My first bikes

I had a flashback yesterday. I saw an exact copy of one of my old bikes on Craigslist for sale for 30.00. I freaked.

This started my journey back in time....

I just had to think for a minute what was my training- wheel bike . I think it was a Sears coaster brake monster, red and white. I think it had "headlights" on the top tube, on the front of the "gas tank".

It took forever to work up the nerve to take those idiotic wheels off. I think my sister finally said, "ok that's it", and I made my first terrifying but successful descent down a long straightaway that went through a field behind our house.

I loved that field, it was the neighborhood kid-park for virtually everything. Now it's gone, filled in with a housing tract.

Around 1969, or maybe 1970, I got a pretty cool bike. A green Ross "spider bike". it had the "ape-hanger" bars, and the stick shifter thing on the top tube. One important rite of passage was riding it all the way to Freddy Bricker's house. It was only a half mile. But it felt like a hundred.

I had to go down Griswold Road, where the mean bully kids lived. They were big and mean and Irish. Brian Williams and his satanic brother Peter. I think Peter ended up getting whacked in 1982 in Arizona . He had horrible pock marks on his face.

Their father was always drunk and beat the crap out of them whenever they did something bad, which was pretty much every day. Because he beat the crap out of them.

If I could get past that house without getting murdered, I was ok. Freddy moved anyway, so I quickly abandoned that adventure.

Some of the other kids (Mostly the macho-heads) had the even cooler Raleigh Choppers. They had the smaller front wheel. These bikes were ok for putting around the neighborhood, but useless for any long distance riding. The seat in the Choppers was thick and square, though, and you could ride double.

Then we started the Evel Kneivel thing. My record was 13 garbags cans, laid on their sides. Of course we never wore helmets. The neighborhood record was held by the legendary Neil Tardio, with 15. That's something like 40 feet.

This was done on the Ross, which amazingly held together, even though Rosses are department store bikes. The front fork got bent more forward though. We would spend hours making the perfect ramps out of plywood, tires and cinderblocks. (This engineering skill carried into 9th grade when the skateboard craze hit).

The golf course was our jumping playground. Perfectly groomed lips for sandtraps and various dips were great launching pads. And we tore the shit out of them. We were great kids.

Neil gravitated to mini bikes along with his little brother Michael. We could never hold a candle to this kid, he could sail fearlessly over anything. We got chased by the old man groundskeeper many times, but we always saw him coming from two miles away. so we always got away. He never figured out where we lived.

All of a sudden, one summer, maybe 1969 or 1970, kids started showing up with these wierd new bikes, they had ram-horn bars and ten speeds, whoa. I remember a lot of Raleighs, a few Peugeots, and Motobecanes at first.

Somehow in 1972, I finagled my way into an amazing Atala, an Italian bike, nothing really special, but it had the coolest paint job, bright neon yellow with neon orange. My friend Steven Leinbach sold me on the Atalas. His was neon orange and white. We raced.

I loved that bike so much. Now I was able to ride all the way downtown, on the roads!!! We would go buy tons of candy and just rush out on sugar all afternoon.

The "Pilgrimage to Mecca" was the tiny corner store, the Rye Smoke shop, where they had all kinds of useless smoking stuff, but truckloads of candy, baseball cards, comics, and stupid squirtgun- toys. I can still remember the lingering aroma of pipe tobacco. The owner smoked in the store. That was ok back then. You could smoke anywhere. My parents smoked in the house.

Your sale was rung up on a world war II vintage manual cash register that went "Bing!"

The Rye Bike shop was not really a bike shop, just a junk-house run by a fat, oil-covered greasy Italian guy, who had zillions of used, rusty, post war fat tire cruisers and three-speed bikes stuffed in a dark, musty space. He dealt with most of our basic needs ok, though, and was never mean to us, so that was cool.

Mike was his name. He smelled like whiskey and witch hazel.

Thanks, Mike.
(yeahsurenoproblemBobby...)

But the Atala was purchased from a "real' bike shop across town, run by a spirited young fellow .
He actually did ok for awhile, then went to Europe or something.

Places like this started popping up in surrounding towns. They actually had displays, signage, and salespeople. The new owner later got some japanese bikes named Lotuses. I still want one, just because I drooled over them for so long, even into college I saw them.

Nothing special with tubing or anything, it was mostly a bling thing. Another curiosity of the japanese invasion, which later turned out to be more impressive than I thought.

I put 413,000 miles on the Atala. I circled the globe. I rode to Italy daily.

Amazingly, the now laughable plastic Simplex derailleur did just fine. I remember my first coherent tune-up. It blew my mind.

Then in the summer of 1975, I woke up one day and suddenly the bike was way too small. This was very confusing. My knees hit the handlebars.

We sold it to some kid for 30 bucks at our yard sale.

The choice was obvious: A bigger Atala!!! or could I score a Lotus???

Oh, but no!

