[First Draft!]
A year into medical school, I felt the need for two-wheeled transportation again. Another police auction in downtown LA, and for $60, I got another beater. My world opened up. I already had a car, of course – it was Los Angeles – but now I could explore the area on the weekends without having to fight freeways or parking. I rode a few miles south from our MacArthur Park house to the USC main campus and tootled around just like an undergrad. The place looked like a real university but felt like a Hollywood set. Students had a more polished look than the Ivy Leaguers I’d grown used to in New England. Appearances matter in LA.
To the west, I discovered Hancock Park, a quiet oasis filled with wide yards and tree-lined streets with little traffic, as if Beverly Hills had been transplanted into the teeming concrete jungle surrounding LA’s downtown. A mile away, the hexagonal streetscape of Park La Brea provided another respite from the relentless grid of LA concrete.
Two miles east of our house, the Los Angeles River ran trapped in a concrete watercourse. Most of the year, a trickle flows along a recessed central channel, leaving the main river bed dry for twenty miles to San Pedro. I discovered a wide open storm drain at the end of 7th Avenue two miles from our house. Now, fifty years later, that entrance is blocked to prevent anyone from entering the river proper. Back then, no chains or barriers blocked the way, but I never encountered anyone else as I pedaled for miles with the Harbor Freeway grinding and pulsing above me.
The summer after my second year, I took advantage of the last extended free time I would have for six years, as I completed the clinical rotations of the final two years of med school, and then four years of residency. I drove my ’66 Dodge Charger up the Pacific coast, through the Rockies, back to Cincinnati and Chicago, returning ten weeks later to enter my medical apprenticeship.
I stayed with family or on my own in the back of the car (the rear seats folded down, providing a rather firm mattress). My sister lived in Ketchum, Idaho, and I spent a week or two with her. She and her fiancé Stephen lived in a trailer at the base of the Sun Valley ski mountain hard by the Warm Springs Creek. Stephen worked at Sturtevant’s Sports. A smooth-talking salesman, he easily convinced me to buy my first drop-bar “English” bike, otherwise called a “ten-speed”. Drop bars, pedal straps, shifters on the down tube, this Raleigh was sleek and elegant. We rode over Galena Summit, taking in the views to Redfish Lake and the Sawtooth peaks to the north. I managed to fit the Record (for that was it’s model name) into the back of the Charger, and continued my romance with cycling.