I first met Don Howarth in 1963. We were both members of the San
> Francisco Wheelmen, but he was an obviously experienced "senior" rider
> (as we called anyone 18 and over then) several years older than I. I
> was 17 in '63 and became dependent on Don for rides to many races,
> something he was very generous about. He was well known for his
> end-of-race kick and I have few pictures of him winning road sprints.
> On training rides he would sometimes wear his Portsmouth CC jersey.
> (He had a club jersey from England, but I might be getting the club wrong.)
>
> He lived in a very nice top floor apartment in the northwest part of San
> Francisco, one that had a view out over the ocean. Later, he married an
> American lady, Eva, and they bought a house in Oakland on the east side
> of San Francisco Bay. He worked as an architect for Safeway, a chain of
> grocery stores.
>
> Sad to say, "Il n'est plus parmi nous." He carried a defective
> chromosome that kicked in around the time he turned 30. He slowly died
> of kidney failure. He knew it was coming and that knowledge must surely
> have been a cloud over his life, but you'd never have known it to be
> with him. The last time I saw him was at the 1984 Olympic Road Race
> near Los Angeles. We sat on the hillside overlooking the final climb
> and got to see Steve Bauer catch Alexi Grewal. Don had a tube coming
> out his nose and it was taped to his face and went into a pack on his
> back. We both acted as though nothing was wrong. The most I could
> bring myself to do was look him in the eyes really hard when we shook
> hands "goodbye". We both knew it was forever. I got no hint that he
> wanted someone fawning over him so we just did the stiff-upper-lip
> thing. I still don't know what I would have done differently, or
> better, in that situation, but surely there must have been something.

Owen Mullholland
author of Cycling's Golden Age-1946-1967)