It Was a Bicycle Thing

Warm, sunny days often remind me of my youth. You know, those lazy days of summer. No school. Still too young to get a job. Hours and hours of endless possibilities.

In those days, before cell phones and satellite television – even before video games, if you can imagine that – my friends and I amused ourselves with such sophisticated pastimes as “playing outside” and “riding our bikes.” I surely didn’t realize this at the time, but it was a glorious time to be young.

One of my friends was a kid named Pete. We were the same age and had some great times growing up together in Blue Island. Pete fancied himself to be a pretty good shade tree mechanic and he loved taking bicycles apart and putting them back together. Sometimes there were parts leftover, but things like this never seemed to concern Pete.

I remember one particular summer afternoon when I rode my Schwinn Sting-Ray over to Pete’s to see if he could go for a ride before suppertime, which was a rigidly observed family ritual back then. I pulled up to find Pete bent over a table full of … parts.  In the midst of these parts was an orange bicycle frame. Pete’s orange bicycle frame.

“Wanna go for a ride?” My voice trailed off as I got a better look at all the pieces spread out on the table.

“Sure! Just give me a few minutes to get this back together. My brother took it apart to spray paint the frame, but then he had to go work.”

To Pete’s credit, he got the entire thing back together in less than half an hour and the only leftover parts were a handful of little steel balls the size of bb’s. We learned only a short time later that the bb’s were actually ball bearings from the bike’s front wheel assembly. How did we learn this, you ask?

Pete and I were racing our single-speed bikes around the block, often trading positions by cutting through the front lawns of corner properties. I found myself well in the lead on just such a corner and, seeing no need to cut through old Mrs. Rippe’s front lawn (she didn’t like kids doing that), I stayed on the sidewalk and leaned into a hard right at the corner. As I rounded the corner, I locked up my rear tire in order to avoid an as-yet unidentified black and chrome trajectory flying past me. What the…?

It was Pete’s front wheel, bounding across Mrs. Rippe’s front lawn, over the sidewalk, into the street and onto the next block before bouncing off a large elm tree. I came to a full stop and looked right just in time to see Pete complete a full aerial somersault over the handlebars of his bike, whose front fork had penetrated a good four inches into Mrs. Rippe’s prize turf.

Pete seemed to be in one piece, though he was bleeding pretty good from somewhere inside his white T-shirt. I helped him gather up the bicycle and carry the pieces home. We lived to ride another day.

Then there was the time I achieved, with Pete’s help, three flat tires in one week. My regular bicycle, a Schwinn “Lemon Peeler” with a spring-loaded fork and dual rear shocks, had a slick rear tire that was a joy to lock up at speed, leaving ever-longer black marks on the neighborhood sidewalks.

During this particular week, I skidded right through the last of my rear tire’s carcass and scored a flat. Within minutes, I had cleaned up one of the “grown-up bikes,” large cruisers with coaster brakes, from the depths of my family's garage, and within three days put a flat in that one, too.

Ever the resourceful kid, I returned to my garage and emerged with the one remaining bicycle. Toward the end of that week, Pete and I came out of my back yard one afternoon and discovered the rear rim of this third bike to be resting terribly close to the ground, the tire spreading out from beneath the weight of the old bicycle.

“Maybe it’s just low,” Pete offered, “Let’s find out.”

“OK.”

Hey, what did I have to lose? We would soon learn the answer to that one.

We pushed the decades-old cruiser bike about two blocks to a nearby gas station. Back then, all gas stations offered free air. (They also had full-service pump attendants, as the concept of “self-service” was still another eight or so years off, but that’s for another discussion.) Anyway, we wheeled up to the compressed air unit and Pete immediately picked up the large coil of air hose.

“Here, let me.” Pete never hesitated when it came to taking things apart or fixing them … especially the former.

“OK.” I wandered off from the air unit toward Western Avenue to see what might be going on up the street. It seemed like I was only away for a moment. Apparently that was long enough.

BLAM!

I whirled about, ears still ringing, to see Pete crouched over the rear tire, holding a section of loose rubber in his left hand while steadying the naked rim in his right.

“It’s flat,” Pete matter-of-factly offered.

“Yep,” I added in agreement. We walked the bike back to my folks’ garage in silence. It had been a long week.

These days I ride a 1300cc sport touring motorcycle, a very capable road machine. Pete on the other hand never took an interest in motorcycling. The next time we meet, I must make a point to thank him for that.