which I’d only broken by impatient zipper operator error. Replacing it was a simple DIY five-minute fix. Worn underneath the R-3 was a pair of similarly old cotton casual shorts and a short sleeve ‘beach’ type button down shirt. I was riding mostly surface streets with my modular helmet’s chinbar tipped up showing my face continuously grinning from ear to ear, simply enjoying the summer riding experiences: An ever-changing endless kaleidoscope of sights, smells sounds and sensations coming at me at forty miles per hour while the bike was delivering its usual sixty miles per gallon. The rains came in the form of many large very cold drops, all from a bank of cold-front leading dark clouds. A moment earlier I had been enjoying an outdoor music event called ’Superior Porchfest’ which is a uniquely old-fashioned midwestern small-town weekly summer event. The musicians get paid, but everyone else, including the homeowners who donate their yards and electricity, volunteer. There’s a food truck or two, a porta-potty and a wide range of live music. Silk screened Porchfest logo T shirts and home-made dog food (no kidding!) are among many fundraiser items being sold. It’s a very pleasant event which builds community spirit and connection and a great way to end a workday or just get out of the house for a couple of hours. Each week the event is at different volunteered homes, with different musicians performing different types of music. When those rains arrived I was sitting in an ultralight camping chair I’d brought, enjoying a nice food-truck burrito thing (my dinner). At the arrival of rain everyone hurriedly packed up and fled, and the event ended a little earlier than we’d all hoped, but it was still a very enjoyable evening as long as it lasted. After I’d put my little chair back into its bag and deployed a travel umbrella and walked over to my bike (where the R-3 was draped over its saddle), I zipped closed those underarm and back vents, deployed the boot rain covers from their little pockets Velcroed onto the backside of each shin-covering leg, and stepped in -- zipping the suit around me, securing the collar, helmeting up, and then rode home through a gutter-filling downpour, still smiling all the way. First time this year for riding through both a hard cold rain, and a nice warm day. This combo was strong reminder of what partly the purpose of these suits was in the first place. Every time I arrive somewhere and step out with dry clothing underneath, I shake my head and grin. When I started street riding back in 1969 (ugh…), It was impossible to use a motorcycle this way without frequently experiencing the discomfort being too hot, and then (later) getting soaked by a cold hard rain. With all of today’s great technical gear, why don’t more people do more everyday riding? I was the only rider at the Porchfest’s free music event, and then the only one on two wheels riding through the downpour. Just to be very clear (and repetitive, sorry) despite the perfection of yesterday’s sunny delightfully temperate pre-rain weather, 97% of those around me in their cars in traffic had every one of their car’s windows fully up. They do this every damn day. It is an unbelievably uniform demonstration of mass-self-isolating behavior. How did this ever happen to us? I’m no heroic motorcyclist, but it would seem like our deeply ingrained human social contract, upon which ALL forms of collective action, and all forms of good governance so heavily depend, requires we all accept that we are, as the cliché goes, “all in this together”. And what seems to most strongly nourish and sustain this stuff is a universal shared exposure to common everyday experiences which transcend the infinite range of our individual self-interests and opinions. Until quite recently that awareness resulted in the creation of technologies and infrastructures which were made as much as possible around recognizably shared needs of people. Look at a street-scene photo of any city anywhere in the world before 1940 and you’ll see streets and sidewalks filled with people on foot. All of the worlds older cities are still like this. Those places remain crowded with pedestrians, bicycles, scooters and (of course) motorcycles.