Beer Run Brings Bikes to Kids in Need Ferguson-Murphy event celebrates 45 years of giving, and tipping back By Jake Ten Pas
B
art Ferguson remembers the first bike he got for Christmas. It was a blue Schwinn Stingray. His parents, Denny and Rorie, parked it under the tree, and that initial glimpse of it as he came down the stairs still fills him with the joy of a whole new world opening up like a present.
Friday before Christmas. Looking at the photo snapped that year, it’s hard not to hear a Ken Burns-esque narrator recounting the early-morning adventures of this short-shorted crew of athletic outlaws posing with beer cans in hand and mischievous smiles on their faces.
“I was probably 8 or 10 years old, somewhere in there. I wanted to open the rest of my presents, but what I wanted to do immediately was get on that bike and just go ride. That’s what we all did,” Bart recalls. “That freedom you feel, it allows you to grow into an independent person.”
Stocking caps, flannels, Adidas stripes and one incredible mustache also mark the fashions. They’re gathered outside Barbi’s Café, a long-gone watering hole for truckers and dock workers in inner southeast. The next year, the names behind all these mugs would adorn the first official Ferguson-Murphy t-shirt.
Five years ago, Bart and his cousin, Ted Ferguson, pumped new air into the tires of the Ferguson-Murphy Beer Run, an event that starts at 6:15 a.m. every Christmas Eve day in MAC’s Turnaround. Forty years earlier, Denny came up with the idea after being struck by a simple, ingenious idea. “What if we stopped and got a beer halfway through our morning run?,” he wondered. The thirst for suds has seldom led to humanitarian endeavors, but that’s exactly how it happened. What began with a band of athletic rebels stopping at a Produce Row bar, grew into an event that’s gifted more than 2,000 bicycles and helmets to Portland kids through local nonprofits Lifeworks NW and the Relief Nursery since 2014.
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DECEMBER 2019
This is the strange, true story of an annual happening so Portland it could make a hipster blush. Crack open a cold one, relax, and let Bart, Denny and Rorie pedal down memory lane.
Sometimes a Great Notion “They’ve done a fantastic job. It’s bigger and better than it ever was,” Denny says of the new Ferguson-Murphy Beer Run & Bike Ride. “It was always a shoe-string deal in my day, but at its heart, it’s a really good concept.” The first Beer Run took place in 1974, and for six or so years, it was always the
“I used to buy the shirts, print everybody’s name on them who participated in it, and distribute them for the next year’s run,” Rorie recalls. From the very beginning, any Ferguson old enough to participate was involved in some way. “I’d take the kids, and later the grandkids, and we would all set up the beer and put it out for the runners. One year, in the early ’80s, it got so cold that as I was pouring the beer into the cup, it froze!,” she says. Every year at 4:15 a.m., the lights went on at the Furguson house, and Christmas music would set the stage for the arrival of friends and family eager to pitch in. Breakfast — and a shot of Jameson for the adults — would warm bellies, and the love