My father, being a shrewd businessman, insisted that we go buy a bike from Mr. Gundelach , all the way over in New Rochelle. My father was in the lawn mower business, and Mr. Gundelach was one of his dealers. His shop was wierd, lawnmowers and bikes. Mr. Gundelach was a nice man, though.

I was presented with a Kabuki ten speed. A Samurai or something. I said to the sales kid "japanese? are you kidding me? They dont know anything about racing!!"

"Oh but it's better quality!!! See the frame lugs?"

"So what? My Atala had that too! I don't like it. Japanese stuff is always crap!!!"

My Dad overheard this, and whispered to me to stop being a brat and shut the hell up. He paid Mr. Gundelach from his roll of cash and we stuffed the bike in the back of the humungous Oldsmobile.

The bike was a size too big, and this really sucked. But somehow I endured. It was also incredibly heavy. The early jap frames were reinforced internally, because they had not yet gotten ahold of decent steel.

Remember, they were still recovering from World War II, and I think a lot of the early steel was from melted down planes and crap that they dredged out of the sea. It was on par with my mom's 1974 Toyota Corolla, a funky little washing machine on wheels that thankfully failed before the undercarriage rusted away completely.

It did have alloy cotterless cranks. One crankarm broke in half my senior year in high school, amazingly I was not killed. They replaced it for free .

"oh sometimes they don't forge the alloy all the way".

I did have fun on it though when we started cycle-touring and doing centuries my junior and senior year in high school. My girlfriend tagged along when she wasn't rehearsing for plays, and she gave me a set of flimsy red panniers that are still on a current touring bike. She got them in France at a Youth Hostel. AYH or something like that the faded patch says.

I was so jealous of my buddy's Trek 520, the first really nice ten speed I ever saw. It cost him four hundred dollars, an insane amount in those days. I would be willing to bet he still has that bike.

We never ended up being close friends, I thought he was an arrogant snot, but he did teach me a lot about riding and road bikes.

He showed the legendary movie "Breaking Away" at our high school. It's a cycling classic, stupid 70's teen drama. Actually based on a true story.

I put another 512,000 miles on this Kabuki monster, grimacing. I rode it to and from school every day , and in college I tried to upgrade the components to alloy wheels, Avocet hubs, Sun Tour Cyclone Derailleur...Excellent down tube shifters...

It still sucked.

But I kept it for about 18 years. I ended up stripping it and putting it out by the trash when my ex-wife bought me my first mountain bike, which I still have. I laughed when I noticed the stripped frame weighed more than my entire mountain bike, a leftover 1987 Trek 930 steelie.

(These early frames were really stable, but inefficient on tough trails. The next year all the bikes had compact frames, suspension forks, and three foot high seat posts. They will dust this bike any day. )

The 930 became the mule until about 1997. I started riding a lot harder on it , though, and lost the pounds that sneak up gradually on a lot of guys in their mid to late 20's. Like a pound a year.

I hammered all through Harriman NY in the lower Catskills, mostly all alone. But sometimes with my old college bud Greg and his annoying wife Nancy.

I tried riding with a Mountain bike group a couple times, and actually kept up with them, which amazed me, because these kids all of course had the tricked out aluminum bikes with suspension. I never understood why an alloy bike back then was so damn expensive compared to steel.

Liability perhaps?

I winessed some horrific wipeouts, These guys went balls-out. The terrain in Harriman State Park is very rocky and "technical" in many places. But you could go for miles and never see anyone. In a way, it was kind of depressing. I remember the severe winter of 1994, when the huge deer herd in the park perished. You could smell rotting flesh for miles that spring.

I rode with knee pads and elbow pads, definitely a good idea. I would do this again. This was before digital cell phones, so if you crashed solo up there you were probably in big trouble.

Every component on that bike except for the headset has disintegrated and been replaced. A couple years ago I put a 49CC two stroke motor on it and went terrorizing quiet West Hartford.
The bike flew, it did 35 MPH on the flats. Little kids freaked. The rear wheel finally melted.

(Amazingly, these are legal, and the cops never hassled me)

The cheap chinese motor wore out, and this year it's been my "snow-bike". We welded the cracked down tube back together with a piece of fencepost, an 8 hour backyard project. We were quite proud of this, my redneck friend Dan and I.

Since 1999, it's been back to the road bike. A fast, high tech (for 1999) Trek 2200 that roamed the Berkshires for a few years now languishes on the wall in favor of a fleet of more cushy workingman's steelframe rides that I get for next to nothing and restore, the process usually taking 30 plus hours per bike.

I do want a vintage 520, though.

Sure , someday I'd love a gorgeous double butted 531 frame or some custom "jewelry- bike",but I really don't need that, as I'm not into racing anyway, and I could care less what people think.

Letting others have their glory greatly reduces my stress level anyway.

What's really important is the simple fact that you are out there in the first place. And I thank guys like the Rye Smoke shop guy, Mike at Rye Bike Shop , the young entrepreneur avante-garde Lotus guy , and yes, ok Mr. Gundelach.

My father is long gone, we clashed a lot, but I thank him too. Some things are important like that.

Peace out