* Modern cities are different. Here in little Duluth Minnesota the older urbanized hillside directly abutting the Lake Superior shoreline is a dense mix of older commercial buildings and old homes and apartments. But just over the hillside away from the lake, it’s sprawled-out malls, big box stores, huge new apartment buildings and big and small homes on very large lots. Everything is spaced out to better accommodate the needs of cars. Not people. There are few pedestrian-friendly sidewalks because the distances between places of business and schools are way too far to walk in a reasonable amount of time. You already know which infrastructure better suits motorcycling, scootering and walking. I am a privileged car owner and occasional car user, though I enjoy riding a bicycle, scooter or motorcycle quite a bit more than driving. Even through pouring rain. For me, the satisfactions of single-track balancing motion is worth the extra effort. This means wearing an armored, vented, waterproof, abrasion-resistant coverall (or jacket-and-pants) plus gloves and a modular helmet. All this gear takes extra time and effort to put on and remove, and money to acquire. It also makes one feel like the perpetual oddball in traffic, even on the nicest days. But if your bike has fenders and you have the right gear, you never fear puddles or rain clouds. Riding nourishes us in real ways, and indirectly nourishes our shared underlying social contract, the bonds upon which you and I -- and everyone – depend on. Riding is like consuming a steady diet of fresh, flavorful organic food - while driving anywhere inside a sealed climate-controlled car, with all its windows fully up on nice days, feels more like enjoying highly engineered processed junk food. A continuous diet of mainly that highly processed food stuff eventually messes with our insides, and I type this as a lover of Cheetos, ice cream and “processed cheeses”, same as I love the comfort, convenience, efficiency and safety of cars. But whenever I am able, and have the time, I like to walk, pedal or motorcycle there even more. If you’ve read this far (?) you already know all this. Why don’t all those very nice people sitting around in folding chairs on someone’s freshly mowed lawn on a warm summer evening enjoying free well-played live music not seem to know it? Ok, maybe a third of them had to us their car to haul little kids to the event. They get a pass. What about the rest of them? -- Mr. Subjective, June 16, 2026 * This famous 1942 painting ‘Nighthawks’ is partly a comment about how industrialization and technology isolate us from each other. If it’s not too much trouble, please get off your butt and ride a little more often.

Guest post by Mrs. Subjective I saw husband tracksIn the snow the other day,Leading down a pathFor his own getaway. Those tracks of hisThey show me his grit;Being willing to ride in snowIs a whole other kind of lit. Preparing his bikeTakes work (and I’m sure some fun too),From siping tiresTo finding his groove. He said to me once,“The snow has to be just right.Better to have snow on the groundThan none in my sight.” He’s true to his motto —Ride to Work or work to ride,These words to whichHe will forever abide. The Suzuki Van Van,It’s his favorite winter bikeWith big, wide tiresThat’s what he likes. All bundled up,Facing the winter wind,His helmet secureAnd, I’m sure, quite a grin. Do I worry? Do I fear?Oh yes, but just a little bit,For I know he is clothed withThe best gear one can get. American-made —A Roadcrafter Aerostich!Equipment for ridersStraight from their pitch. His one-piece zip-in suitWith padding galoreGuarantees him the chance to rideMore and more… and more. Now you might think this is an ad,But no — I’m just a little savvyTo include a renditionOf my husband’s Duluth company. Although I must sayTheir products are quite stellar;Many a hideThey’ve saved from the gutter. But now back to the storyOf seeing husband tracks —I knew that since he left,He must also come back. It was nearing dinner timeWhen my belly cried out,So I texted him these words:“How about some takeout?” Pizza? Sure thing.So I put the order in.Away on his Van VanHe rode with a grin. It wasn’t the first timeHe managed a pizza on his bike,But this time aroundIt was quite a different sight. Opening the boxWas quite the surprise —Our perfect pepperoni pieSlid in that two-point-four-mile ride. Cheese off the slice,Pepperonis scattered about,I gave a little gaspAnd then laughed out loud. The way I look at it is this:If riding makes him smile,He should keep on keeping onmile after mile. If the only casualtyIs cheese off the slice,Well, I think that’s a win —’Cause it still tastes pretty nice. So get out and ride!Leave your tracks wherever you go,Whether you decide to rideIn rain, sleet, sun… or God forbid, snow.

