Childhood Lore
“The aforementioned climb ranks high on my personal list of childhood traumas—this being one of terror.”
Ride to Remember Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that uses cycling and comics to raise awareness of dementia, support caregivers, and champion research. We We recreate a 1930s North Carolina ride that one father never forgot. We publish The Demented, a comic series that asks readers to see people living with dementia as more than a diagnosis.
Ride to Remember Inc. harnesses two universal languages — the bicycle and the comic book — to honor those affected by dementia and to shine a light on the experiences of caregivers. Through rides, original comics, awareness campaigns, and creative fundraising, we bring communities together to foster understanding, provide access to vital resources, and inspire action. Guided by compassion and purpose, we support caregivers, raise awareness through media, and champion research that advances well-founded treatments — working toward a world with greater hope, dignity, and support for all impacted by dementia.
Dementia affects more than 55 million people worldwide. It steals names, routes, and the stories that make a life recognizable — while families and caregivers carry a load that is often invisible.
Progress is real: earlier detection, better understanding of risk, and new treatments under study. What remains scarce is public attention that lasts past a news cycle, support that reaches the people doing the daily work of care, and stories that treat the person — not only the disease.
We work in two registers at once: a ride that communities can join, and comics that a classroom, a grandparent, or a first-time reader can finish in one sitting.
The Demented: Heroes in Time and Mind is Ride to Remember’s original comic series. It was built for a simple problem: most people meet dementia only as loss. A comic can do what a pamphlet cannot. It can put a reader inside another mind and send them out again having taken that person seriously.
The series’ conceit is deliberate. Members of “The Demented” belong to a hidden league of time adjusters. What the world calls confusion, silence, or an outburst is, in these stories, a duty — a micro-correction in a life already lived, made so the present still holds. The point is not to romanticize illness. The point is to refuse the habit of writing people off.
That form is not an accident of taste. Murphy C. Anderson Jr., whose childhood ride the organization recreates, spent a career drawing heroes for the comics page. The Demented returns that language to the cause his later life made urgent: thoughtful, educational stories that a young reader can enter and an adult caregiver can recognize.
Read the series. Share a short with a classroom, a club, or a family that needs a different way into the subject.
In the late 1930s, a boy from Asheville, North Carolina, rode more than two hundred miles across the state. Decades later, after a career drawing heroes for the comics page, that same ride was among the memories Murphy C. Anderson Jr. kept through dementia.
Ride to Remember recreates that journey: two days, roughly 214 miles, more than 13,000 feet of climbing, on a restored pre-war Elgin — the kind of bicycle Sears sold in the years of the original ride. The roads have changed. The purpose has not.
The Ride is not a stunt and not only a memorial. It is our most public gathering: a route for filming the documentary now in production, and a reason for communities to stand with people living with dementia and the families who care for them.
Your gift underwrites the two things the public will actually meet: a documentary that follows The Ride, and comics that travel farther than any single event.
With support, we will:
Ride to Remember grew from one family story: a Silver Age comics artist, a childhood ride that outlasted much of his later memory, and a determination that dementia not be faced in silence.
That origin still matters. It is no longer the whole site. The organization now exists for every family walking a similar road — and for the research, care, and stories that might shorten that road for the next one.
Join Ride to Remember as we film the route, the people; caregivers, afflicted, professionals, practitioners, publish The demented, and keep faith with everyone dementia has touched.
Ride to Remember Inc. is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Gifts of money, tangible property, and services are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. Federal tax identification number: 39-4468072.
Supporting Alzheimer’s and dementia awareness, caregiver resources, and research — through cycling, comics, and film.
“The aforementioned climb ranks high on my personal list of childhood traumas—this being one of terror.”
Be the victim… Imagine that all of your memories, the very memories that allow you to perceive your being, define
— featured image — Ms. Magazine 40th Anniversary Murphy C. Anderson Jr. / American Comic Book Artist1926-2015 There is an