[First Draft]
“Just keep pedaling and hold on to the handlebars!” My father ran 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 set me off be on my own. I tried to steady the bike while grinding the pedals from a standing start – no go. The front end wobbled; and I furiously trying to counter the movement, I threw the velocipede into a nosedive. Sailing over the front end, I landed on the grassy verge and looked up, ready to cry.
“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 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 want 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.
I rode up and down that hill a few dozen 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 the pedal and start evenly rotating around. Gravity and Newton’s Laws of Motion did the rest. I could now join my sister and the other big kids exploring the side streets and cul-de-sacs of our little neighborhood.
School was a little over a mile from our home. Busing was not universal in the ‘50s. We walked there and back, or rode our bikes. The front of the school had a paved asphalt playground, with a long swing set at one end. Kids naturally tried swinging as high as possible, then letting go at the high point of their arc. In the days before the blacktop covered it, the grass and dirt surface provided a relatively cushy landing zone. Once the blacktop appeared, and bones were broken and skulls placed at risk, the swings were removed, but not the A-frame supports. Underneath, the school district placed a long bike rack, which was usually filled with two-wheelers in the spring and fall. Hopping off my bike and slipping the wheel into a slot made me feel like the cowboys I saw on TV, hopping off a horse and whipping the reins around a hitching post. No one used a lock; who would steal a kids bike when everyone already had one?
When my sister and I were 8 and 10, my father started giving us a large allowance, announcing that we would have to buy “all our clothes, and anything else we wanted” that our parents thought superfluous to a healthy upbringing. They fed us, provided a roof and a bed, transportation to activities, books to read. But clothes, or bubble gum or baseball cards – well, for that, we were on our own. We each go $5 a week, which was a fortune at that time. My sister tried to save from one week to the next but had trouble thinking far enough ahead to get the shoes and skirts she needed as the grew and gained a fashion sense. My mother often bailed her out.
I developed a pride in saving enough to create my own unique wardrobe. The first thing I saved for was a pair of black faux leather motorcycle boots, followed by a matching jacket complete with zippers and dangling chains. In the fifth grade, I noticed some of sixth graders had “real” bikes, 24 or 26” wheeled with three-speed gear shifters on the handlebars. I had a bit of a complex, being a year younger than my classmates, and decided having a big kids’ bike would make me one of them. For ten weeks, I bought nothing, and saved my Abe Lincolns in a little cigar box.
With my fifty dollars in hand, I led my father into the local bike shop, and picked out a deep red Raleigh three-speed, with silver fenders and plastic handlebar grips. For the next five years, that majestic steed became my portal to independence.