And Another Box of Chocolates. The fellow who became the owner of the first Aerostich suit is a highly accomplished writer with a bunch of published books, a degree in history, considerable expertise in Air Force subjects, airplane and flight history and technology, and a successful career as an automobile and motorcycle journalist. He rode twisty backroads FAST and was a skillful motorcycle road racer, too. During my twenties and thirties his smart editorials in Auto Week and Cycle World taught me a lot. Many of them offered a deeper understanding of motorcycle culture and mainstream culture than anything I’d read elsewhere or could have come up with myself. Steven L. Thompson got that first Roadcrafter unsolicited, with a cover letter introducing it and attempting to explain what the suit was for, and letting him know if it was not his size to please let me know. I hoped he’d give it a try. Fortunately, he immediately understood what it was, and liked it very much. He also wrote encouragingly about it ('Dressing Up’). Aerostich would not exist today without his generous encouragement, support and recognition, literally from day one. As the years passed, we became friends and eventually collaborators on his insightful book ‘Bodies in Motion’ which analyzes some of what underlies our profound attraction to motorcycles. Steven is still around, and we’re still friends. Recently he sent me a link to a story about the ‘Big Wheel’ children’s trike. Unfortunately, it was behind a paywall, so I was unable to read it, but the story’s title alone was enough to get me going and I wrote what follows. (That behind-a-paywall article is here: “The Wild—and Weirdly Dark—History of One of America’s Most Iconic Toys - How the Big Wheel turned plastic, physics, and pure chaos into a generation’s first taste of freedom.” from Popular Mechanics. If you subscribe to Apple News at $12.95/mo and want to make me a .pdf, I’d love to read it.) What follows is an autobiographical story from my childhood. Among other things, it reveals how much of an insufferable, overly-opinionated little sh-t I was. The first Schwinn ’Stingray’ bikes came out when I was in the 5th grade. With their innovative chopper-esque styling they quickly became the company’s best-selling bike and were soon copied by many other bicycle manufacturers. Nearly all kids loved ‘em. That year I was still pedaling my trusty red and white 20” Huffy traditional bicycle with painted steel fenders, ‘paper-boy’ style bicycle handlebars, ‘balloon’ tires, a Bendix coaster brake and a normal bicycle seat. It handled great and was good on both sidewalks and single-track ’shortcut’ trails through overgrown vacant lots. Excellent at jumping curbs, too, this was a true do-anything little bike, and I loved it enough to periodically use auto paste wax to shine it up. It became my faithful wings as soon as its bolt-on training wheels were removed. So when I examined those flashy new Stingrays it was with narrow eyes and a mix of anger and sadness, in roughly the same way as a decade later pop singer Don McLean described America and American music culture changing in ‘American Pie’, his wonderful song about the “Day the music died…” Here’s verse three of that song: "Now, for ten years we've been on our own
And moss grows fat on a rollin' stone
But that's not how it used to be
When the jester sang for the king and queen
In a coat he borrowed from James Dean
And a voice that came from you and me
Oh, and while the king was looking down
The jester stole his thorny crown
The courtroom was adjourned
No verdict was returned
And while Lenin read a book on Marx
The quartet practiced in the park
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died” (Notes: “jester” = maybe Bob Dylan, “rollin’ stone” = maybe the Rolling Stones band, “the king” = maybe Elvis, “Lenin read a book on Marx” = maybe John Lennon, “quartet practiced in the park” = maybe The Beatles. Personally, I love both pre-and-post ‘American Pie’ pop music.) Those Stingrays embodied everything which seemed to be going bad in America in the worlds of bike marketing, and about the inherent wonders of riding a bicycle. The overly stylized machines seemed like pure evil on two wheels, yet they were selling like hotcakes and ’sliced bread’. I had neither the age, wisdom, or experience to understand what was happening to America, but I knew this terrible bike represented the beginning of the end for something amazing about the experience of riding a bicycle. At age ten I was unable to appreciate and describe it, yet one look at a Stingray and I instantly felt a kind of anger through my every fiber: “The jester stole his thorny crown, the courtroom was adjourned…and we sang dirges in the dark, the day the music died.” For a couple of months every spring and fall, from the third through fifth grades, I rode that Huffy about two miles to and from my elementary school. On September 24th, 1963, a couple of months before President Kennedy was assassinated, he did an overnight campaign stop here in Duluth, speaking in the basketball gymnasium of our local university (UMD). Their campus was less than an eighth mile from my elementary school and that night my parents went to witness the President speak. They had either left me with a babysitter, or maybe I was left on my own - I no longer remember this detail clearly - but I also went there, pedaling my trusty Huffy just to see if I could somehow get in. As I left our house it was already twilight, and if there was a sitter (?) I‘d have sneaked out very