“Just keep pedaling and hold on to the handlebars!” My father was running behind me, hand grasping the seat post of the tiny two-wheeler he’d bought at Sears for my 4th birthday. We were heading downhill, along the sidewalk next to Ridgewood Avenue, where I lived from 1952 to 1966. I’d long ago mastered the joy of the tricycle, madly flailing my legs around the front wheel while the wind blew zephyrs at my eyes, the tassels whipping out the ends of the grips. This bike initially seemed a step backwards: it had FOUR wheels. My dad called them “training wheels” – it seemed like an insult. I saw the older boys in the neighborhood, Tommy Bingham and Larry Landfried, both a year older, on their two wheelers, kings of their domain, able to ride from Cliffridge to Ridge Circle, and back, without a hint of fear.
So today, he’d removed the outriggers, and told me I’d be on my own. He watched as I tried to steady the bike while grinding the pedals from a standing start – no go. The front end wobbled, and I furiously tried to counter the movement, throwing the velocipede into a nose dive and me off the front end, thankfully into the grassy verge.
“Try it again; let me give you a little push.” He held the bike steady while I got back on, ground my teeth, stared downhill, and pushed off once more. I managed one complete pedal revolution, before once again ending up in the dirt.
“OK, I’m going to push you. I’ll be holding on until you get going, then I’ll let go.” This was more or less the same educational methodology he’d employed that winter with my sister and me, teaching us how to ice skate at Cincinnati Gardens. He had grown up on the frigid steppes of eastern Montana, where the Yellowstone river annually froze every January as it slowly meandered through the featureless flatlands on its way north to the Missouri. Like a little Dutch boy, skating in the winter had been second nature to him, and something every able-bodied person should learn how to do. Especially before the age of 4.
It had worked with skating, and it worked with cycling. With the wheels rolling, their natural gyroscopic motion kept me going more or less in a straight line. As he would later tell me about driving on icy roads (again, learned out of necessity during Montana winters), “You can go as fast as you want, as long as you don’t have to turn or slow down.” Too bad he forgot to mention that as part of the initial two-wheeler education.
Not knowing at all how to stop the contraption (easy: just reverse pedal), I panicked as I passed the Binghams’ house, two doors down from us, near the bottom of the hill where Cliffridge intersected the sidewalk. Back then, there were few if any cars at any given time in our little backwater, but I knew I didn’t to be in the road and risk meeting one. So I practiced my turning skills, and hung a sharp right, into the side hill of their yard. Another soft landing.
We practiced that a few dozen more times that afternoon. I learned to softly “pedal” backwards to slow down, to put my foot down as I came to a halt, and most of all, somehow, miraculously, how to start up all by myself. In the end, it was simple: Just stand over the bike with both feet on the ground. Push off with one foot while lifting the other onto its pedal, and start evenly rotating around. Gravity and Newton’s Laws of Motion did the rest.