Inventor Collects Pieces, Parts, to Create Bicycles and Stories
By Chelsea Conaboy
Many of Kevin "Kato" Konrad's tales seem as tall as the 6-foot-high bicycles that he designs and builds.
He tells the story of a snake that he wrestled on the side of the road until he could kill it by stabbing it with a stick. He rolls off a tale about his pet scorpion, Keyki, who died and whose carcass he is keeping until he finds a moment to make it into a necklace and earrings.
Konrad collects stories the way he collects bicycle parts. He piles them up in a heap of rusty gears in the corner of a workroom until he finds time at a later date to spin them together into a master product.
His tales seem to be just as fantastic as his bicycles and as genuine as his original design of the towering two-wheelers.
On weekend afternoons, Konrad rolls around the city on his custom-designed bicycles created from standard-sized frames and built so that a grown man can pedal standing up without having to hunch over the handlebars.
When he is riding, Konrad said he is in his own world.
"That's my realm," he said.
Because of his weekend routine of cruising down to the Pier, up to the top of Coffee Pot Bayou, back downtown, across Central Avenue and home, people have begun to recognize him. Those he blurs by notice him riding high, his long, sun-bleached hair waving in the wind and a tattoo of a cross stretched across the bottom half of his darkly tanned back.
Konrad doesn't seem to mind being dubbed the "St. Pete bicycle man."
"I entertain," he said. "I'm an entertainer."
Workers on the Pier, such as Jeff Gurdak, assistant director of security, might not know Konrad, but they see him pedal by each weekend. Gurdak said he thinks Konrad is a bit of an oddity. But, he has seen Pier-goers stop and watch curiously as he rides by them.
"It's something you don't see everyday," Gurdak said.
He said it seems the biggest mystery is how Konrad gets on and off the bike.
But with a closer look, the way that he mounts his bike is not the only mystery to Konrad. While he is often eager to show the artifacts of his tales-the skin of the snake hanging on the wall above his bed with a hole about an inch and a half in diameter pierced through one end, or the dried and shrunken corpse of a scorpion lying pinned to a piece of flooring-he seems less willing to share pieces of his life story.
He won't tell his age, but through his stories he reveals he is old enough to have been remodeling bicycles for 30 years.
He will say, however, that he has not always been the kind of entertainer that families could see on a Sunday afternoon on the Pier. Up until 1995 he was an adult entertainer. He was a stripper. He called his business "New York Strip." He said he would dance for bachelorette parties, birthday parties and "party parties."
That was until he was waiting at a stoplight in Hollywood, Fla., and an ambulance rear-ended his new car, a Nissan 240 SX. His older brother, Mark, said he refers to his brother as "I-don't-like-to-but-I-always-break-my-bones" Kevin for all of the accidents that he has gotten into over the years, on and off the road. But this accident was a serious one.
He needed surgery on his neck and suffered critical damage to his hip. Doctors told him he would never dance again.
"My life totally, drastically changed after that," said Konrad.
After the accident, Konrad moved to St. Petersburg and is back to entertaining, on the roads and off.
Ania Dumler, who opened Uptown Café with her husband, Bill, about six weeks ago, said they saw the way Konrad got along with people in the bar and wanted him to work for them.
"He's got a spice on him," Dumler said. "The girls like him."
Dumler, who is originally from Poland, said Konrad has a good energy that people notice. There is energy in Konrad's name alone. His friends call him Kato, after Bruce Lee's character in the 1960s television series "The Green Hornet" because, Konrad said, he always supported his friends when they got into trouble.
"When people see energy and hope, they get happy," Dumler said.
After multiple car accidents, Konrad said he tries to stick to two-wheel transportation when he can. He rides his 6-footer to work each night.
Konrad started inventing and building when he was very young. His parents, Hans and Bridgitte, are German and his father was a machinist and a master inventor.
Hans Konrad was an "inventing fool," according to Mark Konrad.
Kevin Konrad said he thinks his talent for inventing came from his father.
"I can make something out of anything else," he said. "I believe it came from him. It had to have."
Now he uses those skills to transform old, rusted bike frames that he finds in the garbage or acquires from friends into remodeled bicycles designed to be more ergonomically correct for an adult rider.
Konrad flips the frame of a standard bike upside down, reattaches the gears and adds galvanized pipe to raise the handlebars and seat a few feet. Then he adds more pipe to support his weight on the extended frame and paints the new bike a rainbow of colors, such as brilliant blue and jade.
Konrad said he thinks the bike he assembled last summer, which has a base of a 1972 Huffy model that once sold new for about $30, possibly could sell for $300 with the work he has put into it.
Looking back, Konrad marvels at how his father never patented any of his ideas. But, like his father, he has never tried to patent his own idea. He said he thinks the idea could take off for speed bikes or extreme competitions.
"There's some crazy, extreme dudes out there that would definitely take this on the mountain," he said.
Whether it is the gleaming gears or the man on the bike that catches people's attention, Konrad has made himself recognized around town for his two-wheelers. He said people often stop him to ask about his creations.
"I don't know half the people who yell at me," he said. "But, they know me…Kato, the bicycle man, the St. Pete bicycle man."
One Saturday, Konrad made his regular stop at the bar at Capt. Al's on the back side of the Pier. He sat with the bike parked behind him on the patio, an Icehouse beer and a plate of blackened shrimp, prepared especially for him, on the bar in front of him.
"Don't you live off Fifth Street?" asked one man a few stools down.
Konrad nodded.
"It must be something else getting up there," the man said, gesturing to the bike.
Konrad stood up and showed him. It's easy, he explained. "You put your foot on the opposite pedal and stand up. Once you get up there, you just have to get used to the steering and you're ready to go."
Then, he said, "You just gotta look out for low tree branches and lightning."
Konrad said won't take any chances when there is lightning around. He has felt the shock of electricity before. It fried his tongue, he said.
But that's another story.
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