quietly, powered mostly by adrenaline and curiosity, hoping to sneak into that gym. I knew the best route even in the dark since it was the same one I’d been pedaling to school every weekday. When I got there some guy at a side door actually let me in and I stood with a few others, crowded into an aisle between folding bleachers, looking around at a sea of people, and trying unsuccessfully to spot my parents because I did not want them to see me there. That trusty Huffy got me into lots of trouble like this and then always got me out of trouble, every time. After the President finished his speech, none of which I remember (…or understood), the city was already in full darkness. Despite the gloom I pedaled back home like the wind and fortunately made it there before my parents. I was in bed faking sleep by the time they arrived. None of this would have been remotely possible riding an idiotic ill-handling Stingray. When the Big Wheel trike came out a few years later I was already older. Little kids had them. The roto-molded polypropylene frame and matching soft plastic tires were as ridiculous and useless as it’s ‘chopper-esque’ riding position. Those G-d Damn’s Stingrays had somehow led to this abomination, I thought. But parents and little kids both loved them because on asphalt or worn concrete driveways they were pathetically easy to drift and slide around in safe and controlled ways, thanks to the near-zero frictional coefficient of roto-molded polypropylene. Plus, they were cheap and less tippy than a traditional trike. When used as intended, which they all were, it did not take super-long to wear through the oversized front wheel’s molded plastic tread, at which time the entire crude and cheaply made thing went into a garbage bin, and then a few days later to the local landfill. It was still years before today’s semi-fake plastic recycling programs existed. Despite (or because of) those dynamic and durability limitations, little kids everywhere begged grownups for them and thanks to a very low price it was not difficult for even lower income parents to comply and shut them up. A few years later those kids would be pedaling Schwinn (or imitation) Stingrays and a few years after that they would be making horrible ‘sissy-bar’ equipped almost-choppers out of completely inappropriate used Honda CL 77 scramblers, all while Evil Knievel was bloviating about jumping the Snake River, true courage and good ol’ American pride while wearing rhinestones on his fingers and a snazzy leather suit which looked like it had come from one of fat Elvis’s concert wardrobes. These days I’m still riding those same streets as I once did on that Huffy, except now I’m doing it year-around thanks to a lightly-modified a 200cc fat-tired Suzuki Van Van ‘winter bike’, which turned out to be a dependable cold-temp starter and seems/feels safe-ish for use on snowy and icy streets. You don’t know what strange is until you’ve ridden a studded-tire bicycle, e-bike or Van Van for day-to-day transportation though one of our always slightly too-long northern Minnesota winters. “To discover what normal means, you have to surf a tide of weirdness.” – Charlotte Rampling, Actor, interview in The New Yorker, 16 May 2021. I’m no poet or Henry David Thoreau philosopher and weirdo, but in America today there’s something inherent about riding which estranges you from all those who do not ride, and which also helps you see the world a little more clearly, probably a little more cynically, and possibly with a bit more humility and a little less hubris than all the good and sensible people surrounding you. Most of them from inside their sealed/safe/comfortable/convenient cars. Also, I was not ‘born old’, or with a good sense of self-discipline and a desire to be on a scholastic ‘honor roll’, and an ambition to be an Eagle Scout, admirable as those things all are. Back when I was riding that Huffy my simple plan was to become a paleontologist who drove a Corvette across the sands of outer Mongolia to find and dig up dinosaur bones. I’d also hoped someday along the way a pretty HS homecoming queen might fall in love with me. Never got that Corvette or any dino bones, but finally - and entirely by chance – did end up married to a smart, feisty, pretty homecoming queen almost as lonely and (forgive me honey…) weird as me. It sure took a good long time, though. By the time we’d met at random, I was old enough to be eligible for Social Security. “Life” really “is like a box of chocolates.” You never do know what you’re gonna get. She and her brothers all loved their Big Wheels. If you loved your Stingray and Big Wheel, that’s ok, too. From a certain viewpoint those things did look fly and were great fun. You probably looked really cool on yours, too. But they still rode like absolute crap… Mr. Subjective, February 2026 PS – Possible future blog post: “Every Dog Has Its Day: The Fall of Schwinn and the Rise of (good handling) Mountain Bikes” PPS – I was completely wrong about the Big Wheel. Though it resembles a tricycle in form it’s actually and more simply a perfectly genius toy. Children of all ages love the sensations of skidding, sledding, skiing, sliding,surfing and every other form of semi-controlled drifting. Many kinds of mammals (think otters, etc) do. This toy was cheap to make, safe to use and introduced kids to exactly this kind of fun in a beautiful way. At a fast glance it looked like a trike, but it was always so much more. These days I am sorry I misunderstood and maligned these things for most of my life.