MY BIKE

I had a not so bright red Schwinn bike that once belonged to who knows who. It was in good physical shape but had some scrapes and bruises from some hard riding. Some how it got passed down to me. No doubt it had belonged to some relative I have long ago forgotten. We lived in this funky old house of about 1000 sq. feet and the first room as you approached the house had been a convenience store at one time in ancient history. When I inherited my bike I had that front room as a bedroom. It was the largest room in the house. I had to share the room with a number of stored items. There was an old baby blue highchair without a tray. It looked like every kid in the family used it at one time. There were plenty of boxes filled with — I don’t know. Don’t think I ever looked in them. The nice thing about the room was that I also got to store my bike in my room and it was easy to get it in and out. It was right beside my bed.

I learned to ride on the hill on our front street. I was taken to the top, put on the bike and released to try and find a soft spot to fall. It took awhile to get the brakes to work right. You reversed the pedal to stop. Push too hard and you flew over the handlebars. The Schwinn was the only bike I ever owned. I barely fit on it when I learned to ride, but it became my freedom to the world.

By the eighth grade I was riding all over the town. I never went south. I really didn’t know that part of town. My oldest sister lived there and it seemed like a long way. Besides, I didn’t really want to ride by the stockyard’s. My small gang of guys often rode downtown, or out to Elmwood Park (by the university) and sometimes north to a place called Devils Slide. That wasn’t an official name, but that’s what we called it. It was a steep dirt hill and many slid down and tried not to crash when they hit the bottom. It looked frightening at the top, and sometimes was frightening coming down. But there was an overwhelming sense of pride when you made it to the bottom on your feet.

These were the pre-helmet days before the government thought it necessary to protect us from growing up. Cuts, bruises and scrapes were a sign of an adventurer. We wore those marks proudly. It was also before the boys wore shorts so we always had our heavy Levi’s to somewhat protect our legs. Of course you either rolled your right pant leg up or had a band around it to keep it from being caught in the chain. Getting it caught could throw you for a loop.

There were about eight of us who played hide and seek on our bikes. Both hiders and seekers could keep moving. We set street boundaries and away we went. Besides the streets there were paved alleys and people’s yards. Very little seemed to be off limits. There were four empty lots in our area and each had some cool places to hide. I liked to hide off an alley behind some apartments. They had garages off the alley and a small space between the garages and a storage shed. It was a tight fit, but very hard to see anyone when riding by.

My favorite place was Elmwood Park. There were trails, sidewalks, a cool tunnel and neat drinking fountains. I usually only did this with Glen. It was a long ways from home, but most of us had only one rule when riding out bikes. Be home before the street lights when on. That was a lot of time on a warm summer day. Besides riding was one of the ways to keep cool. We had no swimming hole near us.

The neighborhood racing spot was the sidewalk around the grade school. There was no room for two bikes side by side so this was always done with Bobby Cummings stopwatch. We were run off the property only once. Tony, the school janitor, was coming up out of the basement and almost got run over by Glen. He was so mad he told us never to come on the school property again or he would @$&!?#*%> us. We were back two day later and he even came out to watched at times.

So what kind of bike did you have as a youth? Did you do any fun things?