The story of Greg Harper’s life is best told through bicycles.
His childhood passed on the classic banana seat of a sky-blue Schwinn Sting-Ray, his hands high on the Harley-like handlebars as he tooled around Muscatine, where he was born, raised and still lives.
Nascent adulthood bloomed under the silver two-wheeler affixed outside his family’s bicycle shop, Harper’s Cycling & Fitness, where he and his five siblings came of age repairing frames and chains. And middle age arrived as his father, Charlie, collected penny-farthings and antique tall bikes — heirlooms that sit in the store’s showroom, a memorial to the family patriarch, who died in 2021.
But he holds most dear the bikes he’s ridden on RAGBRAI, the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. There’s the orange Schwinn World Voyager he rode on the first ride in 